One of the best ways to maintain a relationship with clients once the initial matter is over is to contact them regularly with information that will be of interest to them along with subtle guidance that lets them know that - whatever their next problem - you should be their first phone call.

Today’s Tip: think of the word “document” as a verb.

With legal research, it is a frequent event to have someone ask how you found an answer. This often happens when an answer is “there is no reported case law on that topic”. Especially when the search result is nothing, it is really important to plot your research path and be prepared to share exactly what the path was.

My method for this is to provide research results in memo form, even for short simple tasks. Research memos should have a detailed sources consulted section that includes granular details like …

Get a file to come to the top in Explorer by using non-alphanumeric characters to lead the name.

Eric Mazzonne advises moving to Google Chrome as your browser of choice.

Today’s Tip: plan how to conduct your research before you attempt to find anything

At the CALL/ACBD Conference last week I listened to Ted Tjaden (read him at Slaw) and Andrew Terrett talk about legal project management. My take away from their excellent presentation was that project management is applying a disciplined approach to your (or group) work.

Applying a disciplined approach to a legal research question will help you focus so that your strategy allows you to gather just enough information and the right information to answer the problem. Although it is not described as research project management, …

This week a bit of fun. Wordle is site that lets you generate “word clouds” from text or a URL that you provide. The clouds are graphical collections of the words in the source text or site. They give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

You can see the Slaw Tips Blog Word …

At the Taste of TECHSHOW Dinner that we hosted back in April, one of the attendees, Kenneth Prochnow, a lawyer from Palo Alto, California, produced his business card, which was imprinted with a QR code. A couple of the more tech-savvy people at the table had QR code readers on their smartphones, and were quickly connected through this little code with Ken’s firm’s facebook fan page.

For those of you who as yet are only peripherally aware of QR codes, they are those little squares full of black and white squiggles that are starting to show up in …

If you also follow our sister site you will know that I am in Calgary at the CALL Conference. This visit offers an opportunity to catch up with legal information vendors in the conferences exhibit hall as well as through vendor demonstrations of their latest innovations.

Maritime Law Book is showing a beautifully redesigned website for their excellent case law collection. The front page is nice and clean and allows easy access to the National Reporter System Key Numbers or a topical search. Search templates are also surfaced on the front page with familiar visual tools to access them.

The …

Most of the paid and free legal research products offer proximity search (i.e., the ability to search for documents that have keywords within a certain number of specified words or paragraphs).

And, to the surprise of most people, Google also allows you to do proximity searches with the AROUND(n) connector. AROUND must be typed in upper case and you replace the “n” with a number specifying how many words you want your keywords to be from each other.

For example, when you search malpractice AROUND(10) pinnington, you get 5,900 hits where malpractice is within 10 words of pinnington.

Remember to …

A well-documented file is critical to the successful defense of a malpractice claim against you. In documenting your file, prepare and retain detailed notes from meetings, relevant conversations and of instructions received. Keep copies of emails (and attachments) associated with the file. When your client refuses your advice, document this in writing to your client and your file. Send regular status updates and always use file closing letters confirming the end of representation. Keep your personal notes and all relevant documentation when culling a file.

If, at any time, your client wants the file transferred to another lawyer, or made …