All Our Tips
Use the Crowd, Beware the Crowd
Today’s Tip: Don’t take Wikipedia at face value
I nearly wrote “The King is dead. Long live the King.” as the title of this post, but Wikipedia is definitely NOT dead. It is a very useful resource for a quick look at a topic, name, date, person, or fact that you intend to verify.
Legal research requires work. Use crowd sourced data just like you would any other source – not as the sole point of information. Verify the black letter statement of the law in a legal encyclopedia by reading and noting up authorities referenced in the footnotes. Verify the content and point of view in a journal article or CLE paper by reading and noting up authorities referenced in the footnotes. Verify the content and point of view of a textbook or loose-leaf service by reading and noting up authorities referenced in the footnotes. I am sure you recognize the theme. “Trust, but verify.”
“Trust, but verify” is a quote attributed to Ronald Regan at Wikipedia. Thinkexsist.com attributes “Trust, but verify” to American writer Damon Runyon. My old copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (published in 1980) doesn’t contain this quote so I leave it to the curious readers among you to verify.
Thanks to my colleague Ed for the idea for this post.
Share Collections of Links With Bitly Bundles
Thanks to my good friend Catherine Reach at the ABA LTRC (Legal Technology Resource Center) for this tip. (And kudos for her patience to explain it to me a third time as I didn’t quite clue in the first two times she mentioned it to me.)
URLs can be a mile long – and quite frequently are longer than then the 140 character limit of a tweet. As we all know too well, long URLs are a pain to retype. Fortunately, bitly and other URL shortening services allow you to create URLs that are shorter and far more suited for inclusion in tweets or printed publications.
But what if you want to share multiple links at the same time? bitly bundles comes to the rescue to allow you to do this.
A bitly bundle is a collection of links that you access with a single shortened URL. takes you to a bitly bundle Catherine created listing tools for redacting electronic documents. The bitly bundle link takes you to a nicely formatted page on the bitly site that lists the collection of links she included in the bundle.
Creating a bitly bundle is fast and easy (although they could make the interface a bit more user friendly). You have to login on the bitly site (and you must create a free account to do so). Click on bundle and add your list of URLs in the blue text box. You can then add a title and annotation for the bundle and for each URL. bitly will grab a graphic from each linked page.
After sharing the bundle link, anyone that clicks on that link will see your collection of links. The pages that a bitly bundles appear on also have social media functionality as they allow comments. You can add, remove and reorder your collection of links after it is created. bitly bundles also gives you stats on how many times the bundle was viewed and how many time each link is clicked on.
Next time you need to share a collection of links try a bitly bundle.
Overcoming Fee Resistance
This is a guest post by Gerry Riskin of Edge International on overcoming fee resistance with a client.
The first step in convincing a client of your value is to have confidence in yourself and the fees you charge.
Consumers want the very best price for any given product or service. As a lawyer, you suggest a fee. Your client looks at you and says, “Gee, that’s a lot of money. It’s really a lot more than I had budgeted for, and I’m really concerned about that.” Or perhaps, “My CEO is concerned about our legal budget. Is there a possibility that you could do this for less?”
What do we do?
What we do not typically do is give that client an assurance. We do not usually look the client in the eye and assert the merits of our fee. Instead, we become frightened. What if we lose the client? What if they select someone else? With those fears in mind, we either capitulate on the spot, or we say we would like to talk to our management committee – and then we run to our partners and suggest that we ought to lower our fees to keep the client.
I am not suggesting that this is not a competitive world. I know it is. There may be times when you need to exercise personal judgment, reduce the scope of the mandate and lower or moderate your fees. However, rather than responding reflexively with fear, we should learn first to apply the same approach as professional salespeople-and that is to demonstrate to clients that they are getting good value. We need to assure clients that we are uniquely equipped to deal with their situation and are deploying the very best people available. We need to assure them that the fee is commensurate with the value that they will receive. We may even want to add, where appropriate, that due to efficiencies and effective systems the fee is lower than some other firms would charge to provide similar value.
At that point, the client may very well do what we do often in a showroom when we are buying a product, and that is to accept the explanation. If this does not happen, then we need to apply personal judgment as to how to proceed from there.
The important point is that all too often, we capitulate too early – we fail to demonstrate that we have confidence in our fees. By capitulating so early we probably reinforce the client behavior of questioning our fees-and make the client think, “I guess the name of the game is that whatever the law firm suggests by way of fees, you complain a little and you say it’s painful and then they moderate the amount.” It becomes a conditioned response.
Assert your fees and demonstrate your value. Your client is looking for confidence -don’t disappoint. Contact the author, Gerry Riskin
Check the Regulations
Today’s Tip: Look for regulations.
Most legal researchers are cognizant that they should check for a statute on their topic. My tip today is a reminder to also look for regulatory, policy, and other delegated legisaltion.
Some regulation reminders:
- Regulation making power is always spelled out in a section of the statute.
- The authority to make a regulation does not necessarily mean that a regulation exists.
- Some regulations have the authority to change the wording of an act.
- Regualtions come into force on the day they are filed unless they state otherwise in a ciming into force section
Thanks to Dino for the question that inspired this Tip.
Acrobat for Legal Professionals Blog: An Essential Resource for Anyone Using Acrobat
The , sometimes called the Acrolaw blog, is a fantastic resource for lawyers, law firm staff, legal IT people and anyone else in the legal community that uses Adobe Acrobat. The blog is written by Rick Borstein. He is the Business Development Manager for Acrobat in the Legal Market for Adobe Systems. Rick is probably the most knowledgeable person on the planet when it comes to using Acrobat in the legal setting.
You will find the answer to just about any question you have, including questions about OCR, scanning, Bates numbering, batch processing, digital signatures, commenting, metadata, binders and portfolios.
