Author Archives

    Bryan Sims

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    Creating a Gravatar

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    Last week’s Tip of the Week from Susan Cartier Liebel at Build a Solo Practice, LLC, is to create a Gravatar. As explained on the Gravatar website,

    A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

    Susan explains:

    Solo Practice University is gravatar enabled.  The reason this is so important….recognition, familiarity, others seeing you in many places makes people say, “I’ve seen her around”  which leads to, “I know her.” In this day and age of multiple social media sites, this type of consistency throughout multiple communities is an easy, added bonus.  OK..it’s a no-brainer.

    Signing up to use Gravatars is as easy as providing an email address. To get your Gravatar, go here.

    Yes, this blog handles Gravatars. You can see an example in the comments to this post.

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    Adobe Creates a Community for Acrobat Users

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    Ernest Svenson posted an announcement today at PDF for Lawyers that he and David Masters are moderating the legal group at the new Adobe Acrobat User Community. Ernie explains:

    I happy to announce that Adobe has created an online forum called Adobe Acrobat User Community. It’s free to join, and there are lots of good reasons to do so. First of all, there are some great free online seminars coming up (e.g. Digital Signatures on Dec 17th, and Scanning & OCR on Jan 21st of next year).

    But, if you are in the legal profession, a great reason to join is the sub-group on Legal issues. I am a co-moderator of that forum, along with David Masters, whom many of you know is the author of The Lawyers’ Guide to Adobe Acrobat. The more people who participate and share their knowledge the more beneficial the forum will be. So stop by and sign up if you can.

    Did I mention it’s free?!

    I have already signed up. If you use Acrobat in your practice (and you should), you should check it out as well.

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    Twitter Tips

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    I have written before about Twitter. If you do not use Twitter, there is no way that I can explain it to you without the concept sounding ridiculous. What I will say is that if you have thought about trying Twitter, I urge you to give a whirl. I think you will be surprised by what it offers.

    At her blog Practicing Law in the 21st Century, Nicole Black has posted Twitter 101 for Lawyers. Niki explains:

    Of course, you’re probably wondering whether Twitter has any value to you as a lawyer. It does. With Twitter you can network with other lawyers across the country and the world; promote your practice and its Web site or other online presence; receive news updates relevant to your area of practice and connect with potential clients or referral sources.

    Twitter is an invaluable resource, as long as you know how to use it. The first step is to create an account at Twitter.com. Make sure to choose a user name that is easily recognizable and promotes your practice.

    The next step is to locate people and organizations you’d like to follow, including people you already know, those who practice in the same area of law, potential clients and users with similar personal interests. There are a number of ways to do this.

    Locate people you already know by running your Web-hosted e-mail address through Twitter’s system. (You’ll be prompted to do so when you first sign up.) Once you’ve connected with people you know, check their follower lists and “follow” anyone who interests you.

    I urge you to read her entire post.

    If you are curious, my Twitter page is here. You can find Niki’s here.

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    Tips for Using Google Docs

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    Google Docs is becoming more popular as people realize the advantage of having documents accessible to them anywhere they have internet access. Recently Digital Inspiration posted a “practical guide to Google Docs.” The post includes tips such as the following:

    Q: How do I upload all my Microsoft Office documents from the desktop on to Google Docs?

    A: List Uploader is a Windows utility that enables you to bulk upload files to Google Docs via drag-n-drop or through the right click menu.

    Mac OS X users can upload documents through GDocsUploader – simply drag-n-drop the document onto the uploader icon. Another option is GDocsBar – just drag your files in the Firefox sidebar and they’ll automatically get uploaded to Google Docs.

    Q: How do I associate the common Office file extensions like doc/xls/ppt with Google Docs so that desktop documents open directly in the web browser?

    A: Get the Google Toolbar for Firefox and select the ‘Google Docs’ checkbox from Toolbar options. This will let you open Office documents directly in the browser bypassing Microsoft Office.

    Q: I am worried that someone may hack into my Google Account and delete the important files. To play safe, I want to download all documents from Google Docs locally and burn them on to a CD. Is it possible?

    A: To download a copy of all your Google Docs documents on to the hard drive, get this Grease Monkey script. It will create a list of all your online documents that you can download in one step using the DownloadThemAll add-on.

    Click here to see the remainder of the tips. If you use Google Docs, you definitely want to read this post.

    Thanks to Dumb Little Man for pointing me in the direction of this post.

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    Keeping Your Notebook Safe

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    Chris Pirillo provides 10 Tips to Keep Your Notebook Safe When Traveling. My two favorites are:

      Keep It On You: It is not uncommon for someone to set their luggage down while standing in line for a muffin, or to sit down while waiting for a flight. With all luggage, it is important to keep an eye on it and ensure nobody tampers with it or steals it. Because of their size and value though, laptops make prime targets and a thief can snatch the laptop bag and keep walking while you are unaware with your back turned. You should keep the laptop bag on your shoulder or keep it in sight at all times.

      Back Up Data: Perform a backup of all critical or sensitive data before departing. Just in case your laptop does become damaged or lost, you don’t want to also lose your important files and information. You can buy a new laptop, but it is much harder to replace lost data.

        Go here to read all of the tips.

        Hat tip to Futurelawyer for pointing out this post to me.

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        Citations the Easy Way

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        Bonnie Shucha of WisBlawg recently pointed her readers in the direction of a great new Firefox add-on called CiteGenie.

        CiteGenie describes itself as being able to:

        Automagically copy text with correct citations from Westlaw and other websites

        Cite Genie further explains:

        Cutting and pasting when doing legal research using your browser is simple. But having to construct the citation for what you pasted is not so simple. This is especially true with legal citations from sources like Westlaw. You have to stop and copy the case name separately, determine the pinpoint page numbers, and adjust the date and court name format.

        So I decided to write a browser plugin that would automatically add a pinpoint citation to the text I copy and paste. Thus CiteGenie was born.

        * * *

        When CiteGenie is installