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 …

Catherine Sanders Reach advises lawyers to have two facebook pages - one for personal use and one for professional stuff. This way you can separate out your personal and professional lives.

This weeks tip: Sometimes you just have to use microfilm.

On Tuesday, I enjoyed the hospitality of the Edmonton Public Library from 10:30 in the morning until they shut the doors at 9:00 p.m. Thank you to all the lovely staff at EPL, and those who hosted my colleagues at the Calgary Public Library as well. Thank you also for hanging on to those microfilm reader/printers.

If you are looking for a couple of years worth of historical advertisements, even if you are just looking in one issue a week, it takes a lot of time. Advertisements occassionally (not too …

Most of us have tons of personal info on various Google sites, and many lawyers have started using Google in their law practices. Unfortunately, most of us haven’t done everything we should to make our Google accounts more secure. Have you enabled Google’s Two Step Authentication on your Google account?

On his blog, Rick Klau has a fantastic post that outlines all the steps you should take to make your Google account more secure. This post is a must read for anyone using Google, and for that reason the SLAW Tech tip will shamelessly take to you another site …

"Do you jump from one task to the next without ever finishing? You may want to try the Pomodoro Technique of getting work done.

Todays Tip: Read the screen

There is an adage that states familiarity breeds contempt. I am sure, like me, many of you have been to a training session for a web-delivered search tool that you have used for years. It is very hard not to get into a pattern where you use a tool the same way over and over, without exploring the possibilities that evolve with enhancements to a product.

Todays tip is a gentle reminder to read the screen. Look it over. Pay attention, not just to the function that you are using, but to all the possibilities.…