A short tip today to remind you that you can deep link to a specific paragraph for most judgments on CanLII. This is helpful when you want to bring a colleague’s attention to specific paragraphs in a judgment.

Each decision on CanLII has a permanent URL, which will look like this:

http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2016/2016scc18/2016scc18.html

To create a link directly to paragraph 21 of this decision, just add #par21 after this permanent URL. The link to paragraph 21 of the decision would look like this:

http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2016/2016scc18/2016scc18.html#par21

I often use this when I’m sending a list of relevant case law to a colleague and …

♫ Their habits, I confess
None can guess with the couple…♫

Lyrics and music by Sammy Cahn and Neal Hefti.

Look at your desk and office. Whose office does yours resemble?  Oscar Madison’s or Felix Unger’s? Is your desk neat and tidy or more a hodgepodge of piles of paper, old coffee cups and files stacked everywhere with food wrappers interspersed? Of course The Odd Couple accented the extreme personal differences between Oscar, who is perhaps the world’s most famous slob and Felix, the extreme clean freak, as a way to create an underlying comedic friction as the backdrop …

By this, I don’t mean where partners spend their week-ends. Instead, I have horrors like these in mind:

herein

therein

wherein

hereinafter

thereinafter

heretofore

herewith

therewith

aforementioned [or (shudder) its bastard progeny, ‘above-referenced’]

thereof

thereto

whereas

whereof

whereupon

hitherto

inasmuch as

notwithstanding

As Richard Wydick puts it, these words ‘give writing a legal smell, but they carry little or no legal substance. When they are used in writing addressed to non-lawyers, they baffle and annoy. When used in other legal writing, they give a false sense of precision and sometimes obscure a dangerous gap in analysis’ (Plain …

Death, taxes and change.

Reputedly, these are among life’s inevitabilities. And while there is probably very little we can do about death and taxes, change is something we truly can manage.

A central theme of many of my Practice Tips posts has been the importance of planning for law firms and other professional practices. By occasionally stepping back from the demands of our day-to-day dealings and deadlines, we can gain the benefit of a longer view, think about objectives, and develop strategies and routines to meet our short and longer term goals.

There will be many changes along the way, …

Certain questions come up time and time again. You can save time by keeping a list of the most frequently asked questions and their answers; each time one of the questions on the list gets asked you can just cut and paste the answer.

FAQs can also work as a knowledge management tool. Although you may answer certain questions frequently, other staff members may not. One solution is to have these questions and answers saved centrally so they are accessible to all library staff.

To get even more bang for your buck, put these questions and answers on your intranet …

When you go to a conference and network with a diverse group of lawyers it isn’t necessarily obvious what you should do to prepare. The typical advice is to get a primer on recent headlines within the industry, or at the very least with local happenings. While this is good advice to start up a conversation, the tip I want to give today is that it’s possible to network well and make a memorable mark by “knowing nothing”.

The trick is to take a deep interest in people you seek to make a connection with. What are their hobbies? What …

The law, for starters – but there is a bit more to it than that.

Here are some suggestions, adapted from the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Guide to Business Development for Women Lawyers (January 2013). They are equally applicable to men.

• Choose your topic carefully
  • write about something you actually practise, know about or want to develop as an area of specialisation
  • you don’t want people to think you’re an expert on the basis of one article
• Recycle old work
  • a memo for a file could be the basis of a client piece
  • but be careful to remove any

When I speak to lawyers about improving productivity, some of the best feedback I receive is how to stop distractions. Research has shown that every time a person is interrupted from a task, it takes some 20 minutes to return to it. Each interruption costs productivity and, if you bill by the hour, you lose the chance to docket “0.3”. Here are some common distractions and what you can do about it.

Turn off cell phone notifications

Every cell phone beep pulls you out of the task you’re working on. If you are in the office, chances are the notification …

My sincere thanks to my fellow law librarian Diane Crossley, and to the judicial staff at the BC Superior Law Courts for collaborating with me on this column.

In a recent tip about what’s on CanLII, we learned that “Most routine matters aren’t written up in decisions, so the information related to them is not generally publicly available online. This means that the information available on CanLII (or any source of caselaw) for subjects like sentencing is mostly for unusual matters and outcomes.”

In today’s tip, you’ll learn more about when and how criminal conviction and sentencing decisions are made …

1. Slow Down.The point is to use email to increase productivity, not be the fastest to respond.  Common courtesy is to respond within 24 hours.

2. Be Professional.Yes, that joke your buddy sent you last night was a hoot, but you should never forward such communications to business contacts.

3. Protect Your Friends. When sending a message to a group, do not disclose your recipient’s email addresses.  Use the “bcc” (blind carbon copy) field for multiple addresses and place your own email address in the “To” field.

4. Do Not Use “Forward to All” and “Reply to All” Functions.I