We are deep in Pilot rollout of Windows 7 and Office 2010 at Field Law. It is fun, interesting, frustrating, and intense.
Fun – I love learning new things, especially technology things. I especially like being in Pilot groups where I can see that my feedback is shaping the way we offer these tools to the rest of the firm.
Interesting – It is interesting to see how ribbons and menus were contemplated by the developers who are likely not the same folks who created Windows originally. New technologies are often, for me, a glimpse of how the current generation of programmers think. This is particularly relevant when you are moving from very old to pretty new.
Frustrating – I try to always choose to use new software the way it was intended to be used, rather than forcing the system to work “my old way”. As you can imagine, I am not as quick producing work. It is extremely frustrating for me to take 5 minutes for a 2 minute task, even if both of these are a billable point one. The good news is that as I learn, I learn the new shortcuts – as will everyone who is going through this upgrade – approximately 75% of law firms this year.
Intense – Every new trick I learn, I ache to share. This may be a character flaw but you are reading this post, right?
For today, I will share my joy at how lovely the browser plugin for CanLII works in IE9. They work in other browsers also and you can find them on the Tools page [1] at CanLII.
This isn’t brand spanking new functionality, Simon crafted a CanLII search bookmarklet [2] years ago in his Mac environment. Still it is a step saving, time saving device.
I had the plugin installed for our regular browser setup so at least our common task of case gathering by citation or name can still be a very fast turn around.
What is your favourite browser plugin?