A note about an infographic was delivered to me by email yesterday. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation website www.fightspam.gc.ca. The infographic touted in the email was titled “Worried its Spam? 5 Things to Look for”.
Sharing the infographic was encouraged in the email. Sharing is what infographics are all about.

Gyi Tsakalakis has a fantastic collection of Law Infographics on his Pinterest channel. Gyi has jsut started contributing to Attorney at Work. Gyi’s byline for his Optimize!column:

Gyi Tsakalakis helps lawyers put their best foot forward online because clients are looking for them there. He is a co-founder

One of our fellow PMAs recently shared a group photo that was taken almost 15 years ago.  It prompted us to think about that meeting, and some of our former colleagues who have gone on to other employment in other industries.  One such person is Diane Ellis, a brilliant lady who once worked with the Arizona State Bar and is now a successful psychologist and counselor.  The following is a tip that she was the mastermind behind, and it’s probably even more useful now than it was when she first coined it.  We’ve spiffed it up a little to take …

My browser is crowded with so many links in my favourites bar that sometimes it is faster to type a known URL than scroll for my link. Typing “parl.gc.ca” in the address bar of my browser inspired today’s tip. My shortcut to the parliamentary website skips directly to English, my sadly unilingual preferred language. As you can see below though, the beginning of the site has “important notices“…something that could be overlooked.

Click the image to enlarge.

Today’s Tip: Start at the beginning. …

You can actually tag anyone in a photo, even if they don’t have a Facebook account. If you type in the name of someone who is not one of your Facebook friends when tagging a photo, you have the option of listing their email address. When you are done tagging the photo, they will receive an email that provides a link to the image. They will be able to see the photos in which they are tagged, but nothing else on the site, unless, of course, they get their own Facebook account.
Learned this while writing an article on Facebook …

In writing this tip, we are cognizant that today is American Thanksgiving and that Canadian Thanksgiving was not all that long ago.  Of the authors, one of us is American and one is Canadian. Accordingly it seemed appropriate to focus today’s tip on the act of giving thanks.

What is giving thanks?  It is also called gratitude, thankfulness, gratefulness or appreciation. It is a feeling of genuinely and positively acknowledging the acts of another.  It costs nothing but means everything.  In some cases it can never be felt or acknowledged by those whose acts you are appreciating – such as …

As the shelf sign says, not all tips are online. Remember to read the notes provided by your law library.…

There are many ways to orient your practice.  Many lawyers set up their practices around their needs in terms of producing legal work. This is all quite natural since you need to be working in this environment at all times – it makes sense to set things up so you put your needs first so you are working as effectively and efficiently as possible – right?

Wrong.

Advisor after advisor states that to exceed client expectations – to have clients who truly sing your praises to others – you need to place your own needs second behind those of your …

I am often asked by folks touring through my firm’s library, or in airports, or at various events, if we still buy books. I am always a little surprised by the question. We live in the world of Chapters and Amazon – books are a major player in the retail market – of course we buy books for our law firm library.

We have a rule about books, we buy a title if we are going to use it 3 or more times a year. This seems a reasonable tipping point for pain to borrow vs. pain to buy.

Have you ever needed or wanted to look at a previous version of a website? This is easily done on the Way Back Machine (archive.org)

It allows you to browse through
over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. Just type in the web address of a site or page and hit enter. (Unfortunately, keyword searching is not currently supported.) You will see a listing of dates that archives for that page or site are available for. Click on a link and you are surfing in the past. And the resulting pages point to other …

There is much interest in taking a law firm paperless today and for good reason.  Moving to the digital or paperless practice of law offers many benefits and cost-savings in addition to being *green*.

We find that when starting to talk about going paperless, the discussion typically becomes mired in details such as: ­e-document formats (Adobe Acrobat PDF/A — the archival PDF format), the media on which the electronic documents are to be stored (locally? backed up onto a remote device? on the cloud?), scanners, remote access, security  and the like. Some firms want to discuss using  electronic storage only …