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

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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 …

This is a New Year…the time to resolve to (finally) go paperless.

What are some of the benefits that can be achieved by moving to a paperless document office?

Cut Your Storage Costs

Paper takes up space.  Paper legal files take up lots of space.  Space is expensive.  Cut out the need to store paper and you  have cut your costs.  Especially if you are simply storing closed files for regulatory and insurance requirements.

Moving to creating, filing, searching and storing legal files in a digital form means cutting your costs to simply store all that information in paper form.…

I confess to being a skim-a-holic. I find personal satisfaction in having a really good idea what people in the legal industry are talking, thinking, and writing about.

The problem is that there is a ton of new information. If 3 hours of video is uploaded per minute to YouTube just from mobile devices, how do you determine what to pay attention to? If there are 500,000 new blog posts each day, which are the most meaningful to your work?

My method for narrowing the flood of information to the most succinct and ‘important to me’ trickle is to …

No doubt you have all made – or at least thought about making – a few New Year’s resolutions. Hopefully one of them is to make a backup of your data. You do have a backup – don’t you???
Now I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I know at least a few of you don’t backup of your data, or perhaps you have an older backup. If you are one of these people, make plans to backup your data now! It is critical to remember that for love, time or money, you can’t easily or cheaply recreate …

This is a new year. A time to make positive resolutions to take you to your future. Part of building the bridge to your future is to outline your expected income and expenses for the next 12 months by building a Budget and then tracking your actual income and expenses against that budget.

I usually talk about currency from the “the quality or state of being current” perspective. Today, I used the Bank of Canada Currency Converter to look at the exchange rate which leads me to today’s tip that deals with another definition of currency:

Look to the Bank of Canada site for money issues.

• The Currency Converter offers exchange rates, current and historical.
• The Inflation Calculator is an excellent tool to determine what the present day value of a monetary award from a past decision is equivalent to in today’s dollars
• Canadian interest rates are available using a 10 year lookup

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