All Our Tips
Learn What You Have Access To
Today’s Tip: Learn what you have access to.
This pithy statement could be read a couple of different ways in the context of legal research.
One meaning is to remember to search your library catalog – in your firm, at your local courthouse or law society library, at your nearest public library, at your local law school. Even law librarians who help fill the shelves should remember to look in the catalog. Favorite sources are great, but other sources should not be overlooked. Searching a library catalog will remind you that there are additional sources to refer to.
Another meaning is to remember to look at the database content of your electronic resources. If you don’t know that a particular source stopped being added to in 2009, you may think that you are finding everything when there is a great big gaping hole in your gathering strategy.
What do you think of when you read the phrase “learn what you have access to”?
Know the Real Score: Survey Your Clients Regularly
The short opinion survey is one of the easiest, cheapest, and least used client development tools available to the law firm.
In a 1995 Harvard Business Review article entitled “Why Satisfied Clients Defect,” the authors pointed out the important distinction between satisfied clients and completely satisfied clients. In markets where competition was intense, they noted a tremendous difference between the loyalty of satisfied and completely satisfied customers. For instance, in the auto industry they found that even a slight drop from complete satisfaction resulted in an enormous drop in customer loyalty.
This phenomenon is not limited to manufactured products. It also occurs in the service industry. Anyone who has ever gotten a really bad haircut can understand how this concept plays out in real life. If you have a lot of other options, you’re not going back to the place where you had the bad experience last time.
The key to maintaining complete client satisfaction (and loyalty) is to survey your clients regularly about how they feel you and your staff are serving them, and then meet with them to discuss how you plan to implement the feedback they give. And then make sure you do it.
Diarize Research Follow-Up
Today’s tip involves following up.
When your research is initially prepared, you will likely find new items, or pending legislation. These future things may change the landscape that your initial research analysis paints.
Today’s simple tip is to diarize. Everything.
I use my Outlook calendar to diarize either recurring daily or weekly checks for things (like expected orders in council; court of appeal decisions, the expected publication date or comment deadline for draft regulations, etc.) It is very simple to create a calendar appointment that will popup a message to check for something on a future day. I use calendar appointments for this so that I can easily change the date, and I always see a popup reminder. I can turn the reminder into an appointment for my staff if I need to delegate, or I can forward the item as an email. It is very easy to turn an email into an appointment with a drag and drop as well.
What method do you use to diarize research followups?
Bypass the Windows Recycle Bin With Shift+Del
If you’re absolutely sure that you want to delete a file(s) permanently from your hard drive (i.e., bypassing the Windows Recycle Bin – noting that deleted files aren’t really deleted…see below**), select the file(s), then hold down the Shift key while you press Delete. You will get a File Delete Confirm dialog box asking you to confirm your intent to delete the file “permanently”, answer yes to do so. The deleted file will not be in the Recycle Bin.
My personal preference and practice is to “permanently” delete everything, unless I think I might want it back, in which case I delete it by sending it to the recycle bin. I find this gives me more space on my smallish laptop hard drive, minimizes Recycle Bin clutter and makes it easier to find things I want to undelete if and when I go looking for them in the Recycle Bin. Every once and awhile I clean out my Recycle Bin.
**Note that “permanently” deleted doesn’t really mean permanently deleted: When you “delete” a file you don’t actually delete the file data itself, you only delete the reference to that file in the hard or floppy drive’s “table of contents”. The file data remains unchanged somewhere on the hard drive, and will remain there until it is over-written by another file being saved in the same physical location on the drive. There are utilities that can “undelete” deleted files. Keep this in mind next time you want to “permanently” delete a file.
Produce a ‘Key Statistics’ Report
Most firms spend far too many hours and kill way too many trees producing reports which are rarely reviewed, month after month, for their lawyers . The reality is that, in order to successfully manage the financial health of the firm, you only need to get lawyers to look at exceptions to the norm, not the norm itself.
For example, for management purposes, while you look at all the firm’s receivables each month, the reports that you prepare for the lawyers do not need this level of detail. You only need to show the ones which are over a certain number of days old or over a certain dollar threshold. As another example, you don’t have to show all the cost write-offs – just those which exceed a certain dollar threshold or percentage of total costs on a file. Many time and billing packages have canned exception reports, where all you have to do is specify the criteria, and the reports will be produced at the push of a button. Your pile of reports will shrink considerably, as will the time you devote to them, and you will then be better able to focus on what really needs attention.
Most firms would benefit greatly from producing a one page report which summarizes all of the key statistics that reveal the health of the firm, both for the current month as well as year-to-date and for the prior year for comparison purposes. We call this report the ‘Dashboard Report”.
Once you become familiar with this report, you will be able to determine in a matter of minutes what trends are occurring and whether any numbers are aberrational, requiring further investigation. This way you will be able to work proactively to maintain the financial health of the firm, rather than reactively.
