Today’s Tip: Learn what you have access to.
This pithy statement could be read a couple of different ways in the context of legal research.

One meaning is to remember to search your library catalog – in your firm, at your local courthouse or law society library, at your nearest public library, at your local law school. Even law librarians who help fill the shelves should remember to look in the catalog. Favorite sources are great, but other sources should not be overlooked. Searching a library catalog will remind you that there are additional sources to refer to.

Another meaning …

The short opinion survey is one of the easiest, cheapest, and least used client development tools available to the law firm.

In a 1995 Harvard Business Review article entitled “Why Satisfied Clients Defect,” the authors pointed out the important distinction between satisfied clients and completely satisfied clients.  In markets where competition was intense, they noted a tremendous difference between the loyalty of satisfied and completely satisfied customers.  For instance, in the auto industry they found that even a slight drop from complete satisfaction resulted in an enormous drop in customer loyalty.

This phenomenon is not limited to manufactured products.  It …

Today’s tip involves following up.

When your research is initially prepared, you will likely find new items, or pending legislation. These future things may change the landscape that your initial research analysis paints.
Today’s simple tip is to diarize. Everything.

I use my Outlook calendar to diarize either recurring daily or weekly checks for things (like expected orders in council; court of appeal decisions, the expected publication date or comment deadline for draft regulations, etc.) It is very simple to create a calendar appointment that will popup a message to check for something on a future day. I use calendar …

If you’re absolutely sure that you want to delete a file(s) permanently from your hard drive (i.e., bypassing the Windows Recycle Bin – noting that deleted files aren’t really deleted…see below**), select the file(s), then hold down the Shift key while you press Delete. You will get a File Delete Confirm dialog box asking you to confirm your intent to delete the file “permanently”, answer yes to do so. The deleted file will not be in the Recycle Bin.

My personal preference and practice is to “permanently” delete everything, unless I think I might want it back, in which case …

Most firms spend far too many hours and kill way too many trees producing reports which are rarely reviewed, month after month, for their lawyers . The reality is that, in order to successfully manage the financial health of the firm, you only need to get lawyers to look at exceptions to the norm, not the norm itself.

For example, for management purposes, while you look at all the firm’s receivables each month, the reports that you prepare for the lawyers do not need this level of detail. You only need to show the ones which are over a certain …

Today’s tip: Find a trusted source.

This is a bit of a repeat, but also wisdom from my daughters.
Dominique (15) says: I don’t use Wikipedia first because it can be changed.
Genevieve (16) says: When we do research at school, all the kids bolt for the computers and I go to the encyclopedias because they are cross referenced.

Whether, like Gen, your trusted source is a printed text, or like Niq, your trusted source is your Mom, you should find your trusted source.
There will be more than one. It will be the top of your link list, your …

Tables can be very helpful for presenting information or data in a document. As many of you know, working with tables can be frustrating when you can’t get them into the layout or format you want. So this week, I’m sharing four of my favourite tricks for working with tables in Microsoft Word.

Tabs are very useful for lining up information in a document. What many people don’t know is that you can use tabs within tables. To set a tab within a table, click within the table cell(s) that you want to include a tab(s). Next, select the type …

How to increase the dough in your pocket from your practice by increasing your billing turnover rate.

Editor’s note: Thanks to Karen Sawatzky of the Tapper Cuddy Library in Winnipeg for today’s tip. Follow Karen on Twitter, read her column at Slaw.ca or her posts at Library Technician Dialog or visit her at LinkedIn.

I got a request to find the top 5 London law firms, and then find the lawyers in a particular practice area.

I sent a message via Twitter to a London law librarian I know only from Twitter, and he replied immediately with the info I needed. It cut my research by several hours.

The point I want to make is …

Getting one of your social media accounts hacked can be very embarrassing and time consuming. One of the simplest things you can do to make your Facebook and Twitter accounts a bit more secure is to enable Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure or HTTPS.

HTTPS provides encrypted communication and secure identification for cross-web communications. This simply means that the stream of data going between your computer (or smartphone) and the sever it is connecting to across the web is encrypted. This makes it much harder to intercept and understand. HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide …