Last week I posted about Legal Research Technology Skills. After reading Sarah Glassmeyer’s post on Slaw about The Future of Legal Practice and Technology for Law Professors. Today’s Tip is about technology concepts that I think are necessary for legal researchers. Concepts are things that a legal researcher should understand and have a rough idea of how they apply to legal research.

1. Document automation (including software and word processing tools like fields and macros)
2. Document management (what is kept within your organization) and content management (how are web sites, intranets and other content rich sources built)
3. Open source

I’ve previously blogged at Slaw Tips on the virtues of using Siri’s dictation functions to draft letters, emails and other documents typically created in day-to-day legal practice.

In short, dictation with Siri has increased my productivity, precision  and the overall quality of my work product.

For those who are similarly inclined, I wanted to share a great list of Siri commands that can be used for punctuating as you dictate.  With kudos and credit to iPhone Tricks, here is a partial excerpt:

Punctuation and Commands

Below you can find an extended list of punctuation and commands that iPhone’s voice recognition

Sarah Glassmeyer recently posted on Slaw about The Future of Legal Practice and Technology for Law Professors. Her opening salvo:

One of my pet peeves is when people throw around the word “technology” as a catch all to mean anything that can or will involve a computer. A common pattern is “In X number of years, this task will be replaced by TECHNOLOGY.” The speakers very rarely get into specifics as to when technology they mean. Personally, I like to amuse myself by replacing “technology” in these statements with “magic fairies.” Actually, I think fairies are more likely to

♫ I just want the simple things..♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Miguel.

This post continues the theme of innovative  technology for lawyers.  John Heckman, a legal technology consultant for whom I have a great deal of respect recently wrote in his blog “Does it Compute” a piece entitled:
Technophobe and Proud Of It — the Consequences.  He states that there are “attorneys whose willful refusal to become conversant with their firm’s technology will drag down its productivity and ability to respond to client needs.” John then quotes Sharon Nelson, another good friend and legal technologist who …

I despise long deadlines for legal research projects. Give me a complex project that has to be completed by the end of the week over a complex project that I must pick away at over a month or two any day.  Why? With a longer project I must use formal project management – on myself.

Project managing a short deadline individual research question is easy to mentally manage by scripting the activity as “the research process”.  To be clear, I am speaking of the type of legal research that is often assigned to junior lawyers, law students or law librarians. …

♫  Good lookin’, so refined
Say wouldn’t you like to know whats going on in my mind?
So let me get right to the point
I don’t pop my cork for every guy I see
Hey Big Spender
Spend, a little time with me…♫

Music and lyrics by:  Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, from Sweet Charity.

This column starts what I hope will be a series of columns on new and innovative technologies for lawyers.

The kickoff column in this series deals with WordRake.

WordRake is editing software for lawyers.

Most of us have to write for a …

A post from the daily blog from Harvard Law Schools Program on Negotiation offer this advice regarding when negotiators assume too much:

One pitfall is that decision makers often overlook others’ viewpoints. When we do take others’ thinking into account, we tend to assume that they know as much as we do. For this reason, marketing experts are generally worse than non-expert consumers at predicting the beliefs, values, and tastes of consumers.

Similarly, individuals who correctly solve a problem overestimate the percentage of their peers who will be just as successful solving the same problem .

This advice resonates for …

Many of us have sent angry or nasty comments in a Gmail email, only to regret it moments after hitting Send – or you remember that you didn’t attach the attachment you referenced in the email (hate with that happens!). If you have ever found yourself in either of these situations, rejoice, because Gmail’s Undo Send feature will help prevent them from happening again.
This handy feature delays the sending of your messages by 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds, thereby giving you a small window during which you can hit an “undo” button to prevent your message from going …

Which email client does your law office use?

I raise this question, as the purchase of a new computer for my desktop has necessitated the migration of all my emails – around 20 Gigs worth – to my new machine.

Out of habit, if nothing else, we have used Windows Live Mail as my office’s email client of choice.

While I suspect MS-Outlook has long been most lawyers’ preferred email software, I was always fond of Outlook Express, the predecessor to Windows Live Mail. When OE was discontinued, we migrated to Windows Live Mail as the path of least …

I’ve been travelling in the Maritime this pas week. Like many places, if you are unfamiliar with the particulars of a place, sometimes signs make absolutely no sense.  For instance, the subtle differences in Sydney River, North Sydney, Sydney Mines and Sydney can be just a bit confusing when viewing a map that shows New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, and Quebec.

One of the best ways to navigate is to ask directions. It helps put the scale and scope into proper perspective.

This works for legal research too.

Happy travels.…