What to include in the “Dashboard Report” will be in our next Tip.
Find a Trusted Source
Today’s tip: Find a trusted source.
This is a bit of a repeat, but also wisdom from my daughters.
Dominique (15) says: I don’t use Wikipedia first because it can be changed.
Genevieve (16) says: When we do research at school, all the kids bolt for the computers and I go to the encyclopedias because they are cross referenced.
Whether, like Gen, your trusted source is a printed text, or like Niq, your trusted source is your Mom, you should find your trusted source.
There will be more than one. It will be the top of your link list, your first favourite, a widget on your home page, something downloaded to your mobile device or the text that everyone knows is most likely in your office. It might even be speed dial number 1 or your regular Wednesday coffee date.
Related posts:
An expansion of go to the source
Keep your rules handy
What’s on your browser’s homepage
Four Tricks for Working With Tables in Microsoft Word
Tables can be very helpful for presenting information or data in a document. As many of you know, working with tables can be frustrating when you can’t get them into the layout or format you want. So this week, I’m sharing four of my favourite tricks for working with tables in Microsoft Word.
Tabs are very useful for lining up information in a document. What many people don’t know is that you can use tabs within tables. To set a tab within a table, click within the table cell(s) that you want to include a tab(s). Next, select the type of tab, and click on the ruler in the location you want the tab to appear. Repeat for multiple tabs within the same cell(s).
The one thing you have to remember when working with tabs within a table is that simply pressing “Tab” will jump you to the next cell. You have to press “Ctrl+Tab” to move to a tab position within a table.
The second table trick relates to putting space before a table that is at the beginning of a document. If you need to add text before a table at the very start of a document, you must click within the first table cell and press “Enter”. This will move the table down a line.
Thirdly, remember that you can break a table into two parts. To do this, position the cursor in the cell where you want the break to occur. On the menu bar choose “Table”, then “Split Table” to accomplish this.
Lastly, when you want to make changes to the format or layout of a table, try right-clicking within a cell to see a context sensitive menu that will have all the settings you might want to change. This is far quicker than looking for them using the menu bar.
For Greater Profitability, Increase Turnover
No, we’re not talking about a warm, fruit-filled pouch of dough. We’re talking about how to increase the dough in your pocket from your practice by increasing your billing turnover rate.
Your billing turnover rate is the length of time, on average, that it takes for a bill to be sent to the client after the work has been done. The figure is determined by dividing your current work in progress (WIP) figure by the average amount you have billed monthly during the preceding 12 months. For example, if a single lawyer averages billing $20,000 per month and has $60,000 worth of unbilled work (WIP) on the books at the end of the year, his billing turnover rate would be 3 months ($60,000 ÷ $20,000 = 3 months).
Some types of work are customarily billed only at the end of the matter, so if you do this type of work it can throw the numbers off. Nevertheless, the lower your billing turnover rate, the more quickly you are getting your bills out and, assuming that you have engaged in appropriate client selection and the bills are paid as sent, the better off you will be financially. Clients can’t pay your bill if you don’t send it, and the sooner they get it, the better the chance that it will be paid promptly.
An Expansion of ‘Go to the Source’
Editor’s note: Thanks to Karen Sawatzky of the Tapper Cuddy Library in Winnipeg for today’s tip. Follow Karen on Twitter, read her column at Slaw.ca or her posts at Library Technician Dialog or visit her at LinkedIn.
I got a request to find the top 5 London law firms, and then find the lawyers in a particular practice area.
I sent a message via Twitter to a London law librarian I know only from Twitter, and he replied immediately with the info I needed. It cut my research by several hours.
The point I want to make is that if you focus your “tweeple” in your field, you’ll find you have sources to go to when you get those out of left field questions.
Use HTTPS to Make Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts More Secure
Getting one of your social media accounts hacked can be very embarrassing and time consuming. One of the simplest things you can do to make your Facebook and Twitter accounts a bit more secure is to enable Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure or HTTPS.
HTTPS provides encrypted communication and secure identification for cross-web communications. This simply means that the stream of data going between your computer (or smartphone) and the sever it is connecting to across the web is encrypted. This makes it much harder to intercept and understand. HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and other sensitive online transactions.
You automatically use HTTPS when you login and access LinkedIn. Unfortunately, or both Facebook and Twitter, HTTPS is off by default.
To enable HTTPS in Twitter, go to “Settings”, click the “Account” tab and scroll all the way to the bottom and select “Always use HTTPS”.
In Facebook you can enable HTTPS by clicking on “Account” (top right), then on “Account Settings”, and then on check the “Account security (https)” checkbox.
You can tell you are using HTTPS as you will see “https” in the URL of the site you are accessing and your browser will display a “lock” icon in the status bar across the bottom of your browser window.
Changing these settings does not guarantee 100% security, but it does give you a bit more protection when you are using unsecured Wi-Fi.
