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Through opportunities presented by the Canadian Association of Law Libraries and through my firm, I was able to attend the American Association of Law Libraries conference this year. I learned some things and met a bunch of great folks, including Sarah Mauldin, Director of Library Services at Smith, Gambrell & Russell LLP who inspired this post.
I have talked about “Phone a Friend” in past tips, more than once. While I haven’t specified reaching out to contacts in other jurisdictions, it is worth a research tip mention.
You can find excellent contacts, and make friends who like Karaoke, by attending conferences. You can also make contacts by following the Contact Us links on websites that have teaser information or published writings that look promising.
Warm greetings to my AALL buddies.
Two Simple Rules for Avoiding the Dangers of Email Attachments
While email attachments are frequently used to share documents between lawyers, law firm staff, and clients, they are also one of the most common delivery mechanisms for malware. While most messages that have infected attachments will be stopped if your anti-malware software and/or spam filter are working properly and updated, some will make it through. For this reason, staff and lawyers at every firm should follow should follow these two simple rules:
1. No matter how interesting or enticing they appear to be (e.g., jokes, celebrity gossip or pictures), never open attachments from strangers.
2. No matter how interesting or enticing they appear to be, never open attachments unexpectedly sent to you by people you know.
The reason for Rule #1 should be obvious – enticing attachments from strangers usually have a malware payload. The reason for Rule #2 might be less obvious: to trick you into feeling comfortable about opening an attachment, some types of malware will send an email with an infected attachment to all the address book contacts it finds on a computer that it has just successfully infected. This is done intentionally with hope that people getting such a message will be comfortable opening the attachment as it came from someone they know – and bingo – the person opening the attachment will become infected and all their contacts will get a similar message.
Avoid the headaches of dealing with a malware infection by making sure everyone at your firm follows the above two rules.
Simply Use SimplyFile – Inbox Zero Part II
♫ I’ll tell you simply I’m fallin’ for you;
I’ve never felt this way before…♫
Lyrics, music and recorded by Sara Hickman.
(click image to enlarge)
Continuing our discussion of getting to ‘Inbox Zero’ this second post in the series of posts dealing with email is about SimplyFile – an intelligent add-on to Microsoft Outlook (2007 or 2010). Of all the ‘tips’ that I put forward doing “60 Tips in 60 Minutes” type presentations, this is the one tip for which I receive the most feedback. I use it all the time on my PC and I didn’t realize how much I depended on it until our IT department took it away for a bit (they were implementing a document management system and wanted to ensure that everything was working well before starting to reintroduce software). It is now back on my PC (upgraded to version 3.1) and I am a happy camper once again!
What does it do?
In the words of TechHit:
“SimplyFile is an intelligent filing assistant for Microsoft Outlook. It helps you file email messages in your Outlook folders quickly and efficiently. Due to SimplyFile’s advanced folder prediction technology, one click of a button is all it takes to send a message to the right folder! SimplyFile includes an advanced algorithm, which quickly learns about your filing habits and then starts to predict where you will want to move every message. So after you train SimplyFile for a bit, filing a message to the right folder becomes literally one click – much faster than drag and drop.
If you tried to sort messages into various folders with rules, you know that rules can become complicated and hard to maintain once you have more than a dozen of them. SimplyFile does not require you to maintain any rules. Its algorithm keeps track of messages and folders and does all the work for you. Try it for yourself and you will be pleasantly surprised by how accurate it is!”
I totally agree with those statements…SimplyFile makes dealing with email a breeze..and it saves so much time. There is another benefit – by using SimplyFile to quickly organize and file both incoming and outgoing emails, you can organize all client emails (both in and out) into the same client folder in Outlook. No more looking thru “Sent” to find something that you did on a client file.
Another tip: If you use Adobe Acrobat (standard or professional) you can convert all those emails in a client folder into an Adobe Portfolio document (a big PDF containing each email as a pdf document). That allows you to archive the client email folder as a PDF portfolio and delete the email folder from Outlook when the file closes (knowing that all the incoming and outgoing emails are in there courtesy of SimplyFile).
After a few hours of use, you will fall in love with it. After a few days, you will wonder how you ever lived without it!
–David J. Bilinsky, Vancouver.
When You Can’t Find a Textbook
Research issues can be very specific – either in the time period for information or in the minutia of the topic. For those questions, the commentary material near to hand may not have your answers. Today’s tip shares some approaches.
- Look at reissues or recently released encyclopedias (the CED, Halsbury’s Laws of Canada)
- Look for legal news articles (Lawyer’s Weekly, Canadian Lawyer, Law Times)
- Look at bar association or law society newsletters (CBA National)
- Look at law blogs (lawblogs.ca)
- Look at law journals and topical journal publications (I use the Index to Canadian Legal Literature first and full text searching second)
Passphrases Can Help You Remember Complex Passwords
Creating a long, unique, complex (letters in upper and lower case, numbers and symbols) and random password for every service you use is the best practice standard when it comes to using secure and strong passwords.
If you follow this advice however, your passwords will be an unreadable mix of letters, numbers and characters. While good for security, they will be hard to remember.
As a solution, consider using a “passphrase” to remember complex passwords. A passphrase is a mix of letters, numbers and characters that has a translation that makes it easier for you to remember the correct sequence. Here are some sample passphrases:
- !am@#1DJ!nuSSr “I’m a number one DJ in Russia”
- Rm@y0risKrayz “Our mayor is crazy”
- l@wPR0!sgr8! “LAWPRO is great!”
