All Our Tips
Habits
Today’s tip is about habits. Actually, cultivating the habit of not relying too heavily on your habits when doing legal research.
Beware of the habit of always using the same sources. Though legal research is best done in a methodical manner (secondary source footnotes to noting up to following the path of case law and legislation to further secondary sources until you keep finding the same results then analysis) it is important to remember that you should not always start with your favourite resource, you should use the best resource for the task at hand.
Try a different textbook, you may like what you find.
Disable the Annoying File Delete Confirmation Box
While it is intended to prevent you from accidentally deleting a file, the file delete confirmation box (the little box that pops-up when you delete a file and asks if you are sure you want to delete it) can be a tad annoying, especially if you are deleting a lot of files (say for instance when you are cleaning up your photo collection).
You can easily disable this confirmation (meaning it won’t appear every time you delete a file) by right-clicking the Recycle Bin and selecting Properties. Next, uncheck the delete confirmation box, click Apply and then OK, and you’re done. No more file delete confirmation box.
And remember this trick, you can bypass the Recycle Bin entirely by holding down the Shift key while deleting files. Doing this means you can’t go to the Recycle Bin to restore a file.
Save Time With Great Telephone Greetings
Are you making the most out of your voicemail system?
As Joe Walsh of The Eagles once sang:
So I got me an office, gold records on the wall.
Just leave a message, maybe I’ll call.
…
Life’s been good to me so far
How many times have you called someone only to be greeted by a message that says: “Hi. You have reached Joe. I am unavailable. Please leave a message.”
What is wrong with this greeting?
First, if you don’t know Joe you have no idea if you have reached the right person or even the right organization. Second, you have no idea Joe is unavailable today, tomorrow or for the rest of the year. Third, you have no idea how often Joe checks his messages. Fourth, you have no idea when, if ever, Joe returns them. Fifth, there is no option presented to go around Joe’s voicemail message and speak to a real person.
Your voicemail greeting speaks to your client when you can’t – so you need to make sure it says everything it should. To be of maximum assistance to a caller, your voice mail message should:
- Open with your name and title so that callers are sure they reached the correct voicemail.
- Be updated on a daily basis, including details of your schedule (but not your life story) if you expect to be unavailable for part of the day (“I am in meetings all morning”).
- If you are out of the office, indicate if you are checking voicemail or e-mail messages, and when you expect to be back (especially if you are away for an extended period).
- Always give callers an option to transfer to a live person, either your assistant or the receptionist. This is important if they need immediate assistance. And remember to adjust messages if both you and your assistant are out of the office.
- Encourage the caller to leave a detailed message – yes you shouldn’t have to say this – but it will help pry out a few more facts from callers that are reluctant to say much. This help you learn exactly what the caller wanted without having to call them back.
- Lastly, state your policy with respect to how quickly voice mail messages will be returned (e.g. “ I return calls within 24 hours”, “…by end of the next business day”, etc.). Set a time that fits you, your practice and clientele – and make it very clearly known to your clients at the time of retainer so you can set and control their expectations.
By spending just a little time crafting your daily telephone message, you can ensure that life is good not only for you but also for your clients.
(Hat tip to our colleague Pete Roberts at the Washington State Bar Association for passing along this nugget).
Finding Policies
Ah policies. These documents that govern how governments, companies, and agencies conduct themselves can be very tricky to find.
The good news: the Internet, that fantastic information gathering facilitator, has made it so easy to publish, that sometimes you will find policies attached to the news releases that annouce they exist. See for instance the new Public Disclosure of Travel and Expenses Policy announced yesterday by the Alberta Government. The text of the policy is attached as a background document to the news release.
The only caveat to finding a policy in this form is that you will not likely be able to identify if the policy has been amended or abandoned, discarded or replaced when you find this 2012 new release in 2020.
Perhaps the Sunlight Foundation will come to Canada.
Why Stay in Law?
These days it seems that many young people are reconsidering a decision to enter or stay in law. The authors think that there are many reasons to still value a legal career. But there are also some important questions to ask of yourself in considering a career in the law.
