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 …

In what condition are your accounts receivable?

While your total accounts receivable number from your accounting system tells you the total amount of money owed by your firm’s clients, your accounts receivable report should be aged 30, 60 and 90+ days to give you greater information of the state of your receivables.

The 2008 Juris Law Firm Economic Survey from LexisNexis (the last date for which we have such a survey – they are no longer being published – a great loss as these surveys were very detailed and informative) shows that ‘days fees outstanding’ for accounts receivable in 2008 …

Today’s Tip: Go to the source

What I mean by go to the source is this:
If you have exhausted the traditional places to look for something (case law databases – both free and commercial; journal article sources; local libraries that you may borrow from; a general web search) and have not located a specific item that you need, go to the source.

Who authored the work?

• Phone the arbitrator
• Call the judge’s assistant
• Email the news reporter

People are amazingly helpful and willing to share what they have or what they know if you ask, infrequently and politely of …

Social media tools allow people to look at your profile information. By tweaking privacy settings, you can limit what people see by type of information (e.g., contact info, friends list, education, etc.) and degree of connection (e.g., friends or direct connections only, friends and friends of friends, everyone, etc.).

LinkedIn offers an interesting twist: you can see how many people have looked at your profile, and in some cases, you can even see their names.

As a LinkedIn user you should appreciate other LinkedIn users can see that you have looked at their profile. In many cases it may not …

Understanding your hourly cost structure has enormous implications for examining the financial status of your firm and for determining your top-profitability lawyers (as opposed to top revenue generators… which may or may not be the same!).

Today’s tip is for the watcher. Quite often a court proceeding of interest will be reported in the media as the case is heard. Decisions, especially in civil cases, usually come down at some future time. There are a couple of ways to virtually ‘watch’ for decisions of interest.

• Try a Google News alert – if the case was media worthy when it was being hear, there may be a media report of the decision which a Google alert will send to your email inbox.
• Create a CanLII RSS feed for a search of the decision – even if a

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