CAUTION - the publications referred to on this page have been written for foreign legal systems. Do not rely on them for any information about the law or legal practice in Australia.
Plain English Lexicon (link is in the last line) is a free download (I could only get the download to work in Internet Explorer). It is a guide as to whether or not your words will be understood and suggests alternative plain English words.
An excellent book on improving writing skills for everyone in a legal office is English Essentials - "The wouldn't-be-without-it guide to writing well". It is written by Mem Fox and Lyn Wilkinson and published by Macmillan.
Netiquette. "Netiquette" is network etiquette, the do's and don'ts of online communication.
Netiquette covers both common courtesy online and the informal "rules of the road" of cyberspace.
See also 50 ways to write an email and Email Signatures: Valuable Real Estate.
Please give us feedback about your experiences using Foolkit and ideas for improvements.
Open Office is the free alternative to Microsoft's software for use in the office.
Open Office can open Word documents and save its own documents in Word format.
Open Office has a toolbar like the older versions of Word, rather than the ribbon used in Word 2007. It has a more user friendly method of automatic numbering of paragraphs. If you have a document with complex numbering and Word is the standard software in your office, then consider preparing the document in Open Office then saving it as a Word document.
There is also a lot of other free open source software available. See the Open Source Software Primer for the Solo and Small Firm Lawyer.
Paralegal Today Magazine (incorporating Legal Assistant Today)
Their List of Articles by Subject that may be helpful:
Some news feed headlines from the Estrin Report: