In the distant past, lawyers used to send printed client updates by mail. Those days are long gone. Then came e-mail, rapidly reaching the saturation point.

You don’t want to clog up your clients’ email in-boxes more than you need to, so push things their way through a brief and punchy blog post.

Blog posts can be published on your firm’s public website and also distributed to a phenomenally big audience through aggregators of online content like Lexology, Mondaq and JD Supra.

Novice blogger? Fear not: here are some tips.

Don’t write about the law; write about how …

The 9th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (better known as the McGill Guide) was published earlier this summer. The most important change was no longer requiring a parallel citation in addition to a neutral citation. While the guide tends to be the default for Canadian citation, several courts have slightly different citation requirements:

• The Alberta Queen’s Bench adopted the 7th edition of the McGill Guide with some minor changes as detailed in its Notice to the Profession, November 12, 2013.
• British Columbia’s Court of Appeal has also adopted the 7th edition of the McGill Guide

Imagine if your email system could look like this at the end of your day (presuming your inbox is empty):

This is more likely to happen if email lands in the right folder without you having to triage it from your inbox. Dealing with each message in the order it was received in your inbox can lead to context switching — a major drag on productivity. The time spent doing triage can instead be used to handle business email.

To minimize email triage time, build these five email habits:

1. Set Up Folders in a Logical Manner

Having folders scattered …

Did you know that you can receive instant notifications every time a new case is added to CanLII simply by subscribing to an RSS feed?  Would you like to monitor all new decisions from a particular level of court or administrative tribunal?  An RSS feed can do that for you.

RSS feeds deliver instant updates that inform you whenever a website is updated.  In CanLII’s case, they will alert you whenever a new decision is posted.

Our colleagues at the Law Society of Manitoba Library have put together an excellent guide that describes how to Create an Alert with CanLII…

Each time an electronic document comes into being, metadata is created along with it. People often add their own, too. From the obvious (like page numbers) to the obscure (like dates of creation and author names), every piece of metadata serves some purpose.

During discovery, document metadata can prove just as important as the visible contents in the document. That’s why legal teams need to comb every document for metadata. (It’s also why many use metadata “scrubbers” on documents they share with other people.)

Things can get interesting when one legal team unwittingly sends documents to opposing counsel that contain …

Who?

Who could help me with this?

One of the biggest mistakes a lawyer can make is not asking for help.

Help can mean many things.

It can mean getting advice on a file. Many lawyers the mistake of going it alone, only to realize too late that turning to another lawyer for guidance would be the best course of action.

Help can be about forming a relationship with a senior lawyer in your practice area for support and guidance. I recently connected a junior lawyer seeking to develop a new practice area with a senior lawyer from a small …

The latest in a continuing series.

Next time: guidance for the reluctant legal blogger

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

As a lawyer, you identify with being a professional. Strongly and consistently. Perhaps, not as much with being a business person (even if you play a leadership role at your firm)?

Most of the time, that’s just fine. Some of the time, it’s not.

If you don’t see yourself as a business person, not meeting practice goals can become frustrating:

• We used to get a steady stream of referrals. Where have they gone?
• We have a good reputation among our network. Why aren’t we receiving more resumes from talented recruits?
• We hired good people. Why isn’t morale higher?…

You may …

Not hats: capital letters (or, in typographical parlance, upper case).

Don’t shout at people

When the interweb and e-mail were new, it took (some) people a while to figure out that typing your message all in caps is the typographical equivalent of shouting. Compare: please don’t forget to do this (gentle reminder) versus PLEASE DON’T FORGET TO DO THIS (angry, hectoring, perhaps a bit desperate, possibly crazy).

Used sparingly, capitals can be an effective way to express emphasis (especially if you’re not typing in HTML or rich text) – but the key word here is ‘sparingly’; if everything is emphasised, …

A picture is worth a thousand words, and pictures of your device’s screen are no exception. Those screen shot images can help people troubleshoot problems with your device — and help you better communicate how-to instructions as well.

Sometimes you will see people taking pictures of their device screens with their own (or other people’s) phones. Don’t do that. There’s an easier way. Instead, investigate your device’s built-in ability to take screen shots — also known as screen grabs or screen captures.

Types of Screen Captures

You can capture your device’s behavior in several different ways.

Static captures

These are …