All Our Tips
How Come My iPad Won’t Charge When It Is Plugged Into My Computer?
At one time or another, most of you will have plugged your smartphone or cell phone into computer to charge it. And on occasion, many of you may have charged a camera, GPS or other device on your computer. Using a computer or laptop for charging these devices is especially helpful in a pinch – most often when you forgot your charger at home and have a dead device.
I’m also sure that those of you that own an iPad or other larger tablet will have tried to charge it on your computer only to be frustrated by the “Not charging” message.
So why won’t an iPad or similar tablet charge when it is plugged into a computer? The answer is really quite simple. The USB ports on a computer just don’t have enough power to charge an iPad. The USB ports on computers or laptops (for both PCs and Macs) put out 5 volts at 0.5 amps; or about 2.5 watts. The iPad charger is much more powerful as it puts out 5 volts at 2.1 amps; or about 10 watts. You need the extra power to charge the larger battery in an iPad. Most USB hubs also don’t have sufficient power to charge and iPad.
Two tiny footnotes in case you find yourself in a real pinch with just a computer to charge your iPad. First, despite what I said above, computer USB ports can actually charge an iPad, but they do it very slowly, and only if iPad it turned off. The moment the screen goes on, the iPad sucks more power than the USB port can give it and the battery will start to drain. No peeking!
Second, you should also check the specs on your computer or laptop as some have USB charging ports that will have a higher output – these still won’t charge a device while it is on, but they will charge it a bit faster than a regular USB port will. On some computers these charging ports will even charge a device with the computer it turned off.
Top 10 Financial Errors: #5 Don’t Track Your Time
By the time I have money to burn, my fire will have burnt out. ~Author Unknown
There is much talk today about lawyers moving to alternative billing. We happen to be in favour of trying to bring the practice of law back to its roots in terms of delivering value to clients (ie results-based billing) rather than just time spent on the file (input-based billing). But does that mean that you as a lawyer can give up tracking your time? To those who say yes, we respectfully disagree. While you may not bill by the hour, tracking your time does one thing at least: it keeps you honest with regard to where you spent your time and whether or not you did apply yourself to the tasks at hand.
Let’s take a step backwards and go to a traditional accounting concept, that being the costs of goods (or, in our case, services) sold.
The first step in determining whether you were profitable on a sale of a service is being able to determine how much it cost you to deliver said service. To do that you need accurate costing mechanisms that can count both direct and allocated (or fixed) costs.
Direct costs are your time, plus any direct disbursements incurred in furtherance of the matter—court reporter fees, filing fees and the like. Allocated costs are the file’s share of the office overhead—staff salaries and benefits, rent, insurance, utilities and so forth.
Because the biggest direct cost is the time that you put into the matter, you cannot determine what it cost you to produce a given result unless you can track the time you put into it—billable, nonbillable, written off and so forth.
When it comes time to distribute funds among partners, not knowing the true costs of the matters handled compared to the income generated from them can lead to gross inequities. Most firms simply look at the gross revenue generated at the conclusion of a case, but this can be misleading.
Look at two files, each of which generated $100,000 in revenue (after disbursements):
- Matter A took three years and involved 400 hours of legal time (at $250/hr = $100,000) plus hundreds of hours of staff time.
- Matter B took six months and 100 hours of legal time (at $250/hr = $25,000) and the same amount of staff time.
Which case was more profitable? Not only was Matter B more profitable, you could argue that Matter A resulted in a net loss to the firm, since the total of legal and staff costs exceeded revenues.
If both matters were billed on an alternative-based fee, the firm would not have realized the difference in profitability without the essential time input data.
Don’t make the mistake of treating these matters equally! If you plan to move to value (or alternative billing) you need to know the costs to to the firm of different individual matters or the cost average of different types of matters to be able to correctly evaluate your value-billing program.
Tracking your time is an essential feedback mechanism that allows your firm to improve profitability over time. It allows you to ask: “Why did we spend so much time on X?” and “How do we become more efficient at handling these types of cases?”
