A fantastic post by Marc Lauritsen that came my way via the Attorney at Work Daily Dispatch inspired Today’s Tip. Marc’s post asked readers to think about recent decisions they helped make and whether they did a good job of choosing.

Choices are part of every aspect and many, many moments of every day. In terms of legal research, deliberate choice should be a decision point that you make with each research question, each search string, and most importantly when planning your research path.

As Marc suggests:

Be mindful when you find yourself facing a choice. Don’t just think about

What data can be harvested from the typical smartphone? How can litigators utilize forensics to obtain this data for use in legal proceedings?

Two recent articles from Law Pro’s Tim Lemieux and Rob Lekowski of ABA’s Law Technology Today have looked at these questions and offer quite a bit of need-to-know information.

The typical mobile device retains information on the locations of all calls, all wifi-networks joined, photos taken, and apps that utilize location services.  Text messages – even those deleted – will remain on the device until overwritten, as will browsing histories. Even encrypted data may be accessible.

And …

A hat tip to Sandi Madvid, Supervisor of Edmonton Library Services for Parlee McLaws LLP for Today’s Tip. Sandi shared  that the Alberta Building Code 2014 and the Alberta Fire Code 2014 will be in force on May 1, 2015.  Considering my husband is a carpenter and uses the Building Code, I am surprised I didn’t known this was coming!

Some Canadian jurisdictions (including Alberta, obviously) model region specific codes on the National Building Code of Canada. Building Codes are usually only available for purchase and most (but not all) are available by subscription to an electronic version.

The Building …

This tip was inspired after answering a question from memory that I should have documented back in 2009.

As legal researchers, we find nuggets of useful information from sources that are both transparent and obscure.  Transparent because they are the logical source of the information we seek and obscure in that if we hadn’t connected with exactly the right person at the exactly right time we would not necessarily have found the information in the form or with the context that we did.

Document your sources in detail. Don’t trust that your memory will be available (or working properly) in …

Most of us spend many hours a day browsing the Web. If you are reading an article, or scanning through a long page, it is a pain to reach for the mouse and use the scroll bars, and hitting the down cursor key will only move you one line at a time. Not very fast or efficient.

There is an easier way – pressing the spacebar once will jump you down one screen. This works in all PC and Mac browsers regardless of how big your font size is. Hitting the spacebar once will magically jump you to a full …

The world of marketing remains a bit of a mystery for many legal professionals.  We know enough about it that many of us become do-it-ourselfers for our websites, blogs and even our branding.

Nonetheless, there is much we can learn from true marketing professionals.

To that end, I have the pleasure today of introducing the first in a series of videos on Marketing for Lawyers and Legal Professionals I’ve done with Sandra Bekhor of Bekhor Management and Toronto Marketing Blog. Sandra’s firm provides marketing and practice management services nationwide to lawyers and other professional practitioners.

In this installment, Sandra …

I am having a wonderful time in Maui this week with my family.  Today’s Tip is inspired by my Aunt Betty who reminded me that it is important that OTHER PEOPLE know what you are asking for.

You may know that the Hawaiian language uses fewer letters than English.  I confess to being completely baffled by local pronunciation.  Betty, on the other hand has visited this beautiful part of the world several times, and has mastered the phonetic discrepancies that twist my tongue.

This is the root of it:

a is always ahhhh
e is the long A
i  is …

♫  Look at that sky, life’s begun
Nights are warm and the days are young
Come get up my baby

Golden years, gold, whop whop whop
Golden years, gold, whop whop whop…♫

Lyrics, Music and recorded by David Bowie.

So many  articles on retirement all deal with the issue of finances and how to plan so you are not caught off guard on the money side.  Since that aspect has been explored in detail, this article is going to take us in a totally different direction. As lawyers, we get so much of our personal identity from simply being …

You spend good time and brain power creating a beautiful research work product. Then what happens?

Today’s Tip: think about where your words go.

Today’s Tip is brought to you by the office of my Outlook Junk Folder in conjunction with my Spam filter and my email rules. These offices are not hungry for YOUR content. With the extra efforts being made by organizations to comply with CASL, items are being scooped into spam quarantines that are not really spam.

This legal research tip is intended for readers as well as writers. Best of luck.…

It crept up on us slowly, but Skype has become an  indispensable technology in the modern law firm’s toolbox.

A bit of historical context will set the stage:

Launched in 2003, Skype was one of the first mass market freely available forms of internet video conferencing. It took advantage of early developments in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to allow users to communicate with each other using their microphones and webcams. Previously video conferencing had been prohibitively expensive for the general public and was largely only used by companies. The burgeoning popularity of broadband over the last few years