It is a tricky thing to be asked a question that has a research component and be able to estimate how much time it will take to find and communicate an answer. Something that helps with estimating is knowing how much time a similar task encompased. Since, like most service industries, the legal industry tracks its time to help identify pricing structures and service value, why not use those time tracking devices to measure research time tasks and learn from the measuring?

Check out the Uniform Task Based Management System (UTBMS) – standards that were created to give …

When you are in low light conditions, a flash can be essential for taking a picture. But, in some circumstances, a flash can also be helpful in broad daylight, especially for portraits.

When taking pictures while on auto-flash in the daylight, your flash may not trigger. Your smartphone or DSLR simply decides there is enough light and it doesn’t fire the flash. But even in the daytime, you can end up with a dark face if your subject is in front of a bright background, or have shadows on one side of a face if your main light source is …

♫ Even though you’re going through hell
Just keep on going
Let the demons dwell
Just wish them well…♫

 Lyrics by Neil Peart, music by Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson, recorded by Rush.

Yesterday I taught the first class of the 2014 term on legal technology for the Internationally Trained Lawyer’s Program at the University of Toronto law school. We started the session with everyone giving a bit of background on who there are, where they went to law school, what type of law they practiced in their home country and hope to practice following their call here …

Legal research is only one piece of the larger part of answering a clients legal problem.  With  the growing trend of fixed fee pricing, alternative fee arrangements, and other pre-arranged cost structures for legal work, it is more important than ever for a researcher to know several things that don’t relate to the problem their research is attempting to answer:

1. Is there a fee arrangement that applies to the file being worked on
2. Will he client accept research disbursements
3. Is there a legal project budget that the research costs should fit into
4. Will recorded time  for the researcher be billed

If you buy something online, you will likely have to enter various details into a form of some sort (e.g., name, address, phone number, email, credit card number, etc.). This can be a tad tedious if there are many fields on the form – you type a few characters, stop, reach for the mouse, then navigate to and click on the next field, go back to the keyboard, type a few more characters, then repeat the process again, and again… There is a better way to navigate through a form – and you don’t have to use your mouse.
The …

So you met with a new litigation client.

Your first take on her proposed lawsuit was that liability was a virtual slam-dunk and that her damages would be assessed in the area of $25,000, maybe $30,000 if you “hit a home run.”

Conservatively, you advised your client of your opinion that her claims appeared to have a great deal of merit and that a court’s assessment would likely be in the $20,000 to $25,000 range.

So imagine your client’s shock – and yours – when a pre-trial judge ultimately opined that this claim wasn’t very strong at all.  In fact, …

Ah innovation.  For those of you with a smart phone in your pocket, remember that you have a camera on your device.  Why do I remind you of this?  Your phone (or tablet) camera can be used to:

• snap a picture of footnote citations
• take a ‘screen shot’ of a live presentation
• “scan” or copy a page of text from a print resource

Hat Tip to my colleague Mark Raven-Jackson.

App recommendation: Scanner Pro on my iPad works great and de-skews for the curve of thick volumes of the Canada Gazette – just saying. Cost $2.99…

Unfortunately, the camera on your mobile phone – and even your more expensive DSLR camera – just don’t see things well quite as well as your eyes do. So, what can you do to get better outdoor pictures? Getting more light on your subject by making sure the sun is behind you will greatly improve the quality of outdoor pictures. Of course, this doesn’t work for sunrises or sunsets, but by moving around a bit you can easily do this in many circumstances for outdoor pictures of people and other things.…

♫ more productive
comfortable
not drinking too much
regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)
getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
at ease
eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
a patient better driver…♫

Lyrics and Music by: Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway, recorded by Radiohead.

I don’t know about you, but I have been largely disillusioned by the ‘traditional’ ways of trying to be more productive. They have come to feel like, well, candy-coated panaceas. And frankly, if they worked, then all of us would be …

Back in the summer an Alberta bill was which caused the name of a decision making tribunal to change. For legal researchers, the important task is knowing what to look for regarding content, and often this means that you have to know who you are looking for.

This tribunal, now called the Alberta Energy Regulator has an excellent website with good methods for accessing their current and previous decisions. Decisions from this tribunal are also available with great coverage in LexisNexis Quicklaw.

Hat Tip for today’s tip goes to Quicklaw, especially for sending out content announcements like this one …