All Our Tips
How to Take a Screenshot of Your Desktop on a Mac or PC
Taking a screenshot of your PC desktop is easy – look for the “print screen” key on your keyboard. On PC keyboards it will usually have PrtScn, PRTSC or PRTSCN on it. Often, you will have to press it in combination with the SHIFT key. Doing this will place an image of the entire desktop in the clipboard – a quick paste of the clipboard contents (CTRL+V) gives you an image of your entire desktop.
Adding an ALT to the mix (e.g., SHIFT+ALT+PRTSC) will place an image of the active window (not the entire desktop) into the clipboard.
On a Mac, there are actually four easy ways to get screenshots of all or part of your desktop – but they aren’t as obvious as the ways to do it on a PC.
To take a screenshot of your entire desktop, press SHIFT+COMMAND+3 and an image of the screenshot will automatically appear in a file on your Mac’s desktop.
To copy an image of the entire desktop to your Mac’s clipboard, press CONTROL+SHIFT+ COMMAND+3. Then press the paste command (COMMAND+V) to paste an image of the desktop into a document.
You can also take a screenshot of just a portion of your Mac’s desktop by pressing SHIFT+COMMAND+4. This turns the pointer into a target. Next, click and hold, then drag the target pointer to create a box on your desktop. When you release, the area within your box will appear in an image file on your desktop.
Using CONTROL+SHIFT+COMMAND+4 works in a similar fashion, and pastes the selected area into the Mac’s clipboard. You can then paste the screenshot into a document by pressing the paste command.
Time to Say Goodbye…
♫ Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye my love
I can’t hide, can’t hide, can’t hide what has come…♫
Lyrics, music and recorded by Avril Lavigne.
April 8, 2014 is a significant date for users of Microsoft XP and Office 2003. On that date, support ends for both of these venerable and well-loved products.
Microsoft wants its 100 Million XP and Office 2003 users to upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 and Office 2010 or Office 365.
MS has relented on MSE (Security Essentials updates) and will continue these until July 14, 2015 but that does not mean that you should stay with these products.
The time, as they say, has come to say goodbye. From a management perspective, your choice is to try to upgrade your software on your existing hardware or to upgrade your hardware as well as the associated operating system and Office suite.
What does end of support mean? According to Microsoft:
It means you should take action. After April 8, 2014, there will be no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options or online technical content updates.
Running Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 in your environment after their end of support date may expose your company to potential risks, such as:
Security & Compliance Risks: Unsupported and unpatched environments are vulnerable to security risks. This may result in an officially recognized control failure by an internal or external audit body, leading to suspension of certifications, and/or public notification of the organization’s inability to maintain its systems and customer information.
Lack of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) & Hardware Manufacturers support: A recent industry report from Gartner Research suggests “many independent software vendors (ISVs) are unlikely to support new versions of applications on Windows XP in 2011; in 2012, it will become common.” And it may stifle access to hardware innovation: Gartner Research further notes that in 2012, most PC hardware manufacturers will stop supporting Windows XP on the majority of their new PC models.
What should you be doing? The time is short. Lawyers can not afford the downtime that can come with your computers becoming infected as a result of security vulnerabilities by continuing to use XP. You need to be proactive.
You need to determine if your hardware can run Windows 7 (). However, if your computer is an older one, chances are that you will stand to benefit (and indeed may be required) to purchase a current PC (unfortunately most new computers will come with Windows 8 preinstalled – most business users will want to downgrade to Windows 7).
Once you upgrade your operating system you have to reinstall all your software by hand (you will need all the original installation disks). You will then have to test your current software to see if it will run properly under Windows 7. Peripherals as well may no longer be compatible or may require driver updates.
The point is that time is ticking. You need to establish a budget and book your IT support time (*they will be in short supply as well as the ‘window’ closes*). You will want to have the full conversion, upgrades and testing all this completed in advance of April 8, 2014.
Don’t wait. Unfortunately you can’t hide from what has come.
