Some days, it feels like text messages are the new email. Texting is rapidly becoming just as common as email for business uses (and may well have surpassed email for personal uses), but are you as careful with preserving your texts as you are with your email?

Maybe you use text messaging for business purposes and want to make sure your messages can be retrieved if they are inadvertently deleted or if your phone is lost. Or maybe you find yourself needing to locate a message but unable to remember whether it was in a text or an email… and …

Need an image for a poster, website, or social media post but don’t have a budget for stock or custom photography? Check out Unsplash, where thousands of photographers have generously made their photos available completely free for commercial or noncommercial purposes.

Simply type a keyword into the search bar and you’ll be presented with tons of photos that have been tagged with terms that match or are related to your search. The search function is pretty basic, but I’ve always been able to find what I need by getting creative with alternative search terms.

The site is very …

You stare at a Word document full of dense text, nary a headline or bulleted list in sight. You aimlessly play with font sizes and faces and tables and margins, knowing you aren’t really making any progress. Not even clip art can save it. You’re doomed: the document is utterly, completely boring.

We’ve all been there, faced with this seemingly impossible task: to somehow transform pages of text into something people will actually read. (Or better yet, something people will actually WANT to read!)

The next time you find yourself in this unenviable position, I encourage you to check out …

Have you heard about MMS Watch? It’s a free mandatory minimum sentencing resource recently created by the experts behind Rangefindr – the popular criminal sentencing resource.

MMS Watch provides a list of every mandatory minimum sentence in force in the Criminal Code and the Controlled Drugs and Sentencing Act. Additional explanation appears on the website:

MMS.watch is an ongoing project by rangefindr.ca to monitor the constitutionality of each mandatory minimum sentence (MMS) in the Canadian Criminal Code and Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. All data are from the rangefindr.ca database. MMS.watch is free and will remain free.

We …

Surprising as it may be, of the available free sources for American case law, there may be none better than Google Scholar.

For starters, check out the main search screen – “Case law” is one of two main searches you can do (alongside “Articles). Once you have selected Case law, you get a list of higher-level courts for all 50 states, all Federal Court circuits, and of course, the U.S. Supreme Court.

From there, it is only a matter of constructing your google search. As always, be mindful of Operators, how to apply Filters, and generally good search …

Are you familiar with Irwin Law’s Canadian Online Legal Dictionary (COLD)?  COLD is a free online legal dictionary and is composed of all the terms featured in the legal textbooks published by Irwin Law.  COLD is described in more detail on Irwin Law’s website:

We are a collaborative dictionary comprised, initially, of terms defined in the glossaries of Canadian law books published by Irwin Law. The dictionary will be maintained by an Irwin Law editor. Members of the public are invited to submit new defined terms, edit existing terms and supply citations, sources and related terms — simply request …

The most popular blog post on Legal Sourcery since our launch in 2014 is Cross-referencing footnotes in Word by Reché McKeague. This post has been read 11,012 times since posted on April 29, 2014. That’s an average of almost 400 times each month. Here are a few more interesting posts on Word tips and tricks from other law blogs:

5 Microsoft Word Tips to Make Lawyers’ Lives Easier (FindLaw)

Get the Most Out of Microsoft Word (American Bar Association, Law Practice Magazine)

Master Class: Microsoft Word Shortcuts for Lawyers (LexisNexis Business of Law Blog, video)

If you have already upgraded …

Do you need safe online storage for confidential information such as passwords, birth certificate, bank accounts, medical records, passports, tax returns, wills, insurance and other legal documents that you might need to access anytime, anywhere, or to share with your family members?

Canada Post has a Personal Vault service that provides bank-grade security and keeps your information on servers physically located in Canada. The Personal Vault is not meant to be cloud storage for your massive photo and movie collection but rather a secure place for your important personal, financial, medical information and your most valuable photos and videos. For …

CanLII’s Boolean search commands are displayed in a pop-up box when the cursor is placed over the question mark icon to the right of the search interface:

This is crucial as every online database has its own unique set of Boolean search commands. For example, CanLII’s Boolean search commands differ significantly from those in the Saskatchewan Cases Database. It is always helpful to review a database’s Boolean search commands prior to searching.

Boolean search commands help us search more effectively and efficiently. They can easily broaden or narrow a search by combining different concepts together. Six important Boolean search commands …

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in eight years as a law librarian, it’s that every lawyer loves O’Brien’s Encyclopedia of Forms. And as the purpose of such an encyclopedia is to save you work in creating documents, it follows that you must like O’Brien’s Internet even more, as it provides the entire O’Brien’s collection of first draft legal forms as Word documents.

Do you use O’Brien’s Internet? If not, you probably should. Here are a few pointers in using our province-wide subscription.

First, to access O’Brien’s Internet, you need to get to the Members Section. …