With the 10 year anniversary of Wise Law Blog rapidly approaching  this April, my thoughts have turned recently to the nuts and bolts of law blogging.

There are numerous articles online about the virtues of law blogging, and all the benefits becoming a blogger can bring to you and your firm.

These positives include increased profile, better optimization for your firm’s website, and the genuine professional advantage of being current and engaged in topics of interest to you and your clients.

There is somewhat less guidance online, however, on “how to blog.” Not surprisingly, this is a question new writers …

Lyonette Louis-Jacques posted some great strategies for finding an English translation of case law at Slaw. Today’s short legal research tip: Read Lyo’s Slaw post “How to Find Cases in English Translation, Revisited“…

Get a digital checkup.

Given this week’s news of attempts by “ransomware hackers” to extort payments from three British Colombia law firms by hijacking and blocking access to the firms’ confidential data, that will be my firm’s tech step #1 – and is my first Practice Tip – of the year.

Get a digital checkup.

Like it or not, law firms are increasingly vulnerable to malicious actors online; we are also perpetually vulnerable to the consequences of our own neglect within.

One solution to these very real threats is to institute an Annual Digital Checkup for your firm.

Have a …

There is some rumbling from Alberta this week. The Alberta Courts are no longer publishing decisions on their website, but rather redirecting visitors to CanLII.  The rumbling comes from the seeming abruptness of this move, and the worry over whether decisions will be available as quickly for browsing on CanLII as they were on the Courts website – not about the change itself.

As a process improvement professional, I am the last person who would make a negative comment about change.  How a change project is executed is another matter.

Having CanLII as the primary public source for  Alberta …

Anyone who has spent a lot of time using Excel will occasionally make and error when entering data or a formula. Thankfully, Excel is programmed to tell you that you made a mistake, and it will even give you an error message that will suggest what the problem is. These are the error messages that Excel will give you, and an explanation of what they mean:

• ###### = value is too long to display (make the column wider to fix this)
• #VALUE = the wrong type of argument or operand has been used
• #DIV/0! = a formula divides by 0

I have been reading in the area of Lean Six Sigma lately and have come to the conclusion that good legal research practices and good project management skills have wide overlap. An excellent article from the May 2014 issue of Quality Progress by H. F. Ken Machado titled Plan of Attack: Managing the anatomy of your key projects is fundamental to organizational success has reinforced my conclusion.

Typically, the organizations cannot afford to work on all priority requirements that demand attention. At the same time, certain projects stand out because they are fundamental to business success. For those projects, the

For the last 3 legal research tips of 2014 I decided to give my opinion of the 3 most critical personal characteristics for being a successful legal researcher. I think the most important personal characteristic is integrity.

Integrity means that you do what you promise. You are ethical, honest, decent, and appropriate. You ask for help when you need to, regardless of what your ego suggests. You are dependable.  If you provide an answer, it is as correct and complete as it can possibly be and you are open about limits to your capabilities.

Integrity in answering a legal research …

For the last 3 legal research tips of 2014 I decided to give my opinion of the 3 most critical personal characteristics for being a successful legal researcher. I think the second most important personal characteristic is persistence.

Persistence means that you are devoted to an activity, persevering, tenacious, dedicated, determined, unwavering. You are intent on answering the question.

If you are not persistent in answering a legal research problem, there is potential to find an answer rather than the best answer for your client.  It will be easy to take the path of least resistance to an answer.  Let’s …

I was reminded earlier this week of the sage advice of one of my early mentors on the topic of “file avoidance,” a very particular form of procrastination that tends to attach itself to specific tasks on specific files.

He said:

“There will be files that you encounter in your career that, for one reason or another, you simply avoid.

“There may be no reason for it. You have tasks to be done and you absolutely know  how to do them.  But for one reason or the other, you never quite get to those files.

“They seem to linger and