All Our Tips
Phone a Friend
In the age of email, tweets, texting, IM and messages through facebook, the telephone has new power. If you need to gather a specific item to help with a research problem, try picking up a telephone and making a call.
The phone a friend lifeline works really well getting early versions of cases (call the lawyers on the winning side), getting information from a government source (most governments have online telephone directories that list people with their titles and direct phone lines), or answering tricky procedural questions (parliamentary counsel offices, court clerks, university professors).
This weeks tip – try for the personal touch of a telephone call.
Get Instant and Fairly Accurate Translations With Google Translate
Google Translate is a free translation service that provides instant translations between 57 different languages. It can translate words, sentences, web pages and even whole documents (in a PDF, TXT, DOC, PPT, XLS or RTF format) between any combination of the 57 supported languages (See a list here).
Like most Google tools, it is extremely easy to use. Google Translate generates the translation by looking at the patterns in hundreds of millions of previously translated documents. Do you get perfect and sworn to be accurate translations you that you can take to court? No – but they are more than good enough to give you the gist of any text, document or website that you need to translate.
You can find Google Translate at translate.google.com
Or on the Google home screen click on the more… link and select Translate.
Management by Beneficent Despot
♬ Speak softly, love and hold me warm against your heart
I feel your words, the tender trembling moments start
We’re in a world, our very own…♬
Lyrics and Music by Larry Kusic and Nino Rota,
Marlon Brando as The Godfather
Do you promote people to management roles in your firm based on their popularity or influence, or do you select them because of their business acumen? Does your management structure resemble a beneficent despot, gently but carefully controlling and directing the firm, or does it resemble a raucous democracy where everyone gets a vote? Maybe it’s run by a committee, or even groups of committees?
Democracies are wonderful governmental structures, but they are not designed to most effectively and efficiently make money. Firms headed by beneficent despots seem to work great until the time arrives for the despot to retire – which can leave a vacuum and create a power struggle, often resulting in the break-up of the firm.
In the long run, it’s less disruptive and more efficient to rely on a management group that enjoys the trust of the majority while making the hard decisions that must be made to keep the firm out of red ink and running effectively.
Can your management structure be streamlined to be more nimble and responsive? One way is to move from an owner-run operation to one involving professional management. Whether it’s an executive director, a firm administrator, a chief financial officer, or an HR director, professional managers are paid to produce results in their areas of expertise, freeing lawyer-owners to spend their time doing what they do best – attracting new clients and handling client matters. The series of LexisNexis Economic Surveys (which, unfortunately, appears to have stopped in 2008) consistently found a strong correlation between top-quartile firms and the presence of professional management.
How can you tell if your practice is ready for this step? As managing partner, if the amount of your time spent on management multiplied by your hourly billing rate is higher than the salary and benefits of an executive director, or even close, you are losing money by not engaging such a person. There is a secondary benefit, too, from having someone who is not trying to practice law also running the firm. The managing partner needs only to ensure that the professional manager is doing his or her job effectively – rather than to worry about whether everyone else in the firm is doing his or her job effectively.
Having a proper management structure, combined with good professional management in place, will be better for the firm in the long run than having a beneficent despot, speaking softly, all alone in his room…
Monitoring a Case Law Subject With CanLII
Sometimes it is important to know about every single new Canadian case on a particular topic. Often it is best if you know about these cases as soon as possible. This research tip offers an “as soon as possible” option with some creative use of CanLII.
- determine your search strategy (narrow it as musch as possible)
- run your search using CanLII’s – limiting to caselaw from the court levels and jurisdictions you need to watch
- sort your results by decision date
- copy and paste the resulting URL into your electronic calendar, and set a schedule to re-run your search
- keep track of the most recent case that appears in your result (or top five, just to be sure)
Voila, a quick method for reviewing cases on a subject.
I chose to offer this tip with a CanLII search since it is available without a subscription. Both LexisNexis Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada offer notifications of new items that meet search criteria as well.
Find the Best Free Online Clipart on the Microsoft Office Images Page
Adding some clipart, animations or photos is one of the best ways to make a presentation, newsletter or website look more professional. There are thousands of sites on the Internet that offer free and pay clip art. While there is good content on some of these sites, many force you to deal with large amounts of advertising and many pop-ups. Don’t bother with them.
The best source of free online clip art photos, animations and sounds, bar none, is the . It has thousands of free images and media files, which you can very easily search by keywords and categories. Some of the photos are of professional quality.
Go to the site and check it out. You will like what you find there. And, if you see something you like, download it so you have it for future use and they rotate the content on the site.
