Often you can recover a Word document by opening the .tmp file that goes along with your word document. Word seldom, if ever deletes it's tmp files. This is both good and bad, especially if users don't do it on a regular basis. I've seen literally hundereds of tmp files on a local drive. But if you can't open a document, that tmp file could be a life saver. After you open the document's tmp file, simply rename the file to whatever you need it to be.
I saved a lawyer one time who had a 20 page brief get corrupt when our network crashed. By the way, generally when you have an open document, stored on a file server, and the network crashes, the document gets hosed. Restoring from the tmp file may fix the problem, as it did with this lawyer.