I’m going to check email for an hour until, “Oh, I have to take that call from the client. We’ve been playing phone tag. Hello?”, while I’m signing a cheque and your cell phone rings from that other client you said you would call back when you got out of the car. Back to email until I forgot to message that person back on my Facebook account about giving a quote.

Ah, the beauty of multi-tasking, says the first-born Aries!

It’s the thing that makes us all feel busy and useful and then we end our day accomplishing, nothing. Or, …

It’s astonishing how many people have trouble with personal pronouns.

Perhaps like Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, they think it’s somehow inelegant to say me – so the heroine of that classic book says ‘A girl like I’. But (between you and me) that’s wrong: it should be ‘A girl like me’, of course.

Others, faced with the awful choice between I and me, opt for what they think is the safer ground of myself. This is less wrong (if that’s possible), but not ideal – and it leads to weird constructions like ‘Mohammed and myself …

I have operated my practice as a paperless one since I opened shop in November 2011. I was not a techie (nor am I). I did not have a background in science or computers other than what I needed to get through university. I much preferred reading things on paper than a screen (there are a few physiological and psychological reasons why many of us do). I printed out all my reference material when I could do so on someone else’s dime.

Organizing digital documents and prepping them for disclosure is straightforward, with commonly-accepted practices. The ISO-standardized portable document format …

Summer students have just started at my firm. One of the things that we emphasize in training is that if they don’t understand what they have been asked to do, they need to go back to the lawyer and clarify the question. While it may be embarrassing to have to go back and ask, it’s far better than discovering that they’ve researched the wrong thing.

This principle doesn’t just apply to students. Library staff get asked questions that need to be clarified or elaborated on. Sometimes the person asking the question knows so much about the area, they assume everyone …

These days there’s no excuse for a bad social networking photo. A bad photo looks unprofessional and can diminish your chances with prospective clients. A good one can accentuate your personality. Your website bio, LinkedIn bio, and Facebook photo all communicate something about you to the public. Like it or not, we are judged partly by how we look. With a free app, a cell phone with a built-in camera, and some good technique, you can take a great bio photo. Here’s how.

1. The App: http://www.photofeeler.com/

Upload your photo to Photofeeler and other users will give feedback about whether your …

Verb endings: a small but tricky point.

If you’re from the USA, the practice (noun) of law is practiced (verb) by lawyers. If you’re from the UK, the practice is practised. Here in Canada, we see both verb forms – but preferred usage (by me, anyway) is to go British.

So, is it admitted to practice or admitted to practise? Either is defensible: the first means admitted to the practice of law, the second permitted to engage in practising. Practice is better in this context, on the grounds the noun is what people probably have in mind (although …

I’ve been working in and through the “cloud” since before it was called the cloud. First and foremost, I learned how to credibly publish to the web. If we haven’t met – google “legaltypist”…

I set up my service based company, LegalTypist, Inc., to be able to securely work with any attorney who could dial a toll-free number; and I amassed others who were like me to do the day to day tasks and typing of the law firms I set up on “the System” <-original I know, but the more technical name makes people’s eyes glaze over!

I picked …

Press releases are a good source of free current awareness alerts and a legitimate resource for understanding the intent of new legislation. I’m sharing a few of my favourite sources for timely and helpful press releases today. I’m a BC law librarian so I use these three sources often. Please share your own favourite sources for press releases for your area of Canada in the comments!

Supreme Court of Canada – There are two places you can sign up for press releases from the SCC, but if you want the most timely updates, get this one*, not this one…

♫ Love was out to get me
That’s the way it seemed.
Disappointment haunted all my dreams…♫

Music and lyrics by Neil Diamond and recorded by The Monkees.

I have a confession to make. While I love technology, I am not quite sure the feelings are mutual. You see, technology has come to disappoint me so many times that I am questioning its intentions. In fact it causes me concern when thinking of the rise of artificial intelligence. You see, if technology at its current level of development can be so confounding, what lies in store when technology …

Strive for neutrality, or at least balance.

As Richard Wydick suggests in his excellent Plain English for Lawyers, ‘many readers, both women and men, will be distracted and perhaps offended if you use masculine terms to refer to people who are not necessarily male.’

Wydick also notes that it’s equally distracting to use ‘clumsy efforts to avoid masculine terms’, or to use only feminine terms to redress imbalance (and the latter has a sort of law-school ring to it, which may not be what you’re aiming for). And we can safely leave the androgynous new coinages xe and hir…