Remember in my earlier post entitled “4 Microsoft Outlook Hacks to De-Stress Your Law Practice” how I recommended you use subfolders and flags to organize your emails? Well, here’s a tactic that will allow you to automate both (and other tasks too): Outlook Rules.
Using Microsoft Outlook Rules To Tame Your Inbox
September 7, 2010 By
Death To The Virtual Law Firm!
August 30, 2010 By
With all this talk about virtual law firms, we need to examine the message we’re giving to our clients when we engage in lingo. To do so may enable us to positively effect a change in buying attitudes.
This post is a long time coming. It’s been marinating like a steak waiting for the grill to get hot, but this grill has been heating up for awhile.
There’s been a lot of talk about the virtual law firm going on lately. It’s the topic du jour, likely in part because so many lawyers are looking for a way to reduce overhead and leverage technology to maximize profits without sacrificing the quality of the services they deliver. I’m fine with that, but I am definitely not fine with the virtual law firm.
This, by the way, from someone who’s use the terms virtual law firm and virtual law office many times over the years. But something woke up inside my head awhile back that just made me wonder what the hell I’ve been thinking when it comes to such phrases.
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Let’s get something out of the way. [Read more...]
Discount Available On MacSpeech Dictate And MacSpeech Scribe – Two Of My Favorite Law Firm Productivity Tools
August 25, 2010 By
Like most lawyers, I spend the day sitting in front of a computer. I juggle emails, documents, blog posts and in general just about everything word-related. Until recently, I used my keyboard for getting thoughts from my head to my computer.
Finally, I took a plunge and bought Save 10% on MacSpeech Dictate (aff link), a cool program from the folks who make Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC. I’d used Dragon ages ago, and played with it just as I went to the Mac; it was very good, but not available for my new machine.
But my online content creation duties were starting to wear me down, causing my fingers to ache each night from the strain. I got worried about carpal tunnel syndrome and related repetitive stress injuries. I love to cook dinner at night, and the thought of that being taken away from me wasn’t too appealing.
Unfortunately, there was one major problem. A problem that had kept me from buying the program for a year.
4 Microsoft Word Hacks To Make Your Law Office Run More Smoothly
July 29, 2010 By
I’ll bet Microsoft Word and Outlook are tied for the “most critical Microsoft Office application” award at your firm. So, following up on our earlier “Outlook Hacks” post, here are four Word tricks to smooth out your day.
Make templates (lots of templates). If you have a document type you produce frequently, make a pre-formatted template for it. It’ll make subsequent documents a breeze.
Start off by taking a recent example and stripping out all of the client-specific information. Now, click File, Save As (in version 2007, click the Microsoft Office Button in the upper left-hand corner and choose Save As; in version 2010, go to the File tab and choose Save As), then choose Document Template (either in the drop-down at the bottom of the following dialog box or in the menu, depending on what version of Microsoft Word you’re using).
My advice? Start with simple templates (letters, basic pleading formats) and try more complex forms (like appellate briefs) after you gain experience. A little time invested here can save lots of work later.
Use Styles to standardize paragraph formats. Don’t waste time formatting your headings and other paragraph formats one by one. Use Styles to standardize them instead.
You can access this feature either using the Styles & Formatting Pane (in versions 2002 and 2003) or on right-hand side of the Home ribbon (in versions 2007 and 2010). This feature is particularly powerful combined with templates.
Use AutoText for boilerplate language. Sure, you can repeatedly cut-and-paste that whole “objects to this discovery request on the grounds that yada-yada-yada” thing, but that’s almost as bad as retyping, isn’t it?
Instead, pop that boilerplate into AutoText (found under Insert, AutoText in 2002 and 2003 and on the default Quick Access Toolbar in versions 2007 and 2010). You can configure this so that, when you type the first few letters of this phrase, you can insert the remainder by simply pressing Enter when prompted. Sweet!
