All Our Tips
Have Multiple Facebook Pages
Here is another tip we picked up at the Taste of ABA TECHSHOW 2011 dinner in Chicago that Laura and I hosted this year. This particular tip comes from Catherine Sanders Reach, M.L.I.S. of Chicago, Illinois and the Director of the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center.
While most people think that having one facebook page is enough, Catherine advises lawyers to have two. One should be your personal page and the other should be your professional page. When you list your facebook information on your website, business card etc., refer to your professional page only. Prior to posting to facebook, consider the content of your post and toggle between your two facebook pages and thereby draw a bright line between your online personal and professional lives.
Social networking is a great way to make contact, build relationships and gain new clients, however, through the rules of professional responsibility lawyers are held to a higher standard of conduct than the average citizen. The very nature of social networking means that you can’t – and probably don’t want – to control what your close friends post. But, for your own good, some worlds just shouldn’t collide!
Microfilm
This weeks tip: Sometimes you just have to use microfilm.
On Tuesday, I enjoyed the hospitality of the Edmonton Public Library from 10:30 in the morning until they shut the doors at 9:00 p.m. Thank you to all the lovely staff at EPL, and those who hosted my colleagues at the Calgary Public Library as well. Thank you also for hanging on to those microfilm reader/printers.
If you are looking for a couple of years worth of historical advertisements, even if you are just looking in one issue a week, it takes a lot of time. Advertisements occassionally (not too often thank heavens) have value for a legal research project. Advertisements are not indexed in online services for newspapers, like Informart or Canadian Newsstand – those sources contain articles but not ads.
There is a newspaper service called Press Display that has the newspapers as they appeared in print. It is an excellent service that carries major newspapers from around the world. Unfortunately, if you are looking for ads older than 3 months you are out of luck.
So, suck it up princes (I said to myself) and take your rolls of coins over to the microfile reader/printer at the public library and get the information you need. So what if it isn’t on the internet, it still exists.
Google Account Security Best Practices
Most of us have tons of personal info on various Google sites, and many lawyers have started using Google in their law practices. Unfortunately, most of us haven’t done everything we should to make our Google accounts more secure. Have you enabled Google’s Two Step Authentication on your Google account?
On his blog, Rick Klau has a fantastic post that outlines all the steps you should take to make your Google account more secure. This post is a must read for anyone using Google, and for that reason the SLAW Tech tip will shamelessly take to you another site this week. If you use Google, personally and/or professionally, please read this post and implement the steps Rick outlines.
Pomodoro Time Management
Dave and I hosted a Taste of ABA TECHSHOW Dinner at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago last week, and we promised to feature a tip by each of our dinner guests here on SLAW Tips.
Our first featured tipster is Courtney Kennaday, Practice Management Advisor at the South Carolina Bar, who blogs at SC Small Firm.com. Here’s Courtney’s tip:
“Do you jump from one task to the next without ever finishing? You may want to try the Pomodoro Technique of getting work done. To begin, you’ll need a kitchen timer, a list of tasks and a pencil. Choose a task to be accomplished and set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes. (The Pomodoro is the timer.) Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your task list. Take a five minute break and begin a new task with the timer running. Every 4 “Pomodoros” take a longer break (15 – 20) minutes). The technique was created in the 1980s by Francesco Crillo. Crillo originally used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato (pomodoro in Italian), hence the name. To download the free book and forms, visit the Pomodoro Technique website.”
Read the Screen
Todays Tip: Read the screen
There is an adage that states familiarity breeds contempt. I am sure, like me, many of you have been to a training session for a web-delivered search tool that you have used for years. It is very hard not to get into a pattern where you use a tool the same way over and over, without exploring the possibilities that evolve with enhancements to a product.
Todays tip is a gentle reminder to read the screen. Look it over. Pay attention, not just to the function that you are using, but to all the possibilities.
You may get lucky and see something new, like this enhancement to Westlaw Canada that I noticed yesterday with the paper tablet symbol:
Carswell’s Legal Memoranda & Points of Law Icons will appear in those cases, legislative sections, and passages of commentaries that have been discussed in one or more memos. Remember to read product alerts too.
