Unless you went to school in a one room prairie school house (or were home schooled), you were probably put into a class with other people your exact age, and have been hanging out with people who are approximately the same age that you are ever since. To effectively market your law practice, break out of this mold and consciously make an effort to network with attorneys and other potential sources of referrals who are much older and younger.

Everyone wants to be with the “movers and shakers,” who are usually a little more advanced in their careers and, hence, …

Ah science. It is pretty difficult in today’s world to have even a basic knowledge of what is happening outside your discipline given all the current awareness reading required just to stay on top of what is going on within your legal specialty.

Still, it is pretty important to try and keep up. World and current events are usually available with mainstream media. Legal information via Slaw.ca and current awareness services via your favourite law librarian. For scientific information, I recommend the Technology Review published by MIT. There are RSS feeds, mobile apps, and my preferred method of review – …

At long last we come to the end of our top 10 Cash Flow Reports Tips with our final entry, Client Trust Balances.

Institute a procedure to ensure regular review of the trust account balance for each clients.  You want to determine whether there are funds in trust that can be applied against unbilled time or disbursements and whether there are clients or matters that are approaching the exhaustion of their retainers or cost deposits.  Keeping on top of this information will go a long way toward making sure that you are not placed in a position of having  to …

A post by Library Boy reminded me to look to the Library of Parliament for their excellent publications.

The Library of Parliament offers a wide range of research publications that provide analysis to parliamentarians, parliamentary committees and parliamentary associations on current and emerging key issues, legislation and major public policy topics. The publications provide non-partisan, reliable and timely information on subjects that are relevant to parliamentary and constituency work.

Hat Tip to Library Boy.…

Daily time summaries by lawyer are also an important part of cash flow reporting.  To make this analysis accurate, all lawyers in the firm should be accounting for all of their time every day – billable, firm administration or management, marketing, mentoring, continuing education, pro bono, vacation, etc.  Doing so will allow firm management to look for aberrations or time summaries that don’t make sense or indicate poor time management or failure to meet minimum billable time requirements.

But once you start accounting for all your time, how do you know how you stack up?  Here’s a quick way to …

Simon Fodden posted about the Supreme Court of Canada Justices and how they almost always agree last week. Great post for its intended commentary, AND, Simon gave a research tip that is worthy of its own post

Remember: when you need to get to the Supreme Court website and can’t recall the official URL, just use Slaw’s shortcut: http://thesupremes.ca or http://lessupremes.ca. Easy peasy.

Thanks for the reminder Simon.…

Often law practices look great from the outside.  There are lots of clients, the lawyers are always on the run, and from all outward appearances the firm is successful.  Sometimes, though, these firms – rather than being a picture of health – are more like a patient with a fatal disease, a silent killer the symptoms of which have not yet begun to show.

That silent killer is  unbilled fees and disbursements.  As a consequence, all firms should be monitoring the state of their unbilled work and disbursements just as someone with diabetes constantly monitors his or her blood sugar …

Legal Research is fun. Stop laughing, I am not kidding! To prove it, I am sharing a Legal Research Jeopardy game that we use to reinforce some of our student training at Field Law.

This template came my way via web download some years ago from the public library world. Hat Tip to innovative public library staff everywhere. Choose File – Download to modify legal research jeopardy for your own use. Shared with Google Drive.…

Want to easily see all the apps running on your iPad?
Double-clicking the Home button will show you all the apps that are running on your iPad as icons on a bar along the bottom of the screen. To switch to a running app, just tap on the icon for it.
To remove the bar, just swipe the screen downwards.
Not quite like Alt+Tab for switching apps, but darn close!…

An Aesop fable suggests that we should make friends in prosperity if we would have their help in adversity. Thanks to Mike Doerksen, incoming Chair of the CBA Alberta, Research Lawywers Subsection (South) for today’s tip which came from the minutes of their round table wrap up session.

Joan described using the Search Headnotes function on Westlaw, rather than Full Text searching for cheaper and more efficient method of finding relevant U.S. cases.

Thanks to Mike for sharing the minutes. Thanks to Joan Bilsland, Bennett Jones for sharing wi her colleagues. Thanks to the CBA for facilitating research lawyer sharing …