Customize your toolbars. If there’s a feature you use a lot in Microsoft Word (or any Microsoft Office application), add it to a toolbar for easy one-click access.
In versions 2002 and 2003, you can click on the down arrow at the end of any toolbar, choose Add or Remove Buttons, Customize to get what you need (and ditch what you don’t).
In versions 2007 and 2010, you can add any commands you need to the Quick Access Toolbar to. The easiest way to add one? Find it on the appropriate tab, right-click it, and choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar on the shortcut menu that pops up. Or you can add several at once by clicking on the down arrow at the end of the QAT (the “Customize Quick Access Toolbar” button) and selecting More Commands.
Image credit: Daniel F. Pigatto (via Flickr).
Deborah Savadra specializes in helping law firms use Microsoft Office applications. Her blog http://legalofficeguru.com features video tutorials on solving common Microsoft Office problems. You can follow her on Twitter at @legalofficeguru.
LexisNexis And Westlaw Re-Launch – Too Little, Too Late?
February 2, 2010 By
I’ve been reading all the hoopla about the recent relaunch of LexisNexis (also discussed here) and the pending one for Westlaw; there are some legal minds out there who are pretty happy at what they see. To them, I say, “good for you.”
But I’m left wondering whether these re-launches are nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. To my mind, the value of these services are decreasing steadily day by day.
When I was in law school we were all given free Lexis and Westlaw accounts in the hope that we’d become hooked. This was just as the Internet was coming into being (Netscape launched in my third year of law school), and both of these particular services were on their own closed platforms. Very expensive, too.
Sure enough, we all got in line to dump our reliance on library books and hit the terminals hard. Boolen language was new to us, and finding a case on point was an admittedly heady moment. Sure enough, we were free to find anything we needed from the comfort of a computer terminal.
When the web got big enough that it could no longer be ignored, Westlaw and Lexis both created web interfaces for us. Every lawyer got in line, put down our money and kept on typing. Sometimes our bills were huge, sometimes seemingly incorrect, but it was worth it. No more trips to the library for us!
Small companies cropped up to provide case law, but their archives were miniscule. Why pay for an incomplete database? Sure, Lexis and Westlaw were pricey but they were worth the thousands of dollars we paid each year.
But the giants got fat and sleepy, as they often do. Their pricing became their burden, their staffing and infrastructure made them sluggish. Rather than take the innovations of the technology and provide a better product at a better price, they kept using the door-to-door salesman and blast email approach to rope us into long-term contracts at sky-high fees.
While the titans took a nap, something happened. Courts started coming online, and so did law reviews and other scholarly journals. We moved into a truer electronic age, one that provided an incentive to digitizing documents.
My Kindle could pull down PDF documents. I can read anything I want on my iPhone or Android device. Soon, my iPad will do the same.
It’s as if I went to sleep one night in the old world, and woke up in the morning to find that everything was digital.
The upstarts like Fastcase could provide me with pretty much every state and federal statute and relevant caselaw to boot. Services like Google Scholar has a decent stash of legal research materials, and it’s free. Heck, even a basic Google search will grab a whole bunch of information. If you just put a cite into the search area you’ll likely get the case or, at the very least, a blog post about it.
Where was an iPhone or Android app from the titans, showing us a more convenient way to access the materials we lawyers need to get answers? Sorry, not available. How about a lower price point, making it more attractive for solos and small firms? Nope, can’t help you. So, too, the entire notion of incorporating the cloud into all this? Ha ha, that would surrender some of their control over the content at hand.
Instead, Lexis decided to integrate search and other tools directly within Word and Outlook. Westlaw cleaned up their interface to make it more Google-like. There’s no new content, nothing remarkably new, and no recognition that these services are both providing more of a fungible commodity than ever before.
To be sure, both Westlaw and Lexis do offer some things unavailable for free or for a modest cost. There are some secondary materials that are produced by these companies, but those sources haven’t changed remarkably over the years.
Stale offerings in a walled garden, that’s all they provide.
