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Procertas - Technology Training and Assessment for Lawyers: Home

An introduction and guide to using Procertas, a tool for learning and practicing tasks in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Adobe Acrobat that are commonly needed in legal practice.

Procertas - Introduction

 

Procertas is an online tool to help you learn and practice specific tasks in Word, Excel, and PDF editing that are commonly done in law practice. Word modules offer training specific to Briefs, Memos, and Contract drafting. Additional modules offer training and practice applying Bluebooking citation formats both at basic and advanced levels. View a list of skills covered in each module.

Villanova law students, faculty, and staff can set up a Procertas account for free, and with successful completion of the Legal Technology Assessment (LTA) exercises you can download and display digital badges to show off your competence in these tasks.

Procertas - Teaching Through Practice

Procertas works in three stages:

  • Demonstration - Each task in the trainer module comes with a video that shows exactly what must be clicked or typed in order to complete the task.  These videos can be watched multiple times before moving on to the next step.
  • Practice - You can then try to perform the task by working on the document yourself.  You will download the Procertas example document, make the changes needed by following the steps in the video tutorial, and upload the modified document back to the Procertas website, which will then tell you whether you completed the changes correctly.  You can practice each task multiple times.
  • Assessment - When you feel comfortable with the required steps to complete a task, you can then move on to the assessment module, which does not include any training tips or videos, and grades you on the time taken to complete the task, and how accurately you made the required changes.  In order to qualify for the LTA badges, you must complete each task correctly and within a given time limit.

Procertas will help you develop skills such as:

  • Sorting data in an Excel spreadsheet
  • Tracking changes in a Word document
  • Adding annotations to a PDF document
  • and much more

For more information, visit https://www.procertas.com/

Earn a Certification

Earning a Qualified or Expert rating for the Assessment portion of a module will earn you a Certification (Certified Operator of Basic Office Technology (COBOT)) which can be added to your resume as well as digital badges to add to your LinkedIn Profile.

LinkedIn Certification badges for Word Excel PDF

What is the Legal Technology Assessment (LTA)?

What Is the Legal Technology Assessment?

The LTA establishes how fluent legal professionals are with the basic technology tools of their trade: Word, Excel, and PDF.

The LTA is both a benchmarked assessment and a training platform. Benchmarked results can be used for marketing, professional development, team assembly, onboarding, rate negotiation, invoice review, provider differentiation, etc. Primarily, however, results should be used to ensure that legal professionals are getting the training they need. The LTA pairs competence-based assessments with synchronous, active learning in order to provide an effective, tailored training solution. 

(This information taken from Procertas' website)

How Do I Get Started?

Villanova Law students, faculty, and staff can request a Procertas account for free, just fill out the Procertas sign up form and you will receive your account credentials within a couple of days.

What Software Will I Need?

Procertas will only work properly if you are using Word 2016 and Excel 2016.  Villanova students, faculty, and staff can download Office 2016 apps for free using these instructions (use the "Microsoft Office 2016 Install for Students, Employees, & BYOD" instructions).

You will also need to use a PDF editor for the PDF module.  Villanova does not offer Adobe Acrobat access for students (staff and faculty should have it on their computers), but you can get a 7-day trial through Adobe (make sure that you start the trial when you are ready to go through the assessment, so that you don't run out of time).

Alternately, Procertas allows you to use two other PDF editors if you need (both offer free trials as well):

If you switch to a different PDF editing software while working on the Procertas PDF module, make sure to go to your Procertas "settings" page and change your PDF software preference there as well.