Today’s Tip is about looking outside your borders for trends. You decide where your borders are – your department, your organization, your city, perhaps your country.

A tweet by Darin Thompson inspired this post:

@darin_thompson: It’s on! #ODR to become a part of the legal landscape in the European Union
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-192_en.htm?locale=en

I believe that Online Dispute Resolution and Alternative Dispute Resolution are trends to watch. What trends are you watching?…

You can retweet something in an instant with just a few taps or clicks. Tap, tap and zoom – the RT goes to all your followers. You get a good feeling when you retweet something that your followers will enjoy or find really helpful.

But, what if the link in the retweet doesn’t exactly say what the tweet suggests it does? Or, what if the contents of the link make statements that you just don’t agree with? Or, what if the tweet suggests the link contains something really good, but it really is a few hollow statements making a weak …

Moving beyond Cooperation

Collaboration has many benefits. There are a few pitfalls and difficulties to avoid.  But with solid leadership, a law firm can overcome the potential difficulties and achieve real results by adopting a collaborative model.

According to Morten T. Hansen, author of “Collaboration – How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results“, the goal of collaboration is not collaboration but greater results.  Greater results is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if you are able to successfully adapt your firm to the new model.

(GJW:  With better result…

I have mentioned in the past that calling a friend can be a fast path to a research answer.  It can also be a quick path to resolution of a technical problem. With email and web forms being the new normal for business communication, it may simply be that a phone call or well thought out voicemail message is different enough to be ‘noticed’.

As an example, we have been having technical problems with a website database recently.  The form to report technical difficulty used several times garnered zero response.  A voice mail message to the organization did set a …

Keeping your hands on the keyboard is always faster than reaching to the mouse for a few clicks. Here are some handy keyboard shortcuts for basic navigation in Microsoft Outlook:

• Switch to Mail: CTRL+1
• Switch to Calendar: CTRL+2
• Switch to Contacts: CTRL+3
• Switch to Tasks: CTRL+4
• Switch to Notes: CTRL+5
• Switch to Folder List in Navigation Pane: CTRL+6
• Switch to Shortcuts: CTRL+7
• Next item (with item open): CTRL+COMMA
• Previous item (with item open): CTRL+PERIOD
• Switch between the Folder List and the main Outlook window: F6 or CTRL+SHIFT+TAB
• Move among the Outlook window, the Navigation Pane, and the Reading Pane: TAB

Collaboration: Breaking Each Task Down into its Many Parts

Picking up on last week’s post,  let us start with a basic assumption – there’s nothing ad hoc about how successful law practice groups collaborate.

It takes real planning and repetition to create an optimal, collaborative work-flow routine.

Now, by practice group, we don’t necessarily mean anything highfaluting.

In a solo practice, it may simply be a lawyer and a single assistant.  Or a single lawyer and outsourced collaborators. A larger group model, operating as a stand-alone boutique or as one corner within a larger firm structure, might involve a senior …

We all have them – those days where it feels like your imagination shrugs its metaphorical shoulders, gives you an apologetic half-grin, and heads to Fiji. You’re stuck – you can’t engage with your work, or generate new ideas. Douglas Adams described it best: The Long, Dark Tea-time of the Soul. Here are a few tips to help you endure.

• Set the bar low – this isn’t going to last forever, so don’t be your worst enemy. Populate your to-do list with tasks that don’t require a lot of creativity, but still make you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

In the top left corner of most PC and Mac keyboards is the humble and underused Escape key. It is labelled Esc on PC keyboards and esc on Mac keyboards.
On both PCs and Macs, pressing the Escape key usually cancels or aborts the current operation. To put it another way, the Escape key is the “get me outta here” option for many things. These include closing an open dialog box, getting rid of a button-less splash screen and closing a menu that you clicked on.
In most browsers, hitting the Escape key will stop a page from downloading. This …

Collaboration: An introduction.

It’s a pleasure to commence my SlawTips collaboration with David Bilinsky by focussing on…

What else?

Collaboration: Law firm, style.

And by that I simply mean assessing how your practice group works together, and seeing whether adding some planning, systems and efficiencies might increase the sum of your group’s parts.

We’ll be looking at this in a bit of depth over the next few weeks.  For now, an introduction.

Allow me to pose some serious questions at the outset.

How does your law firm optimize its intra-firm collaborations? Does your practice group really work together? Do …

The fastest path is one that you have already traveled. The sign posts are familiar and likely the vehicle as well. You will know how to get where you are going and likely how long your trip will be. This is as true for legal research as it is for your daily commute.

Look to your prior work product. While each client has a unique situation, there are enough similarities in the issues that they bring you that you will be able to use your experience for the best research outcomes.

Keep and search your work product (research memos, opinion …