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 …

The location of the gas cap on any car you own or drive regularly is probably second nature to you. But when you drive a rental car into a gas station, how do you know which side the gas cap is on? Can you spot it in the side view mirrors? Probably not. Do you need to get out and walk around the car to spot it? Absolutely not.
If you look on the fuel gauge of most modern vehicles, you will see a tiny fuel pump icon with a triangle on one side. That triangle points to the side …

Today’s Tip is about our languages thanks to a tweet from Susannah Tredwell, Manager of Library Service at Davis LLP in Vancouver.

Susannah shared news about TERMIUM Plus (R), the Canadian Government’s terminology and linguistic data bank.

What is in this data bank? According to the site:

• Almost 4 million English and French terms;
• More than 18,000 Portuguese terms;
• More than 200,000 Spanish terms;
• More than 4,000 monthly updates;
• Accurate, specialized and up-to-date terminology;
• The Government of Canada´s standardization tool;
• 17 diverse and user-friendly writing tools.

A quadralingual databank gives the precise English, French or Spanish or Portuguese equivalent …

Some people still worry about overcharging the batteries on their mobile devices. Those of us that have been around a bit longer will remember the days when you were supposed to fully charge and then fully discharge your batteries so they would maintain the ability to take and retain a full charge through many charging cycles. This was an issue that was necessitated by nickel-cadmium batteries, which are rarely used in modern devices.
Lithium-ion batteries are now found in most modern smartphones, tablets, laptops and other mobile devices. Charging your lithium ion battery after a partial discharge is totally fine. …

♫ He’s got this dream about buyin’ some land
He’s gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he’ll settle down, in some quiet little town
And forget about everything…♫

Lyrics, Music and recorded by Gerry Rafferty.

New Year’s Resolutions?  Phfft.  Been there, Done That, Got that T-Shirt.

We all resolve to get fit, lose weight and spend more time out of the office etc etc etc.  Speaking personally I have had my fill of resolutions that are born from the best of intentions but then die a cold …