All Our Tips
Create Free Word Clouds With Wordle
This week a bit of fun. Wordle is site that lets you generate “word clouds” from text or a URL that you provide. The clouds are graphical collections of the words in the source text or site. They give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
You can see the Slaw Tips Blog Word Cloud here
Try Wordle for yourself at www.wordle.net.
QR Codes Can Help Grow Your Practice
At the Taste of TECHSHOW Dinner that we hosted back in April, one of the attendees, Kenneth Prochnow, a lawyer from Palo Alto, California, produced his business card, which was imprinted with a QR code. A couple of the more tech-savvy people at the table had QR code readers on their smartphones, and were quickly connected through this little code with Ken’s firm’s facebook fan page.
For those of you who as yet are only peripherally aware of QR codes, they are those little squares full of black and white squiggles that are starting to show up in more and more places, such as in print ads or on tags attached to products. Similar to bar codes but capable of containing much more information and able to be read by properly outfitted smartphones, these little codes allow the user to immediately be connected to much more information about a product or service than could be printed in the area that the code takes up. And because the code can be linked to an internet URL, they allow the provider to easily update the information that’s attached to the code without the waste of replacing printed materials.
QR codes are ubiquitious in Japan, where they were developed, and more and more North American businesses are adopting them. Could a QR code help you spread the word about your law practice, while allowing you to keep your message updated and fresh and show that your firm is cutting edge?
A New Look for an Old Friend
If you also follow our sister site you will know that I am in Calgary at the CALL Conference. This visit offers an opportunity to catch up with legal information vendors in the conferences exhibit hall as well as through vendor demonstrations of their latest innovations.
Maritime Law Book is showing a beautifully redesigned website for their excellent case law collection. The front page is nice and clean and allows easy access to the National Reporter System Key Numbers or a topical search. Search templates are also surfaced on the front page with familiar visual tools to access them.
The conference is also offering up fodder for future research tips. Stay tuned.
How to Do Proximity Searches in Google
Most of the paid and free legal research products offer proximity search (i.e., the ability to search for documents that have keywords within a certain number of specified words or paragraphs).
And, to the surprise of most people, Google also allows you to do proximity searches with the AROUND(n) connector. AROUND must be typed in upper case and you replace the “n” with a number specifying how many words you want your keywords to be from each other.
For example, when you search malpractice AROUND(10) pinnington, you get 5,900 hits where malpractice is within 10 words of pinnington.
Remember to try the AROUND(n) proximity search connector next time you are trying to find documents with terms that might be close, but not next to, each other. One of the common places this occurs is with names. You may get simple first and last names, but there might be pages with middle initials or full middle names.
Document, Document, Document!
A well-documented file is critical to the successful defense of a malpractice claim against you. In documenting your file, prepare and retain detailed notes from meetings, relevant conversations and of instructions received. Keep copies of emails (and attachments) associated with the file. When your client refuses your advice, document this in writing to your client and your file. Send regular status updates and always use file closing letters confirming the end of representation. Keep your personal notes and all relevant documentation when culling a file.
If, at any time, your client wants the file transferred to another lawyer, or made available for pickup, be sure to also retain a copy of the file for yourself, and get a receipt with a legible signature from the person picking up the file. If it’s not the client, make sure authorization to release the file to someone else, signed by the client, is in the copy you keep. Termination of your retainer by a client is often an indication of dissatisfaction with your services. Having a copy of the file will be crucial in defending against a negligence claim or discipline complaint that a dissatisfied client might make against you.
This week’s tip, again from our Taste of ABA TECHSHOW Dinner, is from Deborah E. Gillis, QC, a lawyer and consultant in Bedford, NS.
Search Assistance From Pictures
Today’s Tip: don’t forget to search images
I am sure that every lawyer reading Slaw Tips has had to build a personal injury quantum memorandum. Even if it was during articling, you will remember trying to identify a dollar figure to compensate for an injury using case law digests. For those of us who took the minimum science credits required, there is a great tool that was profiled recently by MIT’s Technology Review in an article titled .