You can find the
Develop Clients, One Relationship at a Time
The longer you practice, the easier it is to forget that clients are generally in crisis when they come to see you. Although their problems may not seem insurmountable to the experienced lawyer, the client may still feel completely out of control.
Don’t allow yourself to become so interested in the legal problem, fascinating through it may be, that you forget about the person. Start immediately to build a relationship of trust, which will keep bringing the client back each time a new problem arises.
Determine the client’s expectations, not just about the outcome of the case but also about the nature of the relationship they expect to have with you during the representation. Take the time to explain each step of the legal process in which they are involved, not just because it’s your ethical obligation to do so, but because it is the best way to provide reassurance to the client and illustrate your desire to build a long, productive working relationship. As the case progresses, take the opportunity to look for information about common interests you share with the client which can help you to maintain the relationship after this case is over.
One of the best ways to maintain a relationship with clients once the initial matter is over is to contact them regularly with information that will be of interest to them along with subtle guidance that lets them know that – whatever their next problem – you should be their first phone call. There are many websites, such as Streamsend.com, or ConstantContact.com which will allow you to send out group emails without being classified as spam and then stopped by everyone’s spam filter. Check them out and get in the habit of adding clients to your mailing list when their files are closed, if not sooner.
This tip comes from Shawn Holahan, Professional Services Counsel for the Louisiana State Bar Association‘s Law Office Management Assistance Program, and is the last tip from the Taste of ABA TECHSHOW 2011 dinner that we hosted in April of this year. Thanks, again, to all those who attended and provided a tip!
Document, Document, Document
Today’s Tip: think of the word “document” as a verb.
With legal research, it is a frequent event to have someone ask how you found an answer. This often happens when an answer is “there is no reported case law on that topic”. Especially when the search result is nothing, it is really important to plot your research path and be prepared to share exactly what the path was.
My method for this is to provide research results in memo form, even for short simple tasks. Research memos should have a detailed sources consulted section that includes granular details like the database or template and search language used.
The best thing about documenting your search path this way is the ability to reuse or build on your prior work.
Agree? Disagree? Feel free to comment.
Naming a Top File or Folder
You’ve probably got a good file and folder naming system all worked out — at least, I hope so. But sometimes when you’re working you want to force Explorer or Finder, depending on whether you’re in Windows or Mac OS, to bring a certain file or folder to the very top of the alpha list but don’t feel like doing the AAA Taxi trick used by the old Yellow Pages optimizers. Simply preface your file name with a non-alphanumeric symbol and the system will sort that to the top.
Some symbols on your keyboard are off limits, though, when it comes to naming files and folders, so use any but these:
Use any character in the current code page for a name, including Unicode characters and characters in the extended character set (128–255), except for the following “reserved characters”:
< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon)
” (double quote)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)
So tilde ~ works, as does the “octothorpe” #, the dollar sign $ etc.
Google Chrome
This is an ABA TECHSHOW tip from Erik Mazzone, Practice Management Advisor for the North Carolina State Bar (and all-round nice guy!)
He advises moving to Google Chrome as your browser of choice and *not* just for techy reasons! Erik states that there are a number of reasons for doing so. (Hat tip to Mashable.com for helping us flesh out many of these).
Erik states, for one, it is blazingly fast. It shares the same rendering engine as Safari (which is also known to be fast). The folks at Scriptnode.com have also noted how well Safari is at catching errors and recovering…quickly! This saves your time when searching and researching.
Along with Safari, it has a nice privacy browsing feature (called “Incognito” in Chrome and “Private Browsing” in Safari). Nothing left on your machine except files you may have downloaded and bookmarks that you created. This helps protect your privacy!
Erik states it is easy to switch from Firefox to Chrome – you can import your bookmarks and the keyboard shortcuts are the same (we believe the same is true of Safari as well). So you don’t have a steep learning curve in switching.
Similar to Safari, the start page is a display of the most visited web sites (at least those visited when not using “Incognito”). We *love* this feature and it is great to have your browser help you jump to your most visited websites. This helps you be more productive.
Mashable.com has noted that:
Chrome treats tabbed windows as separate processes. Nice, we’ve already seen that in IE8, right? But Chrome also has a nifty way to see what’s going on: a task manager. Similar to the task manager in Windows, it lets you see which processes are active (inside Chrome), and how much memory, CPU, and network resources they use. Beautiful. You can access it by right clicking Chrome’s title bar.
Google Chrome is reported to be more secure, courtesy of its “sandboxing, safe browsing, and auto-update technology” that protects you against phishing and malware attacks. This again, helps keep you safe.
OK here is the kicker (and Safari has this as well). Grab a tab with your mouse in Chrome and drag it off the browser…Voila – it opens the tab in a new window. This is totally cool and saves time when you start having too many open tabs and just want to concentrate on one or just a few in a separate window. (We tried this in IE as well and it works as well). A time saver and reduces time spent flipping between windows (even if you use dual monitors..right?)
Erik also suggests that, rather than having 25 open ‘tabs’, save every (heavily used) open tab as a bookmark in one file. You then create a keyboard shortcut to this file and have your 25 most used tabs in a quick pick list. Again, a time saver!
Thanks Erik for some great ideas on how to make your browsing faster, more effective, safer and more productive!
How Comes Before What
Today’s Tip: plan how to conduct your research before you attempt to find anything
At the CALL/ACBD Conference last week I listened to Ted Tjaden (read him at Slaw) and Andrew Terrett talk about legal project management. My take away from their excellent presentation was that project management is applying a disciplined approach to your (or group) work.
Applying a disciplined approach to a legal research question will help you focus so that your strategy allows you to gather just enough information and the right information to answer the problem. Although it is not described as research project management, following the strategy described at Catherine Best’s Legal Research site.
Happy planning.
