I have been in school for a few years studying law. When writing long research papers one of the only ways I have found to keep my references straight is to use the Citation Tool in Word. It has the wonderful ability to keep all the documents and books used organized and can even generate the citation, footnotes and bibliography at the end. However, since the legal career field uses an unusual method of citation called the "Bluebook" it is difficult to use the tool to form citations. Bluebook uses citation clauses and footnotes for legal practice and footnotes and a bibliography in academics. It also has a strange system of abbreviations and signal phrases, utilizing a lot of Latin terms.
I spent a good amount of time on the internet one day trying to find a way to use the Citation Tool in word to help me when writing legal documents. Although "Bluebook" is a copyrighted publication, with the amount of people in the legal profession I can not foresee many of them that would not pay a reasonable fee for a plugin that would take some of the work off of them and their paralegals.
Is there any way for Microsoft to consider this idea and create a way to either integrate this style guide into the Citation tool, or perhaps update Word to allow for third party applications that can be appended to the program to add different styles?
Any thoughts from anyone else?