Without that essential cost-of-time component, the firm is flying blind – and you may end up having your fires go out when you no longer have money to burn…
Look Far as Well as Near
Today’s Tip”: Look far afield.
When looking for articles from a medical journal I was reminded about the excellent service offered by the National Library of Australia. Their coordinates are:
Document Supply Service
National Library of Australia
Canberra ACT 2600
Enquiry Hotline: 1800 235 627
http://www.nla.gov.au/document-supply-services/contact
A recent fee for service item was sent to me with unbelieveably excellent turn around time which saved a one hour trip to the off site storage facility of my local University library. Their catalogue linked web request form and credit card payment process is well thought out and very efficient. Weighed against my hourly rate, the client saved 50% on the cost of this necessary item, and my internal client got the document faster than if I had physically retrieved it.
Don’t be afraid to look far as well as near.
How Come My Digital Camera Pictures Are Always in a Folder Named DCIM?
You may have noticed that the pictures on your digital camera or smartphone are always stored in a folder named DCIM. Ever wondered why? Here is the answer:
At some point in the distant past, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA) created a standard defining where and how digital images would be stored on digital media used in cameras. This standard gives direction to camera manufacturers on the directory structure, file naming method, character set, file format, and metadata format for the storage of digital images on media used in cameras.
Having such a standard means that cameras always know where to look for and store pictures when you insert a memory card into them. By default, pictures are always stored in the DCIM folder and there is a pre-set file-naming convention. If the DCIM folder doesn’t exist when the memory card is inserted, the camera will create it.
And it doesn’t stop at your camera, some image-editing software programs are configured to automatically look for and in the DCIM folder for pictures.
So now you know why your digital camera pictures are always in a folder named DCIM.
Top 10 Financial Errors: #4 Failing to Regularly Reconcile Your Trust Acccounts
“Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust” was said by Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, in 1857.
A lawyer’s trust account often poses a lawyer’s greatest risk for ethics trouble. Yet it seems that one of the tasks lawyers quickly delegate is that of properly maintaining client trust accounts. It is certainly acceptable to have a bookkeeper administer this function, but the lawyer must remain active in the oversight of the account. The lawyer should – indeed we say – must either reconcile the account each month or thoroughly review the reconciliation completed by the bookkeeper.
Here are some quick tips to help keep your accounting in good shape:
- Keep separate ledgers. In addition to the account journal (or general ledger) that has the running balance of how much money is in the trust account, you must create a ledger for each client on whose behalf you hold money. Also, ensure that all bank administrative trust account charges are taken from your general account rather than from the trust account. (Your computer bookkeeping program may automatically do this, but if you don’t know for sure, confirm it immediately.)
- Never pay trust funds with cash; always have a check as a record. Do not use an ATM card to withdraw trust money, and never use a deposit ticket to get “cash back.” Even a wire transfer out from a trust account can be problematic depending on the ethics rules of your jurisdiction.
- Don’t disburse a check from trust until the deposited funds have cleared. Be diligent, but don’t let a client rush you. (In most if not all jurisdictions, it is not permissible to to issue postdated trust checks – a trust cheque must be able to be cashed at the time it is written). The problem with post-dated trust cheques is that they may be written in anticipation of sufficient funds being deposited at some time in the future – which means that at the time the cheque was written, the lawyer did not have sufficient funds in the trust account to the credit of that client. When you write trust checks, always take a moment to add them up and compare them against the client’s balance in the trust account. Make sure there are funds available in that client’s ledger to cover the checks (and ensure that the cheque and the deposit went into the same trust account, if you maintain separate ones).
- Have a good audit trail. In addition to the account statement and any canceled checks, keep a monthly folder with the following:
- A trust cash book – that shows all trust transactions that month. This should record the date and amount of all funds received and disbursed, the source of funds, the identity of the client for whom the funds were deposited (since there are circumstances where the funds are paid by a third party on behalf of a client), the cheque number or wire transfer record of all trust withdrawls, and the name of the recipient of all trust cheques;
- A trust ledger breaking down the pooled trust account into separate clients;
- Records showing all transfers between client trust ledgers and containing an explanation of why each transfer occurred and containing a lawyer’s signed written approval for each trust transfer;
- Copies of all bank validated duplicate deposit slips and
- All supporting vouchers and documents, including all bank statements, passbooks, cancelled cheques (do not bank with a financial institution that refuses to provide you with your cancelled trust cheques or images of same), bank vouchers and all other relevant documents. In particular should be any memos that you have made concerning bank errors and steps taken to have them corrected, regardless of amount.