Verrry Scaaary: A Practice Tip
Ah, it’s that hallowed eve when the law goblins come out to play, wreaking havoc and terror wherever they go.
They may keep us up at night. They can even cause our insurers to quaver.
There are many nightmares you could encounter when you visit The Haunted House of Legal Horrors.
So beware the darkness, my friends.
Don’t say we never warned you – one of these things happened to a friend of a friend of mine….
- Remember that guy who called you once in 2010, but hung up on you before you got his name? Well his Statement of Claim against you for failing to start his court action in time is on the way…
- Well, at the time it sure seemed OK to release settlement funds from trust to that poor missionary lady in Asia who emailed you about her collection matter. Who’d have guessed the cheque was going to bounce?
- Your trial started 5 minutes ago in Milton. So what are you doing in Newmarket?
- Ooops, the Photo ID your overseas client emailed you was a fake.
- And by the way, the lovely woman your client brought in to sign spousal consent on the new 2nd mortgage wasn’t really his wife. Well, not the wife he owns the property with, that is.
- Didn’t get around to renewing your E&O insurance yet? This would be as good a time as any…
So here is today’s verrry scaaary Slaw Tip: Read LawPro’s Avoid A Claim Blog.
It could help you keep the law goblins away.
– Garry J. Wise, Toronto
Words That Lead to Sources
Emond Montgomery Publications, a respected Canadian Legal publisher, has a super resource available (with a free login and password) for going from a legal word to sources of legal commentary. It is found on the EMP website using the “Click for free legal glossary” link in the site header to get to the Glossary of Legal Terms.
Unlike many legal dictionaries, the terms are not just defined, or defined using judicial decision references, rather the definitions are derived from within the catalog of Emond Montgomery Publications.
Following the source links under a definition will net you possibilities for purchasing the title (including buying it with an immediate download option.
Sample glossary term:
accelerate demand immediate payment
Source: http://www.emp.ca/books/281-2
Today’s Tip is about using this resource (and glossaries in general) to help identify the specific area of law that the key term is leading you to. EMP, like other legal publishers, offers up the table of contents for their titles so that you can see details (keywords) about the type of book that would contain the glossary term.
Irwin Law’s Canadian Online Legal Dictionary is another online legal dictionary that offers legal textbook references.
I would much start with author commentary on a legal term than judicial commentary. Textbooks lead to decisions, but decisions don’t always lead back to texts.
How to Use Google to Search With a Specific Website
The search functionality on many websites is 
dismal, and in sometimes it is non-existent. If you are looking for something on a specific website and can’t find it, don’t despair, Google comes to the rescue.
You can use Google to search within a specific website by preceding your query with “site:SpecificSiteURL” [substitute your URL and don’t use the double quotes]. For example, to find the retainers on the practicePRO site, type “site:practicepro.ca retainers” in the Google search box [don’t include the double quotes].
You can also search within a specific type of site by doing the following: “site:edu YourSearchTerm”.
Unsubscribe Me – Please!
♫ I let it go and now I know
A brand new life is down this road…♫
Lyrics and Music by: Avril Lavigne, Chad Kroeger and David Hodges and recorded by Avril and Chad.
To paraphrase an old saying, everyone talks about how their inboxes are overflowing but no one actually does anything about them. Well, almost anyone that is. I had a conversation with my colleague and friend Debbie Foster at the Pacific Legal Technology Conference earlier this month and she told me she has a policy of never leaving her desk at the end of the day until she has emptied her inbox of emails. She calls this ‘Inbox Zero’. Apparently this concept has quite a following since a Google search generated 39.5 million hits.
So it got me thinking of how I can move to Inbox Zero. I have to say that at first blush I thought it was about as attainable as fitting into the tuxedo I bought 20 years ago. But on further reflection, I think there are concrete steps that all of us can take to reducing the volume of emails we all receive and then efficiently deal with those that are left. So this is the first of a series of posts dealing with the thorny issue of attaining Inbox Zero.
The first step towards Inbox Zero is to unsubscribe from all those ‘junk’ emails that come flooding into your inbox each and every day. You know – the news service ones, the ones on the latest food and wine reviews (I admit I am a sucker for these), the cheap travel fares, the announcements from Twitter as to who has recently started following you and the like.
Virtually every commercial email list today has an ‘unsubscribe’ option towards the end of the email, courtesy of the ‘can-spam’ act. Not all of these ‘unsubscribe’ methods are straightforward, easy or fast. You have to be prepared, in some cases, to ‘sign in’ to a website in order to unsubscribe (which can be a royal pain if you don’t happen to remember the password and/or username that you used to sign up for the email list in the first place). Some will take up to 2 weeks before they process your request. In some cases you have to ‘unsubscribe’ several times before it ‘sticks’. But if you are persistent, you can cut down the number of junk emails that pile into your inbox and start down that road to Inbox Zero.
Note Up Legislation – Old School
Yesterday I whined a little about how hyperlinks and convenient search tools may be making for lazy researching. Today’s Tip is a reminder about how to search for judicial consideration of a statue section without using those convenient tools in CanLII, Quicklaw and Westlaw . If you are looking for cases that consider section 119 of the Health Professions Act, RSA 2000, c H-7 you could use the legislation note up shortcut tools that are provided with your favourite service OR you can search within any full text case law database with this formula:
“name of act” /10 #
Stated in words, the search is: act name as a phrase within 10 words of the section number. Using my example, the search looks like this:
“Health Professions Act” /10 119
Here are the CanLII results filtered for Alberta for the above search.
