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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.…