And note, the licensing agreement for the site provides that you can freely reproduce the images as you wish, without having to worry about copyright or royalties, as long as you don’t sell them. You can find this page at .
Guard Your Stars – There Be Pirates About!
♬ We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot
Drink up me hearties, yo ho
We kidnap and ravage and don’t give a hoot
Drink up me hearties, yo ho…♬
Lyrics by Xavier Atencio, music by George Bruns, A Pirate’s Life for Me.
In today’s economic climate, firms are looking at all manner of different ways to bump up the bottom line. Since one of the top methods of improving a firm’s profitability is to steal top income producing partners, associates and staff from other firms (politely called “recruiting”), you must take steps to protect your income base from being raided!
The first step is to recognize who are your stars among the partners, associates and staff. In some cases they may be those who are quietly effective, working steadily and consistently at a very high level, like Will Turner. In other cases they may be flamboyant and a real character – Captain Jack Sparrow, for example. You wouldn’t want a computer or other valuable asset of the firm simply walking out the door – so when it comes to people, you need to ensure that you are reducing the possibility of losing your starts to a competitor. Consider, then, what you can do from a management perspective, to ensure that your workers are a happy crew!
Remember, people don’t leave a job – they leave a bad captain, partner, supervisor, an unhappy work situation or a bad co-worker. They also may not feel valued by the firm and accordingly, they start looking for another ship on which to sail. The cost of a turnover alone is estimated at about 1.5 times annual salary for non-lawyers and 2 times annual salary, or more, for attorneys. Factor in the additional lost revenue from a star leaving your firm and you can see that time invested in promoting or rewarding a positive, satisfied and productive crew is time well spent!
A couple of good resources to help you with this are: The Extraordinary Law Firm: Making Your Firm a Great Place to Work by Charles E. Stinnett and Keeping Good Lawyers: Best Practices to Create Career Satisfaction by M. Diane Vogt and Lori-Ann Richardson.
After all, we have learned that the world contains rascals, scoundrels, villains, and knaves! Drink up me hearties, yo ho!
Read That URL
Things move about on the web. Sometimes when you search you will get the dreaded message
ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved
Today’s research tip – read that URL! Google, Bing, and other search engines provide the URL for the search result that is coming up. If a domain has changed or a site has been revamped, often you can find “missing” information by reading and translating the URL. For instance, an error message when you click on this link
http://www.apuo.uottawa.ca/Info/arbitrations/
Chodos%202nd%20supplementary%20award%20May%202009.pdf
can be found at
http://www.apuo.ca/Info/arbitrations/
Chodos%202nd%20supplementary%20award%20May%202009.pdf
In this case, the path to finding out that the domain name changed was to navigate to the base URL when I got an error message. Test this out with any URL by deleting everything to the right of the first / in the browser address bar. Often there will be an automatic redirect to the new site which will help to determine what the new URL is, even when the navigation structure of a site has been altered.
You can also use Internet Archive’s Wayback machine to look at older versions of a root site.
Banish You Biggest Daily Interruption: The New Email Pop-Up
Most people get a beep and a new message pop-up box every single time a new e-mail message arrives in their inbox.
Stop the insanity!
You know its true: This is the biggest source of interruptions in your day. That beep goes off, the pop-up appears on your screen, your train of thought gets derailed and, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, you stop whatever you are doing to bounce into your inbox and read the newly arrived message.
With all due respect, the vast majority (if not all) of the messages that most of us receive are rarely so important that we need to know within 7 milliseconds that they have arrived in our inboxes.
Exercise some self-control. Give yourself, your productivity and your jangled nerves a break and turn the new message pop-up off. Okay, go with just the beep if you must (even that will be a moderate improvement), but I urge you to consider turning that off, too, because it is a big distraction as well.
You will be surprised, even awed, by how much more work you will get done without pop-ups and beeps interrupting you all day. And, while your productivity improves, you will still, most importantly, get all your messages but you will read them when you choose. All you need to do is check your inbox at reasonably regular intervals, which you are probably already doing anyway—for example, first thing in the morning, when you go for a coffee, before and after lunch, and the like.
It is easy to turn off the new message pop-up and beep in most e-mail programs. In most versions of Microsoft Outlook, you simply do the following:
1. Click on the Tools menu and select Options.
2. Click on the Preferences tab.
3. Click on the E-mail Options button.
4. Uncheck the “Display a notification message when new mail arrives” box.
And no cheating with your smartphone! Take that BlackBerry or iPhone or whatever you use off your hip, turn the vibrate mode off, and place it upside down on your desk so you can’t see the little red LED flashing.
