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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I travel a lot. When I ‘m on a tight schedule and need to know all my options, getting all available flights by time and a cost across multiple airlines in one place is invaluable. For business and personal travel, Kayak and TripAdvisor are two of my favourite travel resources for doing multiple-airline flight searches. You pick your dates of travel and desired departure and/or arrival times, and these sites give you a searchable and sortable list of available flights from most of the major airlines. I find Kayak and TripAdvisor tend to give very similar results, although sometimes one …

As we head for the end of the year, your mind is probably already turning to things you’d like to change in the new year.  We think that aiming for an empty inbox each afternoon is one of the best resolutions you can make.

The holy grail of current email management is the empty inbox.  This is often referred to as Zero Inbox, RAFT (Refer, Act, File or Toss) or OHIO (Only Handle It Once).  The idea behind all these systems is that you deal with each item in your …

Today’s Tip: Consider how you need a decision to help determine where to get it.

An announcement from the SCC last week inspired this tip:

Major addition to the Supreme Court of Canada decision’s website

The Supreme Court of Canada and Lexum are proud to announce that the Court’s decision website now contains all decisions back to 1907. Moreover, all the PDF versions of decisions up to 2010 are identical to the official version available in the Supreme Court Reports.
This major content addition has been made possible thanks to the support of the Supreme Court of Canada. The Court

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As we approach Christmas our thoughts, of necessity, turn to giving, receiving and gratitude.  These sentiments are the inspiration for this week’s tip.

Open a file (OK, maybe an email folder) just to save all the cards and letters (or electronic communications) from satisfied clients, the replies from speaking engagements, the letter from the Little League team your firm supported, anything that demonstrates that you are making a positive difference in the lives of others.

Practicing law is not always, or even often, easy.  But as we always say, “What gets measured gets done.”  Start measuring the impact that you …

Are you the most busy lawyer in Canada? Do you still need to know what is going on in the legal industry in our country?

The US Legal Market offers busy lawyers a 5 minute daily visit of the RSS feed for the legal gossip blog Above the Law to keep up to date on what is happening inside the legal industry. Associate bonuses, policies from big law firms, law firm mergers, layoffs and closures.

Here in Canada, we have 140Law – a daily offering of legal headlines offered as a roundup post on the Wise Law Blog by Garry …