How to Build a Table of Authorities (Without the Word Nightmare)
A Table of Authorities (TOA) lists every case, statute, rule, and constitutional provision you cite in a brief, grouped by type, alphabetized, with the pages each one appears on. Courts require it for most appellate and many trial-court filings. Building one by hand is one of the most tedious jobs in litigation support — an average brief has around 67 citations, and a TOA can eat 3 to 6 hours before a deadline. Here are your options, honestly.
Option 1: Microsoft Word's built-in TOA
Word can do it, but the workflow is famously painful:
- Select each citation and press
Alt+Shift+Ito open Mark Citation. - For every cite, set the category (Cases, Statutes, etc.) and mark the short forms.
- Repeat for all ~67 citations — one at a time.
- Insert the table (References → Insert Table of Authorities).
It's free, but it's manual, and it's where mistakes hide — a missed id., a mismarked short form, a category slip — which surface at the worst possible moment, right before filing. There is no "find all my citations for me" button.
Option 2: Paid legal-tech tools
Several products automate this well, at a price:
- Clearbrief — an AI Word add-in, around $300/user/month.
- TypeLaw — brief formatting with an auto TOA, roughly $1,895 per brief.
- Litera (Best Authority) — the firm standard, enterprise pricing.
They're powerful, but they're subscriptions or per-brief services, and most upload your draft to their cloud — a real concern for a confidential, unfiled brief.
Option 3: Generate the TOA from the brief, on your own machine
The middle path: a tool that reads your brief, finds every citation, collapses the short forms and id./supra references back to the full cite, and builds the categorized, alphabetized table for you — without a subscription and without uploading anything. That's what we built Authority to do.
Authority is a browser extension (and web app) that builds a Table of Authorities from any brief, 100% on your device. Paste the text and the free version finds, dedupes, categorizes, and alphabetizes every case, statute, rule, and constitutional cite. The $22 one-time Pro tier reads your filed PDF and fills in the real page numbers each authority is cited on, with automatic "passim," ready to paste into Word.
Nothing you paste or upload ever leaves your computer. See how it works →
A few tips whichever route you take
- Always verify. No tool (including ours) checks whether a case is still good law — run your cite-checker separately, and read the table before you file.
- Watch short forms. The most common TOA error is a short form or id. that didn't get tied back to its full cite. A tool that resolves these automatically saves the most time.
- Use a text-based PDF for page numbers. Scanned PDFs have no selectable text; run OCR first if you need accurate pages.
- Mind confidentiality. If your brief isn't filed yet, think twice before uploading it to a cloud tool. On-device tools sidestep that entirely.