-David J. Bilinsky, Vancouver, BC.
Regulations
One of the things we don’t talk about much on the legal research side of things here at Slaw Tips are Regulations. Regulations are a form of delegated legislation made in the exercise of powers conferred by a statute. Regulations are the how to a Statute’s what. and are usually found online attached to the act that they are made from.
A fairly common question arises about the in force date of a regulation. In Alberta, the day it is filed with the Registrar of Regulations, unless a later day is specified. For federal regulations, section 9 of the Statutory Instruments Act reminds us that most federal regulations also come into force on the date that they are registered.
Regulations can be simple or complex and there can be a well documented process for creating them. The bottom line is that though regulations are subordinate delegated legislation, they are still law.
Back Up Your Cloud: How to Download All Your Data
On at least a few previous occasions(here and here), I have written about the necessity of backing up your personal data, pictures and contacts, regardless of where they reside – your computer, your smartphone, your iPad or other tablet, your camera, etc. It is a fact of life that hard drives and other devices will fail – you want to have your data backed up so you don’t lose it.
But what about all that data and information you have created on the cloud? Think about all the information you have created in Facebook, LinkedIn, the various Google services, Evernote, Twitter and Yahoo. More than a few cloud services have lost or destroyed data, and some have gone out of business, usually with little or no notice. Your cloud data should be backed up too!
PC Magazine recently published an article that reviews the things you should think about when backing up your cloud data, and it contains specific instructions on downloading data from the cloud services mentioned above. If you use these cloud services, or others, avoid disappointment by taking steps to make sure your cloud data is properly backed up.
Heenan and Hyriniak: Taking Stock
Canada’s legal sector appears to be on the cusp of major change.
From the towers of Bay Street to our courthouses across the nation, we may be embarking upon a bumpy, but perhaps overdue ride of reorganization, re-prioritization and rationalization.
Last week’s sudden collapse of Heenan Blaikie and the Supreme Court of Canada’s January 23, 2014 ruling in Hryniak v Maudlin could be harbingers of the revolution ahead.
While the Heenan, Blaikie debacle may have more, ultimately, to teach us about human shortcomings and hubris than the perils of the immediate legal marketplace, it does underscore the reality that defections, shakeups, acquisitions and takeovers have become the norm among our nations largest law firms.
The formerly stable, blue-chip legacy firms of 30 years ago have, by and large, been assimilated, merged and swallowed up into huge, global legal enterprises in which I suspect the participation of Canadian branch offices reflects a mere footnote in both balance sheets and boardroom influence.
We can only predict that this trend is bound to continue, whether it be because of internal politics and intrigue, changing client requirements and demands, or the mere, unavoidable economies of scale in an era of increasing globalization and resultingly, decreasing autonomy within Canada’s largest firms.
This cannot help but have a significant impact on the environments in which many of Canada’s lawyers work, the way they conduct business, and the expectations they may safely maintain about the future.
For those of us who work in smaller environments, however, our reactions as outside observers may range from gossipy fascination to sheer relief that our professional lives are not subject on a day-to-day basis to such unexpected tremors and eruptions.
Nonetheless, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hyriniak leaves the rest of us with much to ponder about the future of lawyering in our civil justice system.
The most interesting aspect of this ruling remains our Supremes’ unanimous admonition to the nation’s court administrators and judges that they had better ready themselves and their judicial systems for a flood of summary judgment motions, aimed at achieving cost-effective finality, at the likely expense of the civil trial, as we have long known it.
This may prove to be a revolutionary moment in Canadian civil jurisprudence.
Our lower courts have long played a game of dance and dodge when it comes to harnessing the potential of summary judgment proceedings to render final determinations. With every Rule change that urged increasing use of summary judgment motions, our Courts responded to this mandate by establishing extraordinarily high, often ambiguous thresholds of proof and certainty as prerequisites for their preparedness to rule on a final basis.
