Often a news item will mention a document, sometimes a decision, agreement or other type of document that you need to access. Today’s tip is a reminder to go to the source.

For example, a recent radio broadcast mentioned a memorandum of agreement between the City of Edmonton and Harbin, China to help design a waste managment system. This document does not appear on the City’s website. To get a copy, I need to find a source. Some choices follow that you can apply to your research scenario:

• Find the contact information for the radio newsroom and phone to

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During a recent phone call, my colleague Catherine Reach and I had a bit of a chuckle over a rather risqué and NSFW (not suitable for work) article that one of our mutual friends had apparently just read online. Think clothing-optional antics by a celebrity in a bedroom in Vegas. As it happened, a few minutes before our call, we had both seen a Facebook update telling us that our friend has just read this particular article.

The critical fact here is not what happened in Vegas, but rather that our friend likely had no idea that the articles he …

This is the second of two posts dealing with the management side of taking your office paperless. The first post from last week dealt with the first 5 things to consider from a management perspective.  This post looks at the remaining 5 things to be part of your paperless plan.

Here are the next 5 things to consider:

1. Research: Do a thorough investigation of the available tools to help you (document management systems, electronic faxing, scanners, data backup systems, security systems, document conversion companies, process consultants, storage formats, storage devices, remote access devices etc…). Knowledgeable consultants can help you out

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Do you find yourself in need of a Barrister in the UK? Do you have access to JustCite from Justis Publishing? Even if you do not have access at your desk to JustCite – which is an excellent index that that allows you to search multiple jurisdictions to find leading cases, articles and legislation and see how legal documents cite and relate to each other – you can use their Barristers search.

The search result includes contact information, practice areas, case history generated by Justis and representative cases and a biography if the barrister chooses to add to their …

Many people experienced some degree of frustration today with the Gmail outage. The Internet is more reliable than it has ever been and most major service providers like Google very rarely suffer service outages. But when they do, it can be a great inconvenience, in both your personal and/or professional lives.

For that reason there are some lessons to be learned. If you store your data on the cloud, be prepared to operate when you can’t access the cloud or the particular service. What cloud services do you use and how long could you function with access to them? Consider …

Accordingly this post is the first of two based on that presentation dealing with the management side of taking your office paperless.

In Canada, legal researchers do not have many opportunities to search dockets of courts. That is not the case in the US. Manay of us will search US Court dockets infrequently. Today’s Tip: learn from the experts.

The American Bar Association Law Practice Magazine had an article last year titled Finding Info Like a Pro: Investigating Court Docket Databases. The article offers some tips, and it references a book that offers more.

Happy Searching.

Note: The Supreme Court of Canada Case Information database is available to searchers at http://www.scc-csc.gc.ca/case-dossier/cms-sgd/search-recherche-eng.aspx…

We all need help on keeping up with our email. The Gmail styles feature could help you more quickly see the messages that are most important to you.

Gmail has several built-in configurations or “styles” that change how your Inbox sorts messages. In the Classic style – the default Inbox style – messages are ordered chronologically by the date they arrived (newest first). The other styles present messages in slightly different ways. These are the other styles and what they do:

• Unread First – Unread mail stays at the top; everything else is at the bottom.
• Starred First – Starred

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Real estate costs can be one of a law firm’s highest expenses. There’s no reason to pay rent to house hundreds of case files, especially closed files, that could be much more inexpensively stored off site or converted to electronic format. As soon as possible, set aside some time to determine which files can be destroyed, which can be moved off-site for less expensive storage or digitized, and then, if you haven’t already done so, implement a system to begin creating a paperless file for each new case as you open it. You might even be able to rent out …

Today’s Tip: Life is improved by learning, so educate yourself.

I made some foolish choices in my youth about formal education that I have come to regret.

The good news, for me and others, is that there are plenty of opportunities to educate yourself. Whether it is continuing education about a specific topic or general life-long learning, basic legal research processes, a more esoteric topic like how tribunals can provide excellence in administrative justice, or updates in an area of law you have an interest or practice in, there are opportunities available to learn things.

Take in …