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.…

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, …