For one, a career in law offers you not just a job – it offers you much more. Your legal career has the possibility of offering you novel and fascinating work that continually changes and brings you in touch with bright and interesting people. Your skills will be challenged at every turn.
Secondly, you learn about new things all the time. It is an intellectual exercise that can fully captivate your skills as well as your intellectual faculties. If you like dealing with novelty and overcoming obstacles on a daily basis, then a legal career has much to offer.
Thirdly, you can achieve some real and meaningful results for people – and allows you to be, in every respect of the word, a trusted professional. Lawyers have a particular place in society – they have the skills and the social legitimacy to challenge the existing order in a way that can produce change not only for your client but in a much wider sense as well. There are many lawyers who work in areas of the law that could be considered social advocacy.
Fourthly there are many legal careers that do not involve working in the BigLaw environment. For some, this is the pinnacle…but the authors have also seen many who were much better suited to other careers. Fortunately law is diverse enough that you can find a career in Government, in smaller firms, in IT, in health care, in industry – indeed the critical thinking skills that you acquire can be used in many other careers and life paths.
Of course all this is premised on one very important assumption – namely that you are, and remain, passionate about the work that you do. We think this one factor, over all, spells satisfaction with not only a legal career but indeed any other career or job for that matter.
Accordingly, if you are not passionate about working in the law – if your motivation(s) for seeking out a legal career are more closely aligned to a big paycheck or status or similar themes, then I would hazard a guess that ultimately a legal career will not be satisfactory.
In our view, any financial success that you reap from your legal career is a result of helping people and doing it well. Success in law, like many other professions, is directly tied to how well you are able to apply your skills to achieve real results for people. You have to have a drive and a desire to truly bring about meaningful change for people. Law is a skill set – you acquire the skills to be able to assist, to change, to challenge, to craft and to persuade – to bring about results that value to people.
If you care about this …really helping people by using your legal skills… then a career in law will be richly rewarding in many ways. Don’t become focused only on being in private practice in a big law firm. There are many rewarding opportunities outside of that environment.
Using Google News
The Google News service just turned 10. I know, it seems like a baby, and compared to the Globe and Mail, or the Edmonton Journal, or the Guardian, it is. But, as the post on Google’s blog points out “It’s undeniable that the online news landscape has changed immensely. ”
In the last ten years, Google News has grown to 72 editions in 30 languages, and now draws from more than 50,000 news sources. The technology also powers Google’s news search. Together, they connect 1 billion unique users a week to news content.
I use Google News mostly from the search perspective. Search leads to creating an RSS feed to monitor topics, names, organizations, litigation news, and more. I also use Google News to help monitor the firm’s brand. Google news doesn’t find everything, but it does offer good bang (reasonable content) for the buck (free).
Do you use Google News or some other media monitoring tool?
Easily See Data Trends With Sparklines – an Amazing New Feature in MS Excel 2010
It is difficult to see trends or patterns when you are presented with a table full of rows and columns of numbers. A graph – like a picture – can be worth a thousand words when it comes to visually representing data, but creating a graph takes time.
Sparklines come to the rescue. They are a new feature in Microsoft Excel 2010.
Sparklines 101
A sparkline is nothing more than a tiny graph in a worksheet cell. With a few clicks, sparklines enable you to easily and almost instantly create visual representations of data in rows or columns of a table. They give you a clear and compact graphical representation of your raw data adjacent to it. Although it’s not mandatory for a sparkline cell to be directly next to its underlying data, it kind of defeats the purpose to put them elsewhere. Another advantage of using sparklines is that, unlike charts, they appear on a worksheet when it is printed.
Unlike charts or other elements in an Excel worksheet, sparklines are not objects — a sparkline is an actual tiny chart in the background of a cell. The following picture shows a column sparkline in cell F2 and a line sparkline in F3. Both of these sparklines get their data from cells A2 through E2 and they display, based on the data in these cells, the performance of a stock.
In the above picture the sparkline in cell F6 shows the 5-year performance for the same stock, but displays a Win/Loss bar chart that shows only whether the year had a gain (as in the years 2004 through 2007) or a loss (2008). This sparkline uses values from cells A6 through E6.
