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 …

With Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation coming into force on July 1, 2014, you may have noticed an increasing number of “confirm your email” opt in messages. Though there is a transition period where consent to receive commercial electronic messages is implied, most organizations are getting their express consent ducks in a row.

Today’s Tip is to be list conscious…or more practically, think really hard before you decide to unsubscribe.

Personally, I am making sure that legal publishers I deal with are able to send me email. Though there are plenty of ways to stay up to date on new publications and …

Slowly scrolling through a webpage to find a specific term is not the most efficient or fastest way to find the location of the information you are looking for, especially if the page is a long one.
One simple keyboard shortcut can help you instantly find the location of specific terms on a webpage. Use Control+F on a PC or Command+F on a Mac to find specific terms on a webpage. Press this shortcut, enter your term in the search box, hit Enter and you will instantly jump to the first location of that term. Look for arrows next to …

♫  I want security, yeah
Without it I had a great loss, oh now
Security, yeah
And I want it at any cost, oh now…♫

Lyrics and music by: Margaret Wessen, Otis Redding; recorded by Otis Redding.

I have been giving a number of presentations lately that in part, deal with the (in)security of law firm systems.  This is based on the findings of the Legal Technology Resource Center of the ABA (“LTRC”) in their 2013 Legal Technology Survey.  They reported that 15% of reporting law firms acknowledged that they had a security leak.  43% reported being infected by a …

When you are citing a web resource, provide the URL – the whole URL that links directly to the document you are referencing.

What am I talking about? As an example, when you cite a federal regulation, you identify it with the SOR number not the page  number of the issue of the Canada Gazette that the regulation came from. The URL reference should be equally as direct in my opinion.  A hyperlink or URL that points to the SOR – in this case the HTML version of the individual regulation from the Gazette website – not the PDF link …

When you create a profile on LinkedIn, the default URL LinkedIn creates for your profile page will end with a jumble of letters and numbers. Yuck!
You can make your profile look more professional and have a profile URL that is easier to remember and share by claiming your own LinkedIn vanity URL. It will look like this: www.linkedin.com/in/yourname.
You can customize your public profile URL when you edit your public profile. Follow these steps:

• Move your cursor over your picture icon (to the left of the Share an update… box) and click on it. This takes you to your