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 …

Today’s Tip: don’t forget to search images

I am sure that every lawyer reading Slaw Tips has had to build a personal injury quantum memorandum. Even if it was during articling, you will remember trying to identify a dollar figure to compensate for an injury using case law digests. For those of us who took the minimum science credits required, there is a great tool that was profiled recently by MIT’s Technology Review in an article titled .

Healthline’s Body Maps tool is a search engine to get visual clues for bits of anatomy. You can browse with a person …

Moving text with the cut and paste commands, either from one application to another, or between documents within the same application, is one of the most powerful features of Windows. It can also be one of the most frustrating features, especially when the pasted text doesn’t appear as you had expected or wanted.

In many programs you can control how Windows pastes data with the Paste Special command. This tip reviews how this command works in Microsoft Word. The steps outlined for Word are identical for pasting text with Paste Special in many other Windows programs.

At one time or …

Here’s another tip from the Taste of  ABA TECHSHOW 2011 dinner that Dave and I hosted earlier this year.  This tip comes from Allen Howell, Director of Career Services at the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law of Faulkner University.

Allen’s tip is to make maximum use of your local law school’s interns.  He states that they can help with legal work and provide welcome insight into what is new, not to mention that you’ll be helping to mentor a potential new lawyer.  Sort of seeing the world through new eyes….…

I love my iPad. One reason is for its ability to carry heavy things for me, like extra novels when I travel, my CDs, and my copy of the Rules of Court.

No, sorry there is no Rules of Court app. Here are the steps to get a long pdf that is available for public download on to your tablet.

1. Make sure you have a pdf reader (like iBooks, iAnnotate, or Kobo)
2. In your browser, navigate to the public pdf. I used the Alberta Rules link at http://www.qp.alberta.ca/documents/rules2010/Rules_vol_1.pdf
3. Once the full pdf has loaded into your browser, …

In Microsoft Word (including Mac versions) you can easily create a variety of horizontal lines by typing the following characters three times followed by Return or Enter:

• Minus (-) produces a thin line;
• Underscore (_) produces a thicker line;
• Equal sign (=) produces a double line;
• Asterisk (*) produces a thick dotted line;
• Tilde (~) produces a zigzag line;
• Number (#) produces three lines, a thicker middle line between two thin ones.

The lines will be the width of your page, or if you are using columns, the width of your column. Remember to use these shortcuts to create dividers …