Healthline’s Body Maps tool is a search engine to get visual clues for bits of anatomy. You can browse with a person shaped map. It has an extensive search engine with a lookup suggestion drop down so you don’t even have to spell properly. If you are researching injuries to the musculocutaneous nerve, it is a great idea to know that this is part of the arm.
What is your favourite source for searching pictures (anatomy related or otherwise)?
Use Paste Special to Clean-Up Text
Moving text with the cut and paste commands, either from one application to another, or between documents within the same application, is one of the most powerful features of Windows. It can also be one of the most frustrating features, especially when the pasted text doesn’t appear as you had expected or wanted.
In many programs you can control how Windows pastes data with the Paste Special command. This tip reviews how this command works in Microsoft Word. The steps outlined for Word are identical for pasting text with Paste Special in many other Windows programs.
At one time or another, all Word users will have had problems pasting data. Many lawyers will have experienced this when moving text from WordPerfect to Word. Often the alignment and spacing of pasted text make it very difficult to read.
Here’s how you can use the Paste Special command to control the format of pasted text. First, highlight the text that you want to copy, click Edit, then Copy (or Ctrl+C if you prefer using this keyboard shortcut). This puts the highlighted data into the Clipboard. The Clipboard is just a temporary place for holding text that is being moved or copied from one location to another.
Next, click on the location you want to paste the text you are copying. Then, click on the Edit menu, and select Paste Special (not Paste, which would be your usual selection). This opens the Paste Special dialog box. It gives you several different options for the format of text you are pasting. The “Unformatted text” option is the one that will clean up your pasted text. Select it, and then click OK to paste the data.
The Unformatted text option will paste bare, unformatted text only. All other formatting information will be stripped out, including bold, underlining, italics, indents, bullets etc. If the text you are pasting had various fonts or complex formatting, you will have to manually change fonts and recreate all this formatting. Although doing this can be time-consuming, it will sometimes be easier than trying to fix a document that has problems due to formats that did not convert properly, in particular when moving text from WordPerfect to Word.
Many Windows programs have a Paste Special command, and some have other format options that will help you. Excel for example, has about a dozen different options for reformatting pasted text. Next time you need to clean up text, remember the Paste Special command.
Legal Interns
Here’s another tip from the Taste of ABA TECHSHOW 2011 dinner that Dave and I hosted earlier this year. This tip comes from Allen Howell, Director of Career Services at the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law of Faulkner University.
Allen’s tip is to make maximum use of your local law school’s interns. He states that they can help with legal work and provide welcome insight into what is new, not to mention that you’ll be helping to mentor a potential new lawyer. Sort of seeing the world through new eyes….
Keep Your Rules Handy
I love my iPad. One reason is for its ability to carry heavy things for me, like extra novels when I travel, my CDs, and my copy of the Rules of Court.
No, sorry there is no Rules of Court app. Here are the steps to get a long pdf that is available for public download on to your tablet.
1. Make sure you have a pdf reader (like iBooks, iAnnotate, or Kobo)
2. In your browser, navigate to the public pdf. I used the Alberta Rules link at http://www.qp.alberta.ca/documents/rules2010/Rules_vol_1.pdf
3. Once the full pdf has loaded into your browser, hover over the top of the menu bar until the “Open In” bar appears.
4. Select which of your eReader apps you would like to Save the document in.
That’s it. Rules to travel.
Easy Instant Lines in Microsoft Word
In Microsoft Word (including Mac versions) you can easily create a variety of horizontal lines by typing the following characters three times followed by Return or Enter:
- Minus (-) produces a thin line;
- Underscore (_) produces a thicker line;
- Equal sign (=) produces a double line;
- Asterisk (*) produces a thick dotted line;
- Tilde (~) produces a zigzag line;
- Number (#) produces three lines, a thicker middle line between two thin ones.
The lines will be the width of your page, or if you are using columns, the width of your column. Remember to use these shortcuts to create dividers between sections of a document.
