Thanks to Simon Chester among others, we know that the Supreme Court of Canada intends to release it’s judgment in the National Securities Regulator Reference on December 22 at 9:45 EST. You will most likely find it first here or maybe here.

Today’s Tip is to use your calendar to diarize important watches.

Why your electronic calendar rather than an RSS feed or other automated technology to send you what you are waiting for? I have a few reasons for using this method:

• Your calendar can be set to send you a beeping reminder
• You most likely open your

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Do you want to quickly see two windows side-by-side on your desktop? Yes, you can manually resize them by dragging and dropping the edges of each window, but there is a much faster way.

In Windows 7, you can easily arrange two windows next to each other by dragging them to the left or right side of your screen. Left-click on the taskbar (the bar across the top of each window) and drag and drop the window to the left or right side. Release when the entire window is highlighted.

In Windows XP or Vista, hold the Ctrl key down …

Failing to develop a cash flow projection (your budget) as against anticipated expenses is one of the surest ways to get into financial trouble and as such, it tops our list as our #1 financial error.

Sometimes new law requires very broad compliance.  It might be easy to dismiss an act like the one proclaimed in force on December 8, 2011 titled “An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service” as applying to Internet Service Providers only, but it might apply to you as well. 

Today’s Tip is about identifying who in your organization to inform about a newly proclaimed law.

The  says:

Order fixing December 8, 2011 as the day on which an ACT RESPECTING THE MANDATORY REPORTING OF INTERNET CHILD PORNOGRAPHY BY PERSONS WHO PROVIDE …

Once or twice a month I hear from people who are struggling to open docx files. Read on for the reasons why this happens, and what to do about it.

Office 2007 introduced new file formats – docx for Word, xlsx for Excel and pptx for PowerPoint (formally known as the Office Open XML format). Unfortunately, people using Office 2003 or earlier versions of Office (and there are still a bunch of them) will find they can’t open files in these new formats.

The solution is simple. If you are using Office 2003, or one of the earlier versions of …

Many lawyers deal daily with a subtle form of procrastination – working on “busywork” to avoid the important but intimidating jobs that they should be working on. This behavior creates a vicious cycle that causes stress which, often, leads to additional procrastination which, in turn, leads to more stress and, you guessed it, more procrastination.

Following on last week’s theme, Today’s Tip is about judicial consideration of statutes.

CanLII: Navigate to the act that you are interested in and click the Noteup Tab.  This tool allows for a judicial consideration search for the whole act, or for a particular section.

CanLII very correctly offers this warning:

Results are highly sensitive to the manner in which citations to a specific section are formatted in the texts by their authors. Some of them are not currently recognized by CanLII.

This feature does not currently support subsections or other subdivisions of a section. Therefore you may search

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Do you dread moving to a new computer because you have reinstall all your software? If so, you need to know about Nitite. This amazing free service automatically downloads and installs more than 90 popular no-fee apps. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Skype, Google Talk, iTunes, Hulu, Spotify, QuickTime, Flash, Java, Adobe Reader, Dropbox, Evernote, Mozy, Google Earth to name a few. Am betting most of these apps are on your computer.

Ninite fully automates the installers to run offscreen. No Clicking Next, Next, Next… It also automatically says “No” to toolbars and other junk. The Ninite installer always installs …

In order to keep being strategic and focused, you need to keep your skill set current and sharp.  Take time to not only stay current on your area of the law but also in the skills necessary for the effective running of your practice.

Today’s Tip idea comes from Corey McDonald, Paralegal with Justice Canada in Edmonton.

Cory mentioned yesterday that it would be helpful to know the different steps for doing the same task in LexisNexis Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada and CanLII.  I chose to write about Noting Up. Here are the steps for each system for noting up a case to see if it has been judicially considered

CanLII – click on the “search decisions citing this decision” link.

LexisNexis Quicklaw – click on the citator symbol or the “noteup with QuickCITE” link at the top of the decision or go directly …