- Reconcile your client trust account monthly, regardless of how boring the task seems. Compare your monthly bank statement to the canceled checks; the canceled checks to the copies you made before they left your office; the checks to the account journal; and the account journal to the client ledgers. Everything should match. Some accounting systems will help automate this task by downloading account information directly from the bank and entering this information into the accounting system. However, this is only part of the task – you must still oversee this process and ensure that everything is reconciled monthly and all exceptions are investigated and resolved.
Check your ethics rules regarding how long you must maintain all the above-mentioned books, records and accounts, in case questions arise later. Organizing your recordkeeping now will save headaches later. Also, if you keep your trust records on computer, be sure to save the information onto other media before you decide to upgrade and discard your computer. Furthermore, ensure that your financial data is reliably erased (not just deleted!) before you dispose of your accounting computer.
Phrase Searching for the Quick First Look
Most search engines have the capacity for searching a phrase: internet engines, ebook search tools, services like Westlaw Canada, LexisNexis Quicklaw, Maritime Law Books National Reporter System, CCH Online, and legal information institutes etc.
Today’s Tip: use the phrase search.
It is much more efficient for a first database (and I use this term very broadly) look to use a narrow search and then expand to if you need to “catch everything”.
Test this out by looking at results for:
constructive trust
and then do it again for
“constructive trust”
Happy New Year.
MyPermissions: A Great Tool to Help You Protect Your Privacy
You can do lots of interesting things when you give social media tools permission to connect with each other and with other third-party apps. But beware, in doing this you also giving up your privacy.
I think it is safe to say that many of you don’t put much thought into clicking “Yes” when those little permission pop-up messages appear on your screens during an app installation (usually at the end when the app is already installed or starting up for the fist time). And further, I’m sure most of you don’t fully realize how many permissions you have granted or how much privacy you have given up in doing so.
When was the last time you reviewed the permissions you have granted in the various social media tools you use? Last month? Last year? Never?
Nothing like the start of a New Year to give us all a friendly nudge on making improvements.
MyPermissions (mypermissions.org) is a great tool that will help you systematically review the permissions you have granted in the various social media tools you use. And the simplicity of MyPermissions is brilliant – it doesn’t require any access to your accounts. It’s basically a collection of bookmarks that directly link you to the permissions pages for Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram, and Flickr. If you are logged into one of these sites, clicking on the relevant link on the MyPermissions homepage will take you right to the permissions page for that site.
I encourage you to take the time to review the permissions you have given in the various social media tools you use. I think many of you will be surprised at the permissions you have granted. Revoke the ones you don’t think are necessary or appropriate.
And don’t wait until January 2013 to revisit your permissions again. Put a reminder on your to do list or calendar; to review your permissions once a quarter, every few months or even monthly – remember that checking your permissions helps protect you privacy.
A hat-tip to LifeHacker for this tip on My Permissions.
Top 10 Financial Errors: #3 Using Accounting Software Without Financial Modeling and Reporting.
Robert Orben once said: “Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.”
Unfortunately most of us (the 99%?) have to work for a living. It is even better if the time we spend making our living can be as productive as it can be.
When it comes to financial decisions, it’s a given that you need good data to make good decisions. There are many good general and legal accounting packages out there. But recognize that accounting packages exist primarily for accountants. As lawyers and business owners, we need software that will give us insights into how we are doing as business owners and those responsible for running our practices. So look for accounting packages that build in as many management and modeling reports as possible to give you great data upon which to make your financial decisions.
Look closely at the software you now use. Unfortunately, most of the legal accounting packages out there put the powerful financial analysis tools into the “Pro” versions, which are suitable for larger firms.
