Today’s tip is courtesy of Melanie Bueckert, legal researcher extraordinaire at the Manitoba Court of Appeal via Brian Roach, articling student at Tapper Cuddy LLP.

The Research Log (well deserving of its capitalization) is a deceptively simple template that forces the legal researcher to document all sources consulted and note what about that source was of importance. You can also include anything that wasn’t important so you know not to review it again. If used properly, your research memo practically writes itself. I can vouch for its usefulness – the …

Not things you did as a teenager that you’d rather forget about, but past tenses of verbs that continue to cause people trouble.

Dive
The past tense of this verb is not dove. That’s a bird, mispronounced. The past tense is dived (or should be – the Yanks differ on this one).

Lay and lie
A confusing pair. From last time:

Lead
As in lead me astray. The past tense (and past participle) is led. Similarly, mislead and misled.

Confusion may arise because these two don’t follow the same pattern as read, which is the …

Have you ever had to create a simple interactive presentation in a hurry and PowerPoint seems too daunting when you are in crunch mode? Give Microsoft Sway a try. In a few easy steps, you can create an online interactive presentation that you can make public, keep private, or share with people who are given a link. Best of all, Sway is free, and you can’t argue with free.

Sway and PowerPoint are both Microsoft products. While PowerPoint gives you full control of animation, sound, layout, design and branding, Sway is for you to whip up a presentation (even if …

(Missed Part 2 of this series? Read it here: So Why Are Lawyers Spending So Much Time On Administrative Tasks?)

And Finally: Volume

I think the last reason attorneys are spending so much time doing administrative tasks is the increase in information we have all been subjected to as the world has gone digital.

According to Surprising Statistics About Lawyer Information Overload:

By the end 2015, attorneys on average were creating or receiving more than 70 documents every day (and for some, many more). That includes emails, email attachments, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, client records, opposing
counsel …

I was asked what the library equivalent was of our help desk’s standard “try turning it off and back on” advice. I’m not sure there’s an equivalent, but “try a different browser” comes close.

A not infrequent problem is that certain sites and databases don’t display properly (or sometimes at all) on a given browser. If you find that a web page or online document isn’t displaying properly and you can’t figure why, try looking at it with a different browser.  Some vendors design their databases to work with a specific browser. (In one case, I was assured by a …

(Missed Part 1 of this series? Read it here: Being Efficient Doing the Wrong Tasks = Not Being Efficient)

So Why Are Lawyers Spending So Much Time On Administrative Tasks?

To start, in Time to Work Workflow Technology into the Law Firm Arsenal, Eric Wangler states:

Initially when the market shifted, firms turned to cutting administrative staff to decrease their costs. However, it was soon clear that this type of short-term solution had significant drawbacks. The remaining support staff were expected to do the same amount of work with fewer people, leading to increased stress and compromised work …

More words you may be mixing up.

Next time: problematic pasts.

-Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

If you have signed up for online accounts, newsletters, or even just to download a white paper that you want to read, you will know that a valid email address is usually required. As you are filling in the online sign-up form, a little voice inside your head may be telling you that you will be getting a whole new pile of daily notifications and junk mail cluttering up your inbox. Is there a way to deal with this? You bet.

If you have a Gmail account, Google allows you to create an infinite number of variations with your Gmail …

We all love data. Crave it. We don’t put down our digital devices for a second of missing some interesting digital tidbit. Here’s some interesting data I’ve recently come across with regard to the administration of law firms:

Being Efficient Doing the Wrong Tasks = Not Being Efficient

According to Bob Ambrogi in: Exclusive Survey Results: Small Firms’ Greatest Challenges and What They’re Doing to Address Them, the numbers clearly show how the administrative functions of running a practice have taken over the average attorney work day:

Top five overall challenges (factoring in the issues ranked as both moderate …

Administrator’s note: thanks to Natalie Wing, Law Librarian at Yukon Public Law Library, for this guest tip!

WARNING: this post may contain disturbing content for those with deep anti-marking-up-of-library-book sensitivities.

Back in ye olden days, law clerks and law librarians used to write in the margins of case reporters, literally “noting up” the pages with citations for subsequent appellate decisions. Indeed, it would seem that librarians both sanctioned and participated in the marking up of library books, but of course only for very specific purposes, and conceivably only with the tidiest of (and most tidily placed) writing. Here is an …