September has arrived, ushering in a new season, and, after our summer reprieves, the beginning of a new work cycle.

Whether you are a sole practitioner, a new lawyer, or the managing partner at a large firm, September is also an optimal time for big-picture reflection, planning and setting new goals.

On a smaller scale, however, it occurs to me there are a few simple  things we can all do that could be as positively impactful on our professional successes (and satisfaction) as the most elaborate of strategic plans.

In that vein, here are my tips for September:

1. Help make

I recently did some work for one of my colleagues and was reminded how great it feels when you do something and get feedback. Today’s tip is to give feedback. Often, legal research is shared among many and giving feedback will reinforce all the positive aspects of sharing access to work product.

If you are using someone else’s prior work as part of your research, let them know that it was helpful. Let them know that by properly citing the cases and legislation you were able to note things up. Let them know that by listing the texts and other …

Today’s short legal research tip is this:

You will find better answers to questions if you know Why you are asking them in the first place.

Understanding the motivation for an answer that is hidden behind a question helps reveal biases, suppositions, assumptions and missing inputs that, if misunderstood, lead to incomplete, incorrect, and inefficiently gathered results.

I think about this whenever I momentarily worry that artificial intelligence will make librarians obsolete.…

♫ One ringy-dingy…two ringy-dingies…♫

Ernestine/Miss Tomlin (Lily Tomlin on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in).

How long should you wait before you return a telephone call?  According to Debra J. Schmidt, Loyalty Leader:

“Returning phone calls used to be a common courtesy. Now, busy people claim they don’t have the time. I don’t buy that excuse. I’ve found that the most successful, busy people I know are the ones I can rely on to return my call the same day. It’s a matter of setting priorities.”

Indeed! What could be …

If you are doing research in the area of human rights, you might find HuriSearch a useful addition to your toolbox.

HuriSearch offers a fairly sophisticated front end, allowing you to query any of four types of source (NGOs, national human rights institutions, academic institutions, and intergovernmental organizations), search in any of sixteen languages, and use word variations if you wish. As well, search results can be filtered by facets: source type, source organization, country, and document format. Furthermore, you’re offered a permalink to your search and an RSS feed, so that you can stay up-to-date.

To my joy (and …

Finding an expert or seeing if an expert has been qualified as such can be a challenging legal research exercise. Here are some tips and links to help you.

Tip 1

Use the Canadian Expert Witness Directory through Litigator on WestlawNext Canada. The directory links to cases the expert has been qualified in. You need a WNC password and access to the Litigator component for  this of course, but it is a great place to start.

Tip 2

To find out if there are experts on your issue whose expertise has been qualified by the courts, search on CanLII …

Today’s tip is for health care practitioners whose patients are involved in litigation.

We recognize that it might be natural, and even good practice, for medical practitioners to ask their patients how their lawsuits are going.

Particularly for those practitioners who provide counselling, these discussions may be essential to your work.

Lawsuits can weigh heavily upon the psyches of those who find themselves involved in the legal system. The litigation itself can be very foreign and stressful. The future may in a very real way hinge on the outcome of their lawsuits. There may even be stressful issues between your …

Today’s research tip is more about research output than gathering. Do not be afraid to use colour to add visual clues to your research output. Using coloured text or tables is not appropriate for pleadings of course, but why not present your client with some visual clues in your opinions?

For instance, a table showing research results representing a quantum of damages could have background colour with the high low and mid-range results.  If your organization incorporates colour into your brand, this colour wheel will help with shading.

For instance, if your colour is purple, shading a table or even …

♫ Cell phone’s dead
Lost in the desert
One by one…♫

Lyrics and music by Beck Hensen.

[Image courtesy of holohololand at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]

Having just returned from a long tenting camping vacation where my Blackberry was dead for most of the trip, I thought I would pass along some tips on how to avoid the kind of experience that I just went through.

Notwithstanding that we were travelling with both an iPhone and a Blackberry and charging them equally in the vehicle when on the road (courtesy of having USB connectors that …

Thanks to Sooin Kim, Faculty Services Librarian with the Bora Laskin Law Library, University of Toronto there is another type of link creation tool to share.  Thess tools are made for a specific purpose – to assist with building links to material that will be used at law schools.

Sooin shared the WestlawNext Link Creator https://lawschool.westlaw.com/admin/wllinkcreator/wllinkcreator.aspx. It is a nifty little tool that will build a link to a specific citation, a KeyCite record, a particular database or to a specific query.  It also offers the link in three formats: URL, Iframe, and Hypertext link with all of …