Are you frequently late for meetings and appointments? “My lawyer made me wait” is an all too common client complaint. Being late all the time is something that will really annoy clients – and other lawyers too.
For those of you that get lost in the demands of a busy schedule, there is a simple trick you can use to avoid being late for things: When setting a meeting or appointment, remember to set a reminder or alert as well.
Most calendar programs have a feature that lets you add a reminder or alert to each meeting or appointment entry. …

I would like to take this moment to introduce my new joint columnist, Garry J. Wise of Toronto.  As you gentle readers would know, my long-time collaborator and friend Laura A. Calloway recently resigned from this column due to growing work demands.

A bit about my friend and new collaborator:

Garry J. Wise was called to the Ontario Bar in 1986, and practices with Wise Law Office, a Toronto litigation firm that focuses on Employment Law, Family Law, Estates Litigation and Civil Litigation.

He is primary contributor to the award-winning Wise Law Blog, which features daily legal news updates and …

Today’s Tip is a follow-up from a theme that I see running through recent Research tips.

The theme is about WHO. Who can you go to for a quick answer, who do you trust to be your source for information, who is the person that inspires you or inspire your confidence.

I posted yesterday at Slaw about being inspired by Stephen Abram recently. Perhaps Stephen is one of the people that inspire you as well. If you are looking for a great place to be inspired, consider attending the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Annual Conference in Montreal May 5-8, …

Photos uploaded to Facebook don’t always appear how you want them when they are displayed on your Timeline. Photos, and especially wide photos, will be cropped so they fit in a square box on the Timeline. This may cut off a part of the photo that you want displayed.
Don’t fret – there is an easy way to fix. Place your mouse over the update containing the photo you want to adjust. Click on the “Edit” icon (the pencil) in the top right corner of the update. You will see a “Reposition Photo” option. Click on this, then slide your …

In my last post, I dealt with the issue of procrastination as being the first hurdle in terms of task management.  In this second part of the post, we are dealing with all the interruptions that happen to you once you have started on the path to accomplish a task.

Now that you finally have your job started, how do you manage the inevitable interruptions that are keeping you from finishing?  To do this, you must take control of your boundaries and space. People have long noticed the difficulty in dealing with interruptions:

“Life is a series of interruptions interrupted …

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 …