Last spring, Meritas’ Leadership Institute released a Social Media Guide for Lawyers. This helpful resource provided lawyers with an overview of the three main social media tools — LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter— and some tips on how to use them for networking and marketing purposes. The guide also include two sample law firm social media use policies – one strict and one permissive.
As you all know, technology changes almost as fast as the weather does, and to keep up, Meritas has just released an updated version of the guide: Social Media Guide for Lawyers v. 2.0. This great …

Following on our earlier Top 10 Financial Errors posts, this is the first in a series of 10 posts dealing with Cash Flow Reports and in particular, cash flow management.

Mark Ruffalo once said: Certainly, it’s very easy to fall in love with cash. If you’re going to make all your decisions based on cash, you’re going to have a pretty naffy career.

In my MBA days, I took a series of accounting courses. One of the courses was entitled ‘managerial accounting’ but it really was about how to manage cash. I still recall the professor walking in and saying: …

Today’s research tip is about facts.

When research is assigned to juniors (and librarians for that matter) it is important to share facts that are critical to the research. It can also be difficult to remember to share everything that might be pertinent.

This tip is a reminder to researchers to ask for facts. The ask might be looking in the file – whether electronic or paper, or it might be talking to the assistant who works on the file. It might be going back to the responsible lawyer to ask for more information. It may prove necessary to get …

If you are using Office 2007 or 2010, The Ribbon is now a part of your life. Some of you will be happy about this – some of you won’t.
The Ribbon was introduced with Office 2007. It replaced the standard Office toolbars and menus with a very large toolbar filled with graphical representations of control elements or commands. Commands are organized in logical groups by functionality and are collected together under tabs. Each tab relates to a type of activity, such as writing or laying out a page.
There are good intentions behind the Ribbon – honest! It was …

Our lives as lawyers are hectic enough even before we factor in busy family events. Accordingly our tip is to create a ‘family’ calendar where every family member can enter (and see) the entire spectrum of upcoming family events. Schedule movie nights! Put in Grandmother’s birthday party! The school play (where your daughter is on stage!). Also enter the evenings where you have business events to let everyone know Mom (or Dad) won’t be available until later (no need to put in confidential client info – just a notation that you have a business meeting is just fine).

If the …

Today’s top: Be prepared for mobile.

Sarah Glassmeyer of CALI shared a tip from her session at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference yesterday. You can test a website to see how it will act on a mobile device. visit http://www.howtogomo.com to check your research websites before you try and use them with your phone.…

Most MS Outlook users know that you can sort your Inbox by a single column. A single left-click on any column head will sort all the messages in the Inbox by the contents of that column. For example, alphabetically by subject or chronologically by sent or received date.
Note as well that a second click on the same column will sort the messages again in reverse order to the initial sort.
Sorting your Inbox by a column can be helpful for locating a message or deleting old messages.
But you can do more – you can actually sort your Inbox …

If you spend any time on the web, you should be aware of the fact that you can be tracked by websites that you do not visit.  This can include analytic services, advertising networks and social platforms.  Few of these offer any reliable way of opting-out.  Accordingly, we are left with working with a voluntary op-out procedure that is honoured by third-party web tracking sites.

One of the ways to prevent this tracking *at least by third parties who agree to honour a user’s Do Not Track preference* is by installing a plug-in for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari.  …

Today’s tip: “talk to your law librarian” is in honour of all the new legal summer students that are starting at law firms. For those of you who don’t have access to a person or team in house, law society and bar organizations have your back.

The Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society Library offers:

• through the provision of reference and research assistance;
• current awareness to the membership;
• document delivery and interlibrary loan services;
• research and resource guides;
• online services;
• training to the membership;

The Great Library website offers an Ask a Law Librarian page which states:

Experienced staff are available to

…

It is an unfortunate fact of life that the most trusted of employees could be stealing money from their employer.