As I’ve detailed in my book The Off Switch, Microsoft Outlook provides modern ways not just to communicate but to interrupt our work flow and make life harder.

For example, the new-mail sounds and desktop alerts (the blue “toasts” or translucent ghosties that pop up on a new message) may do more harm than good because they interrupt your thought processes.

So turn them off. (Go to Mail Options, which is under Options near the bottom of the File menu.)

Figure 1

People say to me, “But I need to be responsive to clients.”

Yes, you do, but interrupting . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Canada (Commissioner of Competition) v. Chatr Wireless Inc. 2014 ONSC 1146
   

   [1] This court found that the respondents had failed to conduct adequate and proper tests prior to claiming that Chatr Wireless Inc. (“Chatr Wireless”) dropped fewer calls than Wind Mobile in Calgary and Edmonton and Public Mobile in Toronto and Montréal.

   [2] The “fewer dropped calls” claim appeared on Chatr Wireless’ website,

It’s not often that I comment on a U.S. legal decision (mostly because I’m not an American attorney), but a recent decision from the US National Labour Relations Board (NLRB or the Board) is particularly interesting from an employment and labour law perspective and because it also highlights a significant area where US and Canada labour law differs.

In the decision Design Technology Group, LLC, 359 NLRB No 96, the Board ordered the employer to reinstate a number of employees who were terminated for critcizing their employer on a semi-public Facebook page. In the US, most employment is “at will” . . . [more]

I love my iPad mini. I have been using it for just over one year. It has proved to be tremendously helpful in my civil litigation practice.

There are hundreds of similar pieces about “ipad apps for lawyers.” This is a simple setup that works for me. 

My basic tools are PDF Converter and PDF Expert.

I use the PDF Converter app to convert Word documents into PDFs so that I can annotate them using the PDF expert app.

Using the PDF expert app, I can mark up any PDF document. I can highlight it, put text annotations, arrows, . . . [more]

Google Alerts are emails generated by Google when it finds new results. Alerts have mentioned on Slaw including an interesting article by Omar which offered an alternative service that uses a desktop or mobile device download – Mention.

Despite reports of concern about the continuing functionality of Google Alerts, I have continued to use the service for select monitoring with success. Google Alerts continues to be generally reliable and it was recently used by a team member and I to watch for notice of a newspaper article. There is an interesting story about our watches that may be relevant to . . . [more]

I’m proud indeed to announce that Natasha Chetty is joining Slaw as a regular blogger.

Natasha is the principal consultant at Bellwether Strategies in Vancouver where she works with law firms and legal organizations on strategic planning, reputation management and business development initiatives.

Natasha was one of the first Canadians to have completed major certifications from the Reputation Institute in New York (researchers for the annual Forbes magazine list of the “World’s Most Reputable Companies”). She is also a certified coach who helps lawyers throughout North America to apply legal project management techniques to their client work. She often facilitates . . . [more]

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.

Technology

How to Take a Screenshot of Your Desktop on a Mac or PC
Dan Pinnington

Taking a screenshot of your PC desktop is easy – look for the “print screen” key on your keyboard. On PC keyboards it will usually have PrtScn, PRTSC or PRTSCN . . .

Research

Patience Required
Shaunna Mireau

Today’s Tip: wait with patience. I often find myself using curse filled phrases when everything (websites, . . . [more]

I recently attended another drinks party, again to celebrate, or rather mark, the forced departure of a former colleague after his many years of working for a major professional publisher. There was neither bitterness nor acrimony on his part, just an acceptance of that being the way it is. You work with them until you become surplus to requirement, too old (however young) and/or too expensive (however underpaid) and then you are out. The problem is that there are years of work still capable of being done and bills still to pay. In this way, another aspiring and hopeful . . . [more]

The question relates to the discoverability of social media information and whether having something on a ‘private’ page makes any difference. Case law has dealt with this too. My own summary is that any document relevant to civil litigation has to be disclosed by a party, wherever it is and however private it is. However, the opposing party will not be given free access to fish among private documents on mere speculation that there is something relevant there.

Once lawyers know this (and presumably most litigation lawyers now do), can they advise their clients to move stuff to private sections . . . [more]

In my seemingly never-ending quest to grasp the underlying technical components that feed into the various linked data efforts out there, I happened on an interesting talk given at last year’s SymfonyLive* conference. This presentation, by Markus Lanthaler, was called “Building Next-Generation Web APIs with JSON-LD and Hydra.”

If you’re interested in JSON coding at all I would recommend the first half of this presentation for Lanthaler’s nice overview of the differences between JSON and JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data).

However, what really struck me in this presentation were a couple of slides he . . . [more]

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to see Gordon Ross speak on a panel talking about the social intranet and KM for legal knowledge management practitioners in the public sector. Ross is a partner with the Vancouver-based consulting firm Open Road and the Vice President responsible for strategy and professional services for their social intranet platform ThoughtFarmer. He has written a blog post outlining his thoughts from that talk: How Social Intranets can Support Legal Knowledge Management.

While the post is quite a theoretical discussion, pointing to thinking by Max Boisot in his 1998 book Knowledge Assets around . . . [more]

The 2014 Student Edition of LAWPRO Magazine {“Moving Into Practice”) will be arriving in Ontario law schools this week. Its the second LAWPRO Magazine issue focused on providing students with resources to make the transition from student to lawyer. It also serves as an introduction to LAWPRO and our messages of claims prevention and practice management.

Articles in the magazine include:

• What do law firms look for when hiring?
• Common practice pitfalls and how to avoid them
• Student-to-lawyer: 20 tips for a smooth transition
• The dangers of social networking and how to avoid them
• What I wish I knew in