How to Reopen an Accidentally Closed Browser Tab
How many of you remember the old days when you could only have one browser window open at time? Yikes! Thankfully, the current versions of mainstream browsers now let you open multiple sites and it is easy to switch between them by clicking on tabs.
But what happens when you accidentally close a tab and you want to get back to it? You can of course go digging around your History, but there is a faster way.
You can use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+Shift+T” to open the accidentally closed tab. This works in IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
A side note for those that are not familiar with the syntax for describing keyboard shortcuts. Simply remember that a plus sign (+) between two or more keys means that you press those keys, in the order they are listed, almost simultaneously, moving from left to right. For example, a capital B would be described as Shift+b. Release them in the opposite order.
Try this handy keyboard shortcut next time you accidentally close a browser tab.
For Greater Productivity, Find Focus
You have someone answer your office phone so that you don’t jump at it, like a teenager, each time it rings. You don’t sit at the post office all day long, waiting for someone to put a letter in your box. So why do you constantly interrupt what you’re doing to review each and every email the instant it comes in?
The research is in and, according to the Stanford University News, people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time.
Turn off all visible and audible signals on your computer that an email has arrived. If you use a smartphone, consider turning the signals off on it, too, unless you are in a situation where you are waiting for a particular message in an emergency situation. Then, check your email at regular intervals that are as far apart as possible for the type of legal work you do. This will allow you to better structure your work, devote uninterrupted time to the things that are really important, and not feel so frazzled and out of control at the end of the day.
To turn off email notifications in Outlook 2003 and 2007, go to Tools | Options. In the Options dialog box, on the Preferences tab, click the E-mail Options button next to E-mail. In the Email Options dialog box, select Advanced E-mail Options. This will open the Advanced E-mail Options dialog box, where you can uncheck all the desktop alert settings.
If we are slaves to our email, never really getting anything accomplished as quickly or as well as we’d like to, it’s no one’s fault but our own.
Use a Dictionary
Today’s tip: Know what you are looking for…use a dictionary.
I didn’t take biology in high school. The thought of having to disect something just wasn’t my cup of tea. I regret that decision sometimes, usually when someone sends me a request to quantify an injury to a body part that I have never heard of.
I once was asked to get a rush quantum for a musculo-ligamentous strain of the neck. Foolishly, and because the requestor gave me the confirmed spelling, I plugged the phrase into a paid legal search tool. I got an answer, but probably not the best answer. The above injury is also frequently called a whiplash injury … a phrase when entered into the same paid legal search tool, generated more and better results. A good, if embarassing, lesson.
Make sure you know what you are looking for.
Some dictionary links:
Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus
Duhaime’s Legal Dictionary
from MedlinePlus
Use the Desktop
A surprising number of people work with their program windows at full expansion, even though computer monitors are getting wider and wider. This might have made sense when screens were small and you needed all of the room just to frame a sensible document. And it can still make sense if you’re easily distracted and need to throw a blanket over everything other than what you’re currently working on.
But at other times and for other folks, the desktop can be a great tool, rather than a large expanse of wasted space. You can have more than one document window open and visible to be compared, or you can work from an open browser window to an open Word document window. You can store important shortcuts on the desktop and even organize them into useful clusters or patterns. It’s a place for digital sticky notes, patches of frequently used text, and, of course, motivational photos of the reasons you’re working as hard as you are.
How do you use your desktop?
Speed Up Responses by Slowing Down
There’s an old saying that if you don’t have time to do something right the first time, you can always make time to do it over again.
Most of us are in too much of a hurry – most of the time. It just comes with the territory of being a lawyer. But there is nothing more frustrating than receiving a voice mail message in which the caller is asking you do to something important or even critical for him or her, but rips through the phone number so quickly that you have to play the message over and over in order to get it or write it down. Or worse, the caller doesn’t even bother to leave the number at all, just assuming that you either have it or will be more than happy to take the time to ferret it out. Add to this the callers who don’t leave a number or bother to spell their names — leaving you to head-scratch on how to even start looking up their number before returning their call. Those are the calls you really love to return.
Being more thoughtful, courteous and deliberative when you leave a voice mail message, particularly one for a client, can do wonders to make that client believe he or she has chosen the right attorney – and to recommend you to others. It may engender more cooperation from the opposing attorney. It might even garner a referral under the right circumstances. It will definitely help to move you to the top of the call-back list.
