An email exchange is not the same as a phone call or a face-to-face conversation. At the top of the hierarchy of human communications are face-to-face meetings, then phone calls, then voice mail, and lastly email. Face-to-face meetings have the most impact. Not only can you hear and talk back to the other person, you also have the ability to see gestures and facial expressions etc. On the phone you don’t see gestures, but you can hear the tone and emotion in the speaker’s voice. Email has the narrowest communications bandwidth – it is only black and white words on …

GnuCash is a free open-source accounting system that will handle general and trust transactions for lawyers.

Papers presented at CLE seminars are good research sources

Switching between open programs is one of the most frequent things we all do as we work on our computers. For this task most of us use a mouse to select a button on the task bar. There is a much faster way.

Pressing Alt+Tab (or on a Mac Option+Tab) will open a rectangular grey pop-up window in the centre of your screen. It will have an icon for each program that is running on your computer.

Press and hold down the Alt key, and then repeatedly press Tab to jump from one icon to the next in this pop-up …

If you consistently and accurately log your time, your work in progress report is like an oracle, allowing you to take information in your financial system and turn it into a reasonably accurate prediction of what your cash flow situation will be like in the weeks to come.

In the age of email, tweets, texting, IM and messages through facebook, the telephone has new power.  If you need to gather a specific item to help with a research problem, try picking up a telephone and making a call.

The phone a friend lifeline works really well getting early versions of cases (call the lawyers on the winning side), getting information from a government source (most governments have online telephone directories that list people with their  titles and direct phone lines), or answering tricky procedural questions (parliamentary counsel offices, court clerks, university professors).

This weeks tip – try for …

Google Translate is a free translation service that provides instant translations between 57 different languages. It can translate words, sentences, web pages and even whole documents (in a PDF, TXT, DOC, PPT, XLS or RTF format) between any combination of the 57 supported languages (See a list here).

Like most Google tools, it is extremely easy to use. Google Translate generates the translation by looking at the patterns in hundreds of millions of previously translated documents. Do you get perfect and sworn to be accurate translations you that you can take to court? No – but they are …

Having a proper management structure for a law firm combined with good professional management in place will be better for the firm in the long run than having a beneficial despot running the firm.

Sometimes it is important to know about every single new Canadian case on a particular topic.  Often it is best if you know about these cases as soon as possible.  This research tip offers an “as soon as possible” option with some creative use of CanLII.

1. determine your search strategy (narrow it as musch as possible)
2. run your search using CanLII’s – limiting to caselaw from the court levels and jurisdictions you need to watch
3. sort your results by decision date
4. copy and paste the resulting URL into your electronic calendar, and set a schedule to re-run your search
5. keep

…

Adding some clipart, animations or photos is one of the best ways to make a presentation, newsletter or website look more professional. There are thousands of sites on the Internet that offer free and pay clip art.  While there is good content on some of these sites, many force you to deal with large amounts of advertising and many pop-ups.  Don’t bother with them.

The best source of free online clip art photos, animations and sounds, bar none, is the .  It has thousands of free images and media files, which you can very easily search by keywords and categories. …