Creating a sparkline
Creating a sparkline is easy. Select an empty cell or group of empty cells in which you want to insert one or more sparklines. Click on the Insert tab, and in the Sparklines group on the Ribbon, click the type of sparkline that you want to create: Line, Column, or Win/Loss. In the Data box, type the range of the cells that contain the data on which you want to base the sparklines (or you click on the range selection button to selection your range with drag and drop). Click OK and bingo – you have a sparkline.
Doing more with sparklines
And you can do more with sparklines. As they are tiny charts embedded in a cell, you can enter text on top of them as labels. You can apply a color scheme to your sparklines by choosing a built-in format from the Style gallery (Design tab, which becomes available when you select a cell that contains a sparkline). You can use the Sparkline Color or Marker Color commands to choose a color for the high, low, first, and last values (such as green for high, and orange for low).
And it doesn’t stop there, you can to lots more with sparklines. .
Seeing Double…Rather Than Seeing Red!
There is much discussion these days on law firms ‘going paperless’. There is no doubt that there are tremendous efficiency and effectiveness gains to be made once the law firm switches over to a digital environment.
The process, technology and change management issues involved in taking a firm paperless are far too complex to deal with in one (hopefully) short management tip. But there is one (often) overlooked aspect to going to paperless that can have a huge impact on the user’s acceptance and satisfaction with the paperless system that can be covered in a short tip.
Our tip here is to upgrade to allow for each workstation to have either one large (24” or even up to 28”) monitor or two slightly smaller ones. Most laptops today will allow ‘dual display’ right out of the box. Desktops may require an inexpensive graphics card to be installed.
Why go to dual monitors? The productivity upgrade realized by moving to dual (or one very large) monitor (that can display two pages or Windows comfortably side by side) has been demonstrated over and over again in law firms.
Dual monitors (or one very large monitor) allows you to have one document (say your research) open at the same time as displaying your active document. You only have to move eyeballs from one to the other (rather than having to switch between Windows).
You can easily copy and paste from one document to the other (*use Paste Special* and paste raw text to avoid dragging in unwanted formatting hitchhiking with the desired text).
You can display your calendar on one screen and your email on the other. Or you can run TweetDeck on one screen while you have email open on the other.
However you decide to use your dual screens, you will find that your satisfaction with any paperless system will increase if you can have greater screen real estate available to you (and to your staff!) while you work. Greater staff satisfaction means greater acceptance…and that means you don’t have to see red in trying to manage the change to a paperless office.
Go to the Source
Today’s Tip is about looking at the original source of something. I had two good reminders of why this is important just this week.
- Lancaster House Online databases are now call First Response
- Law21
Somehow, in just linking to the database from the various (very well written) publications that we subscribe to, I missed the news that Lancaster House launched a new website and rebranded their online search tool. My fault entirely for not going to the source of the information to see how it was presented.
Jordan Furlong’s excellent Law21 blog has a nwe look and feel. Thankfully, Jordan reminded those of us who look at blogs through RSS or email subscriptions to check out his new site.
So, there you have it. Don’t miss news, or links you have to refresh, by relying on one method for viewing or consuming information. Once in a while, go to the source.
Free Quick Reference Cards for Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2010 and Other Programs
The staff and lawyers in most law offices use a fraction of the functions and features in the programs on their computers. This is because most law firms don’t follow through on the one critical step necessary for people to learn and do more with the technology on their desk: formal training.
But, while not a replacement for training, cheat sheets or quick reference guide that list features, settings and keyboard shortcuts can help people do more. These guides typically cost $10-15.
However, the people at Custom Guide Online Learning have more than 100 quick reference guides available for free – yes – for free! You can get Outlook 2010, Word 2010, Excel 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and Office 2010 for free without registration. You can get more than a 100 other quick reference guides for free with registration (they state they have a no spam policy). They have a guide for all or most of the programs you use.
I really like these guides because they list the common tasks that people will want perform along with a simple explanation on how to complete them. These guides are two pages and in colour (you can put them front and back on a single page). And even better, at no cost they are yours to use, distribute, and share at your firm.
Check them out – you won’t be disappointed.
