(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 …

When a meeting takes longer than anticipated, minds may start to wander. An inefficient meeting can cause participants to “switch off” and cease contributing meaningfully.  Similarly, starting a difficult task without a time limit can seem too large a mountain to
climb, and make it easy to procrastinate. One solution is to consciously set a time limit for a meeting or a task, and do it both verbally and visually.

A meeting would begin with an announcement to the participants, “We have 30 minutes to get through our theory of the case. Let’s make each minute count.” A visual cue …

Words you mix up at your peril.

Next week: confusing pairs, part 2

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

Good keyword searching practice varies from database to database, depending on how the data is structured and how the search engine works. But there are some principles that apply to most situations.

For legal research, whenever you have at least a basic understanding of the legal concepts involved, it is usually best to start out casting your net wide, and refine or expand as you go. The goal, for this strategy, is to create a search that will include ALL relevant documents and as few irrelevant ones as possible.

The following process involves an imagined scenario in which I am …

Mark Zuckerberg wears the same outfit every day. It may seem like a small thing, but even little decisions can eventually exhaust our ability to make good decisions. Decision fatigue, which is the theory that our ability to make good decisions deteriorates with each decision we make, applies no matter how small or large a decision. As the day goes on, we use up our decision-making fuel and make poorer decisions. If you’ve experienced at the end of a long day a breakdown in your willpower – getting easily frustrated and angry, or needing to go shopping, or eating a …

A frequently asked question is “what does this word mean in a legal context?” In my last SLAW tip, I talked about using legislation to find definitions, in particular interpretation acts. However, legislation cannot define every term used, so if you can’t find your term in the legislation, you may want to check if it has been judicially defined. There are a number of books of words and phrases listing judicial definitions (and truly it is a wonder what has been defined), but, as with legislation, these books cannot be exhaustive.

If you can’t find your term in either …