I have a pretty easy time monitoring Canadian case law that is of interest to people in my organization. RSS feeds for CanLII searches or to monitor court output, good newsletters available from commercial legal publishers both in print and online, and the great sharing services offered by lawyers and firms, for example:

• Supreme Advocacy Letter created and distributed by Eugene Meehan and his team
• The Rules Newsletter offered by Alberta firm Jensen Shawa Solomon Duguid Hawkes LLP

For global case law that you should know about, look to the law blogs. A great example of how law blogs can …

If you routinely print two or more kinds of documents, each requiring its own printer settings, you’ve probably found it frustrating to have to re-enter or change printer properties every time you change documents.
There is actually a very simple trick to
avoid having to do this. Simply install the same printer two or more times, but with different names and settings. This way, you simply select the “printer” that has the appropriate print settings you want each time you print.
To install a printer with new print settings in Windows, go to Start, Settings, Printers, and click the Add …

This is the first of two tips dealing with personal time management.

There are two big difficulties when it comes to time management and trying to fit in all the tasks that we have to do in our lives.

One is procrastination (trying to start a task) and the other is dealing with interruptions (trying to finish a task).

This post deals with procrastination.

In order to start dealing with procrastination, you need to come to an understanding when you are procrastinating on a task in order to start to take steps to correct it.

So: …

A press release received in my email inbox inspired today’s tip. Because I subscribe to an email list used by Canadian law libraries (CALL-L – an open list, more info here), I received the following press release:

APLIC/ABPAC releases its Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal (GALLOPP/PPGPE): A key resource for locating Canadian and Provincial Government Publications.

The Association of Parliamentary Libraries in Canada (APLIC) is proud to announce the release of its unique pan-Canadian bilingual government and legislative publications portal known as GALLOPP (Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal) / PPGPE (Portail des publications gouvernementales et

I am a Blackberry person, and I’m holding out (with great patriotic hope) for a new BB10 Blackberry with a real keyboard (apparently there is a model with a real keyboard). I like the real keys on my Blackberry Torch. I have tried onscreen keyboards and find they are frustrating. I find them to be non-responsive and I hit often seem to hit the wrong key.

All that said (and to avoid a flurry of unfriendly comments from the platoons of iPhone and Android users, and the occasional Windows phone users that are out there),I recognize there are different strokes …

In talking to hundreds of law firms, I am struck by a common theme.

Many of these firms have tried to implement change, only to be faced by staff (i.e. lawyers in most, but not all, cases) who refuse to go along with the change and still do things the old way.

What may be right for them (after all, the resisters don’t have to learn anything new and can continue to work as they always did) is almost always against the interests of the firm.  The firm ends up maintaining dual systems (and doubling the …

Today’s Tip comes from Melanie Bueckert, Legal Research Counsel, Manitoba Court of Appeal. Melanie shared a story about looking for citing cases:

I wanted to know if the Supreme Court of Canada had ever cited its decision in F.H. v McDougall, 2008 SCC 53. So I headed over to Quicklaw, pulled up the QuickCite record and filtered it by “Supreme Court of Canada”. There was one result from 2011.

Just to be thorough, I thought I would check Westlaw to see if there was anything more recent. This is not an easy task, as you likely know. I found the

Email is a primary means of communication for most lawyers. It is a fantastic tool. You can easily and almost instantly communicate across the globe with your client and other people involved in a legal matter. You can send different types of attachments. And if you have a smartphone, you can send and reply to emails from just about anywhere on the face of the planet (assuming you have wireless or internet access).
But email can be dangerous – and one of the most dangerous features is blind carbon copy or BCC. I will assume everyone knows what BCC is …

This phrase is usually associated with too much merrymaking – particularly cutting off the intake of intoxicating spirits – but it can have real application to your law practice.  In essence, it means to think about what you’re doing and whether you should continue down that path or make some changes.

The beginning of a new year is a good time to take a hard look at your practice and your clients, and decide whether things are “in balance.”  If things are running smoothly and you are making money and happy with what you are doing, then they probably are.  …

One of the things that we are careful to do in the Field Law Libraries is to make sure that the output of research is the way that it is needed. There is no sense in providing a printed copy of something if the requester wants to send a tweet about it. Likewise, there is little use in sending someone a short URL if they need to attach something to a printed brief.

Today’s Research tip crosses into technology: Try using Storify to capture information where your research sources are from social medias or the web.

To see a sample …