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 …

Email attachments are wonderful things. Long gone of the painful and inefficient days of snail-mail and sending faxes (Perhaps dating myself here.) With just a few clicks, you can almost instantly send a document, picture or computer file of umpteen other different formats to one or more people located anywhere on the planet. This is truly amazing – and we do take it for granted.
And thankfully, our e-mail administrators have increased attachment size limits. Do you remember when you could only send attachments that were under 1Meg or even 500k? (Probably dating myself again here.) You still can’t send …

As Hurricane Sandy barrels down on the east coast and BC is still gently trembling from last week’s earthquake, we can’t help but advise you to think about what would happen if a disaster were to take place in your city, to take a look at what plans you currently have in place to cope, and to make changes if needed.

Busy law firms  seldom think about the possibility of an office fire, but the effects of a fire could devastate your law practice.  The fire doesn’t even have to start in your office suite; down the hall or one …

Today’s tip is a simple reminder…read the screen. When you are doing legal research, the best gift you can give yourself, and your client, is careful attention to detail. For electronic research services, that means paying attention to everything that is going on – content and functionality.…

While there is something to be said for a face-to-face meeting, you can get just as much or more done at a virtual meeting, especially if you use some of the new tools that let you collaborate across the web. Virtual meetings have several benefits: you can hold them on an ad hoc basis without leaving your desk, and you don’t incur the time and expense of traveling to an in-person meeting.

You can easily “meet” your clients virtually, either by phone or by video. The phone is effortless – everyone knows how to use a phone. Video conferencing, too, …

Today’s Tip is for those of you who may be thinking of buying a sports car through eBay and shipping it long distances and cross borders so that your partner has a excellent birthday. Really, it is about the wealth of fantastic databases that exist and may not necessarily be considered legal research, but fill that role.

Take, for instance, the Road Safety Recalls Database provided by Transport Canada. This database, freely available through a government website, makes it very easy to find vehicle recalls for virtually any make and model of cute little sports car that you may choose.…