Google’s Gmail has made news a few times in the past couple of years by “losing” users email – often years worth. While these outages have primarily affected the free Gmail, even access to the paid Google Apps has occasionally been lost. For lawyers who are using the free Gmail as their primary email communication with clients, one must ask “how are you backing that up?”

With Gmail, there are a number of options. You can run Google Gears and maintain a local copy of Gmail. This is a pretty useful option, letting you choose which folders you want to maintain locally. Look in Gmail Settings under “offline” to set this up. Another option is to set up IMAP, which synchronizes your Gmail to a downloaded email client (like the free Thunderbird) to keep on your server or harddrive (which you do backup, don’t you?).

Don’t let your record of client communication live in the ether without a safety net.

Thanks to my good friend Catherine Reach at the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center for this tip.

How often do you find yourself giving new clients directions to your office? Google Maps offers a great tool for creating a map that will show clients the location of your office. Go to maps.google.com and type your office address into the search box. Click on the link icon (look for an icon with 3 chain links at the top right corner of your screen). This will open a pop-up that will give you a URL link you can use to access that same map. Send that link to a new client via email and they can see the map.

The pop-up also gives you the HTML code you can use to include the map on your website. Slick! Take it a step further by creating customized maps to show clients directions to other places that might be helpful for them (e.g., the local court house).

If you’re absolutely sure that you want to delete a file(s) permanently from your hard drive (i.e., bypassing the Windows Recycle Bin – noting that deleted files aren’t really deleted…see below**), select the file(s), then hold down the Shift key while you press Delete. You will get a File Delete Confirm dialog box asking you to confirm your intent to delete the file “permanently”, answer yes to do so. The deleted file will not be in the Recycle Bin.

My personal preference and practice is to “permanently” delete everything, unless I think I might want it back, in which case I delete it by sending it to the recycle bin. I find this gives me more space on my smallish laptop hard drive, minimizes Recycle Bin clutter and makes it easier to find things I want to undelete if and when I go looking for them in the Recycle Bin. Every once and awhile I clean out my Recycle Bin.

**Note that “permanently” deleted doesn’t really mean permanently deleted: When you “delete” a file you don’t actually delete the file data itself, you only delete the reference to that file in the hard or floppy drive’s “table of contents”. The file data remains unchanged somewhere on the hard drive, and will remain there until it is over-written by another file being saved in the same physical location on the drive. There are utilities that can “undelete” deleted files. Keep this in mind next time you want to “permanently” delete a file.

Tables can be very helpful for presenting information or data in a document. As many of you know, working with tables can be frustrating when you can’t get them into the layout or format you want. So this week, I’m sharing four of my favourite tricks for working with tables in Microsoft Word.

Tabs are very useful for lining up information in a document. What many people don’t know is that you can use tabs within tables. To set a tab within a table, click within the table cell(s) that you want to include a tab(s). Next, select the type of tab, and click on the ruler in the location you want the tab to appear. Repeat for multiple tabs within the same cell(s).

The one thing you have to remember when working with tabs within a table is that simply pressing “Tab” will jump you to the next cell. You have to press “Ctrl+Tab” to move to a tab position within a table.

The second table trick relates to putting space before a table that is at the beginning of a document. If you need to add text before a table at the very start of a document, you must click within the first table cell and press “Enter”. This will move the table down a line.

Thirdly, remember that you can break a table into two parts. To do this, position the cursor in the cell where you want the break to occur. On the menu bar choose “Table”, then “Split Table” to accomplish this.

Lastly, when you want to make changes to the format or layout of a table, try right-clicking within a cell to see a context sensitive menu that will have all the settings you might want to change. This is far quicker than looking for them using the menu bar.

Getting one of your social media accounts hacked can be very embarrassing and time consuming. One of the simplest things you can do to make your Facebook and Twitter accounts a bit more secure is to enable Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure or HTTPS.

HTTPS provides encrypted communication and secure identification for cross-web communications. This simply means that the stream of data going between your computer (or smartphone) and the sever it is connecting to across the web is encrypted. This makes it much harder to intercept and understand. HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and other sensitive online transactions.

You automatically use HTTPS when you login and access LinkedIn. Unfortunately, or both Facebook and Twitter, HTTPS is off by default.

To enable HTTPS in Twitter, go to “Settings”, click the “Account” tab and scroll all the way to the bottom and select “Always use HTTPS”.

In Facebook you can enable HTTPS by clicking on “Account” (top right), then on “Account Settings”, and then on check the “Account security (https)” checkbox.

You can tell you are using HTTPS as you will see “https” in the URL of the site you are accessing and your browser will display a “lock” icon in the status bar across the bottom of your browser window.

Changing these settings does not guarantee 100% security, but it does give you a bit more protection when you are using unsecured Wi-Fi.

Social media tools allow people to look at your profile information. By tweaking privacy settings, you can limit what people see by type of information (e.g., contact info, friends list, education, etc.) and degree of connection (e.g., friends or direct connections only, friends and friends of friends, everyone, etc.).

