Crackberry.com has posted a useful tip that solves a problem that many BlackBerry users have had: how to dial all those phone numbers with words in them?? (e.g. 1-888-ROGERS1). The keypad letters don’t seem to correspond with the old rotary number/letter system.

There were always workarounds, from looking elsewhere on a webpage for the actual number to looking at an older phone and writing down the numbers yourself. But it seems all this time there was an easier way: just hold down the ‘alt’ key while dialing the letters (but not the numbers), and the BlackBerry will substitute the proper …

Part of coming to grips with the financial management side of your practice is learning to read the numbers. One of the more important ones to understand is the concept of "Effective Hourly Rate".

My colleague Jennifer Merchant, Library Assistant for Field Law in the Calgary office gets credit for this tip. It is really more the beginning of a memo of research results, rather than a tip, but I thought you might find it useful. Jennifer was looking for some background information on a private company. Here is the beginning of her result:

You asked for background information on [insert private company name here]. I used the following resources in my search:

• Google (general)
• Google News
• Canadian Business and Current Affairs Complete (business/news database)
• Canadian Newsstand (news database)
• Canadian Periodicals (news database)

…

Keeping up with the changes to Facebook Privacy settings is a never-ending task. The large number of settings makes it very confusing. The LifeHacker blog comes to the rescue with The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Managing Your Facebook Privacy.

This comprehensive guide runs through the basic privacy settings that determine what you share, next it looks at deeper settings you’ll want to tweak, and it finishes with a few third-party tools that will help keep your Facebook information private.

LifeHacker says they will update this page when there are changes in the future. Bookmark this page, make it a …

Decide to block out your time and put aside one block of time to accomplish important but not urgent tasks to avoid them never bubbling up on your To Do list - and actually get them done.

Today’s Tip: Don’t take Wikipedia at face value

I nearly wrote “The King is dead. Long live the King.” as the title of this post, but Wikipedia is definitely NOT dead. It is a very useful resource for a quick look at a topic, name, date, person, or fact that you intend to verify.

Legal research requires work. Use crowd sourced data just like you would any other source – not as the sole point of information. Verify the black letter statement of the law in a legal encyclopedia by reading and noting up authorities referenced in the footnotes. …

Thanks to my good friend Catherine Reach at the ABA LTRC (Legal Technology Resource Center) for this tip. (And kudos for her patience to explain it to me a third time as I didn’t quite clue in the first two times she mentioned it to me.)

URLs can be a mile long – and quite frequently are longer than then the 140 character limit of a tweet. As we all know too well, long URLs are a pain to retype. Fortunately, bitly and other URL shortening services allow you to create URLs that are shorter and far more suited for …

This is a guest post by Gerry Riskin of Edge International on overcoming fee resistance with a client.

The first step in convincing a client of your value is to have confidence in yourself and the fees you charge.

Consumers want the very best price for any given product or service.  As a lawyer, you suggest a fee. Your client looks at you and says, “Gee, that’s a lot of money. It’s really a lot more than I had budgeted for, and I’m really concerned about that.” Or perhaps, “My CEO is concerned about our legal budget. Is there a …

Today’s Tip: Look for regulations.

Most legal researchers are cognizant that they should check for a statute on their topic. My tip today is a reminder to also look for regulatory, policy, and other delegated legisaltion.

Some regulation reminders:

• Regulation making power is always spelled out in a section of the statute.
• The authority to make a regulation does not necessarily mean that a regulation exists.
• Some regulations have the authority to change the wording of an act.
• Regualtions come into force on the day they are filed unless they state otherwise in a ciming into force section

Thanks to …

The , sometimes called the Acrolaw blog, is a fantastic resource for lawyers, law firm staff, legal IT people and anyone else in the legal community that uses Adobe Acrobat. The blog is written by Rick Borstein. He is the Business Development Manager for Acrobat in the Legal Market for Adobe Systems. Rick is probably the most knowledgeable person on the planet when it comes to using Acrobat in the legal setting.

You will find the answer to just about any question you have, including questions about OCR, scanning, Bates numbering, batch processing, digital signatures, commenting, metadata, binders and portfolios.…