Tips Tuesday

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on technology, research and practice.

Research

Understand the Why
Shaunna Mireau

Today’s short legal research tip is this: You will find better answers to questions if you know Why you are asking them in the first place. Understanding the motivation for an answer that is hidden behind a question helps reveal biases, suppositions, assumptions and missing inputs that, if misunderstood, lead to incomplete, incorrect, and inefficiently gathered results. …

Technology

Use the Desktop*
Dan Pinnington

A surprising number of people work with their program windows at full expansion, even though computer monitors are getting wider and wider. This might have made sense when screens were small and you needed all of the room just to frame a sensible document. …

Practice

How Much Did That Cost?*
David Bilinsky & Laura Calloway

In manufacturing, there is a metric known as “Cost of Goods Sold”. When it comes to legal services, the equivalent metric would be the “Cost of Services Rendered” (CoSR). Do you know what it costs you to render an hour’s worth of legal services? …

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