Today’s Tip is a simple reminder to view by “latest activity date”.

The Parliament is back in session and those Slaw Tips readers for whom monitoring legislation is a regular task will appreciate one of the features of LegisINFO. This feature is to view the new information added to the service using the Latest Activity Date filter.  Latest activity date is a Sort by feature.  The default sort is by Bill number, which is useful if you know what you are looking for, or if you want a snapshot of status for multiple bills.

Check out Sort by Latest …

When everyone in the firm is required to report monthly to all other partners, you instill a culture in the firm that is self-correcting. If someone fails to regularly meet their financial goals, you have a decision to make and a forum within which it can be made.

Today’s Tip: Dig Deep

By deep, I mean the deep or invisible web.  According to Marcus Zillman, there are somewhere in the vicinity of 1 trillion plus pages of information out there on the world wide web that search engines might not see.

Marcus was kind enough to update his annual article at LLRX.com, Deep Web Research 2012.

This report and guide is designed to give you the resources you need to better understand the history of the deep web research, as well as various classified resources that allow you to search through the currently available web

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It is a huge financial mistake to not record in writing the very nature of the contractual relationship with each and every one of your clients.

Susan Van Dyke wrote at Slaw on How to Avoid Resource-Draining One-Off Marketing Activities. She inspired this post with one of her ideas:

• Review your current orphans and if you’re not getting any results after a good effort of at least a couple of years, see about dropping some of these, especially if you can’t make a reasonable business case to support it.

Susan was speaking about marketing events, but this advice could apply to many things – library services, database content, use of website features, technology solutions, margarine vs. butter.

For legal research, I believe it is important …

At one time or another, most of you will have plugged your smartphone or cell phone into computer to charge it. And on occasion, many of you may have charged a camera, GPS or other device on your computer. Using a computer or laptop for charging these devices is especially helpful in a pinch – most often when you forgot your charger at home and have a dead device.

I’m also sure that those of you that own an iPad or other larger tablet will have tried to charge it on your computer only to be frustrated by the “Not …

By the time I have money to burn, my fire will have burnt out.  ~Author Unknown

There is much talk today about lawyers moving to alternative billing. We happen to be in favour of trying to bring the practice of law back to its roots in terms of delivering value to clients (ie results-based billing) rather than just time spent on the file (input-based billing). But does that mean that you as a lawyer can give up tracking your time? To those who say yes, we respectfully disagree. While you may not bill by the hour, tracking your time does …

Today’s Tip”: Look far afield.

When looking for articles from a medical journal I was reminded about the excellent service offered by the National Library of Australia. Their coordinates are:

Document Supply Service
National Library of Australia
Canberra ACT 2600
Enquiry Hotline: 1800 235 627
http://www.nla.gov.au/document-supply-services/contact

A recent fee for service item was sent to me with unbelieveably excellent turn around time which saved a one hour trip to the off site storage facility of my local University library.  Their catalogue linked web request form and credit card payment process is well thought out and very efficient. Weighed against my …

You may have noticed that the pictures on your digital camera or smartphone are always stored in a folder named DCIM. Ever wondered why? Here is the answer:

At some point in the distant past, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA) created a standard defining where and how digital images would be stored on digital media used in cameras. This standard gives direction to camera manufacturers on the directory structure, file naming method, character set, file format, and metadata format for the storage of digital images on media used in cameras.

Having such a standard means that …

A lawyer's trust account often poses a lawyer’s greatest risk for ethics trouble. Yet it seems that one of the tasks lawyers quickly delegate is that of properly maintaining client trust accounts.