Solos and smaller firms face a Hobson’s choice: Acquire the basic level of the software and forego the higher-end financial tools, or pay thousands of dollars for a full version that you will never use. Fortunately this is starting to change for the better!
Although moving to a different accounting package may be a troublesome undertaking, remaining with one that doesn’t effectively help you run your business by giving you good financial data upon which to make decisions in a timely manner will be more expensive and troublesome in the longer run.
Use PC Decrapifier to Remove Unwanted Software From a New or Old PC
Some of you were lucky enough to have Santa leave a new computer or laptop under your Christmas tree. That’s great news. Now for the bad news: Unfortunately, most new computers come preloaded with a tons of junk software you don’t really want or need. These can be trial versions of various programs, including mainstream ones like Microsoft Office Online, one of the popular security suites, toolbars, utilities, games and other programs you have never heard of (and will probably never use).
Nice to have a chance to try some of these programs out, but in the long run you just don’t want them on your machine. Why? Your computer will take longer to boot-up and run more slowly. These programs will bug you with annoying pop-ups, they can use significant amounts of space on your hard drive and they may slow down your access to the internet. You want them off your machine ASAP.
You can manually remove the programs you don’t want, but there is an easier way. The PC Decrapifier is an easy to use tool will help you remove all the crap you don’t want on your machine! It also does a great job of helping you disable unnecessary startup items that can slow down your computer when it boots up. It takes you step by step through the process, giving you recommendations on what to remove, many of which can be removed unattended. PC Decrapifier works with all versions of Windows 7, Windows XP and Vista and is free for personal use (a commercial version is very inexpensive).
The PC Decrapifier also does a good job of cleaning crap software from an older computer. You will likely see a noticeable performance improvement after running it on an older computer.
A small word of caution: You need to be a bit careful about what you remove. PC Decrapifier will help you make some of the decisions. A Google search can help you with programs you don’t recognize or are unsure of. If in doubt, don’t delete a program or delete it only after you have created a Restore point so you can easily revert back to a previous configuration.
Download PC Decrapifier here. Here is a list of the top 50 applications removed by actual PC Decrapifier users: (more…)
Top 10 Financial Errors: #2 – Rely on Total Billable Hours
Jules Renard once said: “I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries.”
This post continues our list of the Top 10 financial errors we have seen made by smaller law firms. This post concerns the subtle but important distinction between realization of law firm billable hours and the billable hours themselves.
Many firms use billable hours when it comes to performance measures for both partners and associates. In our view, that can be problematic, due to several factors, not the least of which is the ability to write-away time before billing, the write-down of time at billing and the write-off of time after billing.
All of these ‘downsize’ billable time and result in distortions in the financial analysis of the firm if you rely on billable time as a metric in the firm. Instead, we advocate using historical realization rates against billable time to get a better picture of how each lawyer – and the firm in general – is doing from a financial perspective.
With this as our background, our second financial error is:
#2: Relying on Total Billable Hours Rather than Realization Rates to Track Progress.
What is a lawyer’s realization rate? Their realization rate is the percentage of actual income paid to the firm from the billable hours of that lawyer.
For example, Partner X bills 200 hours per month at $200 per hour for a total amount billed of $40,000. Of that amount, 10 hours are written down (taken off the books) for various reasons, and clients pay a total of $30,000. Partner X’s realization rate is 75 percent.
In contrast, Partner Z bills 165 hours at $200 per month, but she has no write-downs, and her clients pay 95 percent of that for a total of $31,350.
Although Partner X bills more hours, because of Partner X’s low realization rate of 75%, Partner Z—with fewer hours billed but with a 95% realization rate – is actually generating more income for the firm.
Your computer-based time and billing program or accounting program should be able to create this report for you. If you determine a historical realization rate for each lawyer, then you can accurately forecast the revenues to be received from their WIP (work in progress).
Examine your results and use it to help guide any discussion of effectiveness and its effect on compensation for partners and associates – as well as the downstream effect on cash flow. Furthermore, once you start reporting on lawyer realization rates, you can start taking steps to tighten them up to make maximum use of all firm resources and hopefully lessen your financial worries.