Underlying this hesitation was a genuine deference by our judges to the civil trial as a time-honored and tested best methodology for getting to the truth.
The prohibitive cost of civil trials, however, has made such “getting to the truth” a near impossibility for most. As a result, the civil trial remains a relatively rare occurrence in the lives of even the most seasoned civil litigation practitioners.
In Ontario, the costs consequences of losing a summary judgment motion and lengthy delays in the availability of motion dates have effectively thwarted the summary judgment motion as an alternate process for most ordinary litigants.
The result has been an access to justice nightmare. And for practical purposes, our lofty ideals regarding the civil trial process have been reduced for most to the stuff of folklore and ancient jurisprudential history.
One is left to wonder whether the more ready availability of summary judgment proceedings in civil matters will ultimately lead to more courts ruling in more cases, with fewer cases settling. Will we observe a corresponding decline in the prohibitive influence of legal fees as a reason for avoiding the legal process altogether?
For lawyers, this change may require a heightened emphasis upon court advocacy, rather than negotiation and mediation skills, as the primary tool in our box for achieving our clients’ objectives.
More broadly, the question remains – will this new world of summary judgment lead to better, more fair outcomes, or will we be left with a “quick and dirty” justice system that will serve to further frustrate and disgruntle the public and the profession?
We are about to find out, it appears.
In either event, the theme of our times in the legal profession will remain “change.”
For new practitioners this may be a daunting experience. Will our future success stories be comprised only of those who will see and seize the opportunities in the new horizon that is emerging?
How do we plan for a future in which the stability of our largest firms is uncertain, the civil trial will be relegated to the dustbins of history for the average citizen, and changes are now emerging with ever increasing speed? I don’t know the answer to that questions, but I do suspect that is now particularly critical for law firms and individual lawyers to take stock.
And that is today’s SlawTip: Take stock and plan ahead.
Start drawing the roadmap for your firm ‘s emergence in the new legal frontier we are only beginning to see. Assess where your practice is, where you would like to get, where your talents lie, and what the opportunities and obstacles look like for you and your firm in the future.
And expect the unexpected.
– Garry J. Wise, Toronto (@wiselaw on Twitter)
Measure Research Time
It is a tricky thing to be asked a question that has a research component and be able to estimate how much time it will take to find and communicate an answer. Something that helps with estimating is knowing how much time a similar task encompased. Since, like most service industries, the legal industry tracks its time to help identify pricing structures and service value, why not use those time tracking devices to measure research time tasks and learn from the measuring?
Check out the Uniform Task Based Management System (UTBMS) – standards that were created to give a structure to time tracking and also enable most eBilling systems. There is an excellent overview of UTBMS and how it has rolled out in Canada on the Canadian Bar Association PracticeLink site.
Using UTBMS (or some consistently applied system) to measure research time is a step closer to better prediction of how long research actually takes.
Some basic time predictions:
- Noting up a case for judicial history: .1
- Noting up a case for judicial consideration: .2 to .4
- Identifying the in force date for a statute: .1
- Writing a memo outlining the quantum of damages for a broken elbow:
it depends.7 to 2
Use a Fill Flash for Better Pictures With Your Smartphone or DSLR
When you are in low light conditions, a flash can be essential for taking a picture. But, in some circumstances, a flash can also be helpful in broad daylight, especially for portraits.
When taking pictures while on auto-flash in the daylight, your flash may not trigger. Your smartphone or DSLR simply decides there is enough light and it doesn’t fire the flash. But even in the daytime, you can end up with a dark face if your subject is in front of a bright background, or have shadows on one side of a face if your main light source is coming from one side. Setting your smartphone or camera to fire the flash regardless of the ambient light can help light up a darkened face and/or eliminate shadows on your subject. This is call a “fill flash.”
While you only have the choice of on/off on your smartphone, but there will be tons of flash settings you can play with on a DSLR. Consider trying this trick next time you wanting a bit more light on your subject in a daytime picture. It can yield spectacular results, even on a smartphone.
