A very quick tip today: if you’re trying to print out a readable version of a web page, but the website doesn’t provide the content in a print friendly format, try using https://www.printfriendly.com to remove any extraneous information.…
The last thing any busy lawyer wants to add to their already overflowing plate is business development.
Scratch that.
The last thing any busy lawyer wants is the pressure to come up with a ‘winning’ new idea for business development and then to work on implementing that idea on an urgent basis.
Here’s the problem. While you may be too busy to think about marketing today, you may not be headed for quite the same level of activity in the foreseeable future.
So, avoid setting yourself up to have to figure it all out while you’ve got your hands …
Let’s talk about Legal Information Institutes (LIIs). Every Canadian legal researcher knows about CanLII (I least we hope you do). But there is also LII (that’s the USA one), BaiLII (Britain and Ireland), AustLII (Australasia), AsianLII, HKLII (Hong Kong), PacLII (Pacific Islands), SAFLII (Southern Africa), WorldLII, and many others, all of which are part of the larger Access to Law Movement.
LIIs provide free access to current, primary law in their jurisdiction. But they do not always contain comprehensive collections of historic materials (in all cases, I assume, they are working on it). In the English-speaking world, …
A regrettably continuing series.
Core
Almost as bad as key (when used, like core, as an adjective meaning ‘principal’ or ‘main’). Both have a distinct whiff of the 1990s to them.
My gut
Please, no one wants to imagine what your digestive tract is doing – much less what it is telling you.
Next steps
For the love of pity, can we stop talking about these at the end of every meeting? It’s not as though we can take previous steps at that point.
Action items would not be an acceptable substitute; it’s another piece of jargon. Tasks would …
You know what really grinds my gears? When I open a PDF file containing what appears to be digitally-formatted text and find that it is non-copyable and non-searchable. The ability to search, copy and paste text are essential functions of digital communications – so the idea that a text is born digitally and therefore ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) encoded, and that somebody wittingly or unwittingly should remove that functionality – it leads to much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part.
Well just last week I was sent a large PDF document with more …
Administrator’s note: thanks to Wendy Reynolds, Manager, Accessibility, Records and Open Parliament at the Information Services Branch, Legislative Assembly of Ontario for this guest tip!
Libraries track reference questions for many reasons. Primarily, we capture information about transactions – who we did work for, how long it took, and how difficult it was. A simple spreadsheet or piece of paper on the ref desk will suffice for this most common kind of tracking.
Some libraries go beyond the transactional. My employer, for example, relies on an Oracle database to collect questions, triage work, and record the answers sent to clients. …
In certain situations, I need to type something I’ve typed dozens or hundreds of times before. Rather than type it out, I prefer to type three to four letters. My Mac recognizes those letters and offers me the option of the full text I’ve typed in the past.
Here are two examples:
Name and phone number shortcut
Each time I schedule phone calls with people, I put my name and …
In case you missed the big news, there’s a new addition to the Slaw family!
Slaw Jobs, a new Canadian legal job listings service, launched earlier this month with listings for positions across the country. From lawyers to marketers to professors to content managers, there’s already a good variety of positions and employers on the site.
By using Slaw Jobs, you’ll be getting your listing in front of a large and targeted audience and at the same time, supporting the high quality, original legal commentary at Slaw.ca.
Learn a bit about the genesis of Slaw Jobs here, and …
If you are carrying out due diligence on an individual or company, the BC Securities Commission has produced a very useful online resource on the subject called Conducting Background Research. The guide does note that there is “no set template for a good background search. … You will need to use your judgment for each research decision, including the choice of sources to search and research strategies to employ.”
In the first year of law school, students pick up many bad writing habits. Perhaps the chief of these is to use previously unfamiliar phrases that have a (specious) lawyerly appearance.
An example is at first blush, which is not commonly used outside the law; and because it’s used so much within it, it ought to be avoided as an over-used cliché. You could just write at first, without the blushing (‘This case seems, at first, to be uncomplicated …’)
On its face has a venerable legal pedigree (at least as far back as 1632, according to the …