I had the pleasure of sitting down for a chat on Monday about knowledge management with Canada’s reigning Information Diva, Connie Crosby.

The video of our discussion is embedded below:

The focus of our conversation was how Canada’s smaller law firms can utilize current knowledge management approaches to better identify, organize and access their own, valuable knowledge inventories – their precedents, checklists, document templates, research memos, and other key data.

Connie is principal of Crosby Group Consulting, a Toronto-based firm, specializing in knowledge management, information management, social media and library management. She is a law librarian, Slaw…

Today’s tip is a quick reminder to think about the British/Canadian and US spellings and how that might affect your search string.

offence = offense

Offense in CanLII finds 227Alberta Appeal court decisions.
Offence in CanLII finds 4433 Alberta Appeal court decisions.

Happy Wednesday!

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Predicting the weather is both an art and a science, and getting it right in the longer term can involve some luck. But in the shorter-term, knowing for sure whether some rain is coming your way can be very helpful. Should I head to the golf course? Is my kid’s baseball game going to get cancelled? Do I take an umbrella for the walk to the subway?
My go-to resource for answering these kinds of questions is Government of Canada Canadian Weather Radar page for Ontario. It has a map of Ontario overlaid with current storms and links to …

After much planning, and at least one eyeball fixed at all times on weather reports foreshadowing thunder, lightning, rain (and lions tigers and bears, oh my!) our Wise Law Office Backyard Retreat finally enjoyed its inaugural debut last Sunday.

I expect to have several SlawTips posts in the weeks ahead on the actual topics we discussed and the action plan that continues to emerge.

For today, I’m going to focus on the agenda, which is reproduced below.

WISE LAW OFFICE BACKYARD RETREAT AGENDA – June 8, 2014

11:00am – 11:15am – Introduction and objectives for the day (Garry)

11:15am –

The very first Research Tip on this blog was about reading the URL.  That advice is the same today as it was back in January 2011.  Understanding ‘where’ on the web you are getting information from is a useful skill.

Dan has written about phishing and there is a a good twist on Lifehacker that discusses how to boost your phishing detection skills.  The skill set boils down to reading the URL and being aware of where you are vs. where you want to be.

What does this have to do with legal research? Reading a URL and understanding …

As a supplement to their great book, the 2014 Solo and Small Firm Legal Tech Guide (published by American Bar Association), my good friends Sharon D. Nelson and John W. Simek will share their take on the best current PC or Mac hardware options for desktops, servers or laptops. To get this informative document, simply send an email to sensei@senseient.com requesting the “current specs.”
Thanks Sharon and John for this very helpful resource!…

♫ These are the people of Walmart
Through mark downs, roll backs, and shopping carts
These are the people of Walmart
Where we save money and shop smart only at Walmart…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Jessica Frech.

They teach you in business school to carefully evaluate your ‘marketing mix”. When it comes to a law firm’s marketing mix, the discussion is typically centred around the 7 P’s of law firm service marketing:

• Product
• Promotion
• Place
• Price
• Physical Evidence
• People
• Processes

What is unique in North America is that there is a law firm – …

One of the things that we teach at Head Start* programs is how to limit searching to the most relevant set of data that will lead quickly to an answer. Today’s Tip is to remember that a data set limit might be a jurisdiction, court level or date range or it could be deciding to look first to digests of cases rather than a full text source.

A student recently asked how many cases to use in a memo to illustrate his research findings.  My response: only as many as you need to show binding or if not binding then …

On many occasions over the years I have written and spoken about the benefits of using two monitors in a law office setting – for both lawyers and staff.
Once you try two monitors, you will never go back. Having two monitors makes the preparation of documents, particularly complicated legal documents, much easier. When you can have the document you’re drafting on one screen and your legal research results on the other, it becomes a snap to cut and paste text directly from one to the other. Turn one of the monitors ninety degrees (“portrait” orientation). This allows you to …

We’re going to try something different next month – the First Annual Wise Law Office Backyard  Retreat.

It will be a day-long, out-of-office session to explore planning and teamwork and to ask to ourselves some fundamental questions about what it is that we do as a law office.

There will, of course be food and festivity too, but ultimately, it will be an opportunity for our lawyers and staff to put our collective heads together to do some creative, directed brainstorming.

In the planning stages for this event, I’m having lots of thoughts as to the issues we should be …