In Appreciation…
♫ Even though you’re going through hell
Just keep on going
Let the demons dwell
Just wish them well…♫
Lyrics by Neil Peart, music by Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson, recorded by Rush.
Yesterday I taught the first class of the 2014 term on legal technology for the Internationally Trained Lawyer’s Program at the University of Toronto law school. We started the session with everyone giving a bit of background on who there are, where they went to law school, what type of law they practiced in their home country and hope to practice following their call here in Canada and what their background was in technology. They also had to provide one quirky fact about themselves that no one would know which provided a light-hearted fun aspect to the course.
Notwithstanding the humour introduced by the quirky question responses, two factors struck me in listening to the stories of these bright and enthusiastic lawyers…one of which being the challenges and personal sacrifices that they had undertaken in order to cross half the globe and seek qualification here in Canada. The second aspect was how deeply technology has penetrated how we practice law in Canada and the enormity of their task – to not only learn a new legal system but to learn how one interacts with that system using the myriad of tools and technologies available to us.
There is the analogy of the boiling frog – if you put a frog into a pot of hot water, the frog will immediately leap out. But if you put a frog into a pot of cold water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog apparently does not realize what is happening…the frog slowly adjusts to the increase in temperature (ultimately for its detriment…but I digress). The point is that technology has grown up around us to the point where we take it all for granted.
It is only when you are faced with the prospect of learning all that we take for granted that you realize how lawyers in Canada have adjusted to incorporating technology into all that we do. Unfortunately there are still a number of lawyers who do not embrace the benefits of technology and what we can achieve on behalf of our clients by applying technology appropriately. It is sad that some of this group wear the distinction of not knowing how to use technology as some kind of mark of distiction.
It also makes one realize the efficiencies and effectiveness that we have achieved as a result of incorporating technology into the practice of law. We have been through a tremendous period of change from the time of the introduction of the first personal computers into practice. Now with the Internet, collaborative technologies, social media, cloud computing and all the mobile devices from smartphones to iPads and Android devices, we have new and innovative ways to practice from wherever we are with clients that are scattered all over the globe.
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be a lawyer in Canada. I am encouraged and humbled by the determination of those in this cohort to come up to speed with all aspects of how to practice law in Canada. I wish them well!
Know What Things Cost
Legal research is only one piece of the larger part of answering a clients legal problem. With the growing trend of fixed fee pricing, alternative fee arrangements, and other pre-arranged cost structures for legal work, it is more important than ever for a researcher to know several things that don’t relate to the problem their research is attempting to answer:
- Is there a fee arrangement that applies to the file being worked on
- Will he client accept research disbursements
- Is there a legal project budget that the research costs should fit into
- Will recorded time for the researcher be billed
Just as lawyers should talk to their clients about the budget before legal work, so to should researchers speak to their stakeholders.
Use the TAB Key to Move From Field to Field in an Online Form
If you buy something online, you will likely have to enter various details into a form of some sort (e.g., name, address, phone number, email, credit card 
number, etc.). This can be a tad tedious if there are many fields on the form – you type a few characters, stop, reach for the mouse, then navigate to and click on the next field, go back to the keyboard, type a few more characters, then repeat the process again, and again… There is a better way to navigate through a form – and you don’t have to use your mouse.
The web-based forms on many websites will let you move from one form field to the next one by “tabbing” (i.e., by pressing the TAB key). So after filling out a field, you don’t have to use the mouse to move to click on the next field – just press the TAB key instead. If form was properly built, pressing TAB will move you through the fields of form in the order that makes the most logical sense for completing it. Typically, you can also move backwards using Shift+TAB. Note that the TAB key does the same thing on many other electronic forms.
Tabbing is not just a convenience; it is also an important accessibility feature, since it makes it possible to fill out a form without a mouse or other pointing device.
Keep the TAB key in mind the next time you are filling out an electronic or online form.