LinkedIn offers an interesting twist: you can see how many people have looked at your profile, and in some cases, you can even see their names.

As a LinkedIn user you should appreciate other LinkedIn users can see that you have looked at their profile. In many cases it may not matter, but in some it might. If you are doing some competitive intelligence research on you competition or if you are an HR person or headhunter you probably don’t want people to know you are looking at their profiles.

To see how many people have viewed your profile, look in the Who’s Viewed Your Profile? box (3rd box down on the right side) of the home screen. It will say “Your profile has been viewed by # people in the past # days.” This line is a link. Click it you can see the names of up to 5 people that have looked at your profile over the last few days or the last week.

In some cases actual names will be listed, in some cases you can see a description of the person by industry and location (and if you click on that link you can see a list of 10 names that include the specific person), and in some cases it will just say “Anonymous LinkedIn User”. By changing LinkedIn privacy settings you can control whether people will see that you have looked at their profile. Full display of your name is the default setting.

Go to your LinkedIn setting page. In the Privacy Controls section (middle of the screen) there is a “Select what others see when you’ve viewed their profile” option. Click on it to see your three options:

• Your name and headline (Recommended)
• Anonymous profile characteristics such as industry and title
• You will be totally anonymous.

Note that the first option is the default and the “Recommended” suggestion is from LinkedIn (as they would like you to be more open about sharing your information). Pick the setting that makes sense for you and click on Save.

Note that if you have an upgraded LinkedIn account (you must pay extra for this), you can see a list of everyone that has looked at your profile (unless they have changed their Privacy Controls setting) and the names of people who turned up your name in search results.

Crackberry.com has posted a useful tip that solves a problem that many BlackBerry users have had: how to dial all those phone numbers with words in them?? (e.g. 1-888-ROGERS1). The keypad letters don’t seem to correspond with the old rotary number/letter system.

There were always workarounds, from looking elsewhere on a webpage for the actual number to looking at an older phone and writing down the numbers yourself. But it seems all this time there was an easier way: just hold down the ‘alt’ key while dialing the letters (but not the numbers), and the BlackBerry will substitute the proper number.

A frustrating problem (for some of us, anyway) solved!

Keeping up with the changes to Facebook Privacy settings is a never-ending task. The large number of settings makes it very confusing. The LifeHacker blog comes to the rescue with The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Managing Your Facebook Privacy.

This comprehensive guide runs through the basic privacy settings that determine what you share, next it looks at deeper settings you’ll want to tweak, and it finishes with a few third-party tools that will help keep your Facebook information private.

LifeHacker says they will update this page when there are changes in the future. Bookmark this page, make it a favorite and tell your friends about it (remember they can share your information too). This is an amazing must read resource for all Facebook users and you will want to come back again.

Thanks to my good friend Catherine Reach at the ABA LTRC (Legal Technology Resource Center) for this tip. (And kudos for her patience to explain it to me a third time as I didn’t quite clue in the first two times she mentioned it to me.)

URLs can be a mile long – and quite frequently are longer than then the 140 character limit of a tweet. As we all know too well, long URLs are a pain to retype. Fortunately, bitly and other URL shortening services allow you to create URLs that are shorter and far more suited for inclusion in tweets or printed publications.

But what if you want to share multiple links at the same time? bitly bundles comes to the rescue to allow you to do this.

A bitly bundle is a collection of links that you access with a single shortened URL. takes you to a bitly bundle Catherine created listing tools for redacting electronic documents. The bitly bundle link takes you to a nicely formatted page on the bitly site that lists the collection of links she included in the bundle.

Creating a bitly bundle is fast and easy (although they could make the interface a bit more user friendly). You have to login on the bitly site (and you must create a free account to do so). Click on bundle and add your list of URLs in the blue text box. You can then add a title and annotation for the bundle and for each URL. bitly will grab a graphic from each linked page.

After sharing the bundle link, anyone that clicks on that link will see your collection of links. The pages that a bitly bundles appear on also have social media functionality as they allow comments. You can add, remove and reorder your collection of links after it is created. bitly bundles also gives you stats on how many times the bundle was viewed and how many time each link is clicked on.

Next time you need to share a collection of links try a bitly bundle.

The , sometimes called the Acrolaw blog, is a fantastic resource for lawyers, law firm staff, legal IT people and anyone else in the legal community that uses Adobe Acrobat. The blog is written by Rick Borstein. He is the Business Development Manager for Acrobat in the Legal Market for Adobe Systems. Rick is probably the most knowledgeable person on the planet when it comes to using Acrobat in the legal setting.

You will find the answer to just about any question you have, including questions about OCR, scanning, Bates numbering, batch processing, digital signatures, commenting, metadata, binders and portfolios.

You can find the

• Nicholas on Software Tools for Editing
• Jamie on Software Tools for Editing
• Steve Coughlan on ‘I Hope This E-Mail Finds You Well’
• Lyn on Womxn
• Celia Chandler on Gross Negligence

• Suggest a Tip
• 
• Slaw.ca
• 
• Slaw Jobs
• 
• Copyright
• 
• About SlawTips
• 
• Contact Us