To make your legislation investigation or monitoring task easier, check out the Canadian Legislation Table of links from the Lederman Law Library at Queen’s.

This organized resource offers links to current and retrospective legislation, usually from the primary source (i.e. Queen’s Printers).

A link to a jurisdiction’s statutes and regulations page on CanLII will also give their source of information.

Today’s Tip: For legislation, remember to go to the source.

For some extra info on the Why of a legislative change and some sources for that information, check out my post at Slaw yesterday and read the excellent suggestions in …

Few things are more finicky than typing case citations in various legal documents. Most people use toolbar buttons to turn italics and underling on and off. Reach for mouse, reach back, reach for mouse again, reach back… There is a better and must faster way.

With these three simple keyboard shortcuts case typing case citations will be a breeze:

• Press Ctrl+I to turn italics on/off
• Press Ctrl+U to turn underline on/off
• Press Ctrl+B to turn bold on/off

A side note for those that are not familiar with the syntax for describing keyboard shortcuts. Simply remember that a plus sign (+) …

Add your photo to your v-card and set up Outlook to automatically attach this to all outgoing emails. Let people see a picture of you and start building a human connection!

Today’s tip is simple.  Ask for help.

There is too much information in the world to have an expertise in all but the most narrow of subjects.  It is better to ask for assistance than to try to explain to someone why you expended unnecessary time and energy and might not have the ‘best’ answer.  Ask for help or advice – from your partners, from your associates, from your students, from your network, from librarians in your organization or another. 

There is no such thing as a dumb question.…

It is amazing how Google can search the web and find exactly what you are looking for. However, as amazing as Google is, you can do a few things to help it better find the information you are searching for – read on.

These things will help Google find the specific information you are searching for:

• Use multiple search terms: Narrow your results with more search terms as Google will return only pages that include all of your search terms.
• Make your search terms as specific as possible to the information you are looking for.
• Remember Google uses stemming technology

…

Usually, when a firm’s billing realization rate starts to slip, this is an indication that the firm is using ineffective procedures to do the work, or the responsible time biller isn’t as familiar with the area of law as he or she should be, or both. Either way, it means it’s time to take a look at who’s doing the work and how he or she is doing it, to determine whether training or the implementation of new work processes is needed.

I was asked to retrieve list of cases recently which reminded me about CanLex. As I wrote on Slaw a couple of years ago, CanLex is a website that hosts some Open API’s which offer tools that marry CanLII’s Content with LexUM’s Technologies. 

I like using the Reflex-API which lets you plug in a list of neutral citations and create an HTML output file with links back to CanLII.  It is a quick way to gather a hyperlinked list of material to then download or print.

This week’s tip is to use tools to make research gathering tasks faster …

The Google Alerts service is one of many very helpful Google apps. It allows you to monitor the web for interesting new content and it will send you an email update of the relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• Being aware of your name or your firm name appearing in the new or on the web
• Monitoring a developing news story
• Keeping current on a competitor or industry
• Getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• Keeping tabs on your favourite sports teams

To create …

While you still should ask for ernest money up front from a client (and keep the trust account balance in the black by repeatedly asking for replenishment of the trust retainer), the next best thing may be to bring in a retired partner and give him or her the task of putting the accounts receivable into order.

This weeks tip: remember to look at print.