Data recovery application provider Ease Us offers this comprehensive article on locating a deleted or lost Word document. I’ve never seen all this information in one place before, so it’s worth bookmarking and/or printing for future use.

Some of the solutions they propose won’t be available to most legal secretaries. For instance, documents deleted from a document manager like iManage/DeskSite or Docs Open won’t appear in the recycle bin.

But the recycle bin is just the tip of the iceberg. Ease Us explains how to search for backup, temporary, and AutoRecover files, how to properly restart Word after a crash, how to open and repair a corrupt document, and more.

As you might expect, Ease Us also suggests using their own “Data Recovery Wizard,” which isn’t going to help us much, since we wouldn’t be allowed to install it on our PCs. But scroll past all those screen shots of the Wizard, and there is a long list of other helpful articles on lost file recovery.

Ease Us: How to recover lost Word files; (thanks to Lifehacker for the linkage)