Put aside the shiny objects and pretty lights. Consider whether Westlaw and Lexis are providing value sufficient to justify a cost of thousands a year per lawyer?
Photo courtesy of Léoo
Toggl: Track Your Billable Time Easily (And Free!)
February 1, 2010 By
Managing a bankruptcy law office requires the ability to keep track of where time is being spent, by whom, and on which matters. For many bankruptcy lawyers, however, time tracking is costly and difficult. There are a bunch of programs out there to help lawyers track time, but they’re all cumbersome and cost money.
You already know I hate to spend money unless it’s for an awesome reason.
About two years ago I was looking for a simple and quick way to track my time. I didn’t feel like shelling out a bunch of money for a full-featured case management system (I was using Basecamp at the time for my case management, and it didn’t have a real-time application), and even a program like Time And Chaos seemed like overkill.
All I wanted was something I could click to start and click to stop. I wanted to get reports showing my progress, and I wanted to be able to print out a PDF for my fee applications. It had to be free, too.
Too much to ask, I thought. Then I found Toggl. And over two years later, it’s better than ever.
Toggl is an online time tracker that tracks the number of billable hours you spend on a client project. In real-time.
Once you register (for free), create a new project for a new client, and “toggl” the on button. Toggl starts tracking the time spent in real-time, right in the web browser. You can even download an application to your Mac or PC and the data will automatically sync with the web server. Hit stop when you’re done.
Toggl will put together reports – PDF or CSV – for invoicing your clients. Beyond that, the system lets you look at your time in graphical format. How much time you’ve billed each day, week, month, etc. Which days were most productive, least, and stuff like that.
Bottom line? It’s awesome.
The application is free for up to 5 timekeepers on your team, and the cost is modest for bigger groups. So go check it out and see if it suits your needs.
A Virtual Lawyer And On-The-Go iPhone Dictation
December 31, 2009 By
In the old days, lawyers had a Dictaphone or some such device, complete with a little hand-held microphone, for dictation. They’d sit at their mahogany desks and ramble into a recorder, then pass the tape to their “girl” (yes, that’s what they were called back then – haven’t you ever watched “Man Men”?). The lawyer would promptly retire to the gentleman’s club for a martini or six, then golf the rest of the day.
Later on, we got hip to technology. Lawyers tossed out the Dictaphones (and started getting sued for chasing their secretaries around desks – rightfully so, I might add) and began using mini-cassette recorders for their dictation. Then it was an electronic recorder with a USB hook-up for their computer.
Now we’ve got something better. An iPhone and a freebie app from the folks who brought us Dragon Dictate.
Nuance Dragon Dictation for iPhone lets you tap the little Record button, start talking, and then tap when you’re finished. The app turns your words into text that you can use for an e-mail, a text message, or the contents of your iPhone’s clipboard.
Make a mistake? No worries, just tap the error to bring up a list of suggestions. Only bad part? You can’t use it offline.
Equally amazing: Dragon Dictation is free, at least for now.
Here’s a video. If you’ve got an iPhone, go grab this app before they start charging big money for it.
Photo courtesy of rpujols.
Creating Screencasts With CaptureFox
December 28, 2009 By
How often do you need to show someone how to do something on your computer, and find yourself going through a painstaking process of trying to explain exactly which button to press … and where each button appears on their screen?
For years, the solution was a screencast. I personally use Screenflow for my Mac to record audio and video for my members-only site and tutorials, and most people with a PC use Camtasia.
But what if you want a “quick-and-dirty” screencast and don’t feel like shelling out the extra bucks?
Enter Capture Fox, a Firefox extension that does nicely in a pinch. Capture Fox Movie records your screen frame by frame. You can also record your voice.
The downside is that the output is in AVI format, which may prove slightly limiting to some. But it’s free, pretty simple to use, and does the trick when you want to show someone how to do something on their screen.
Here’s the video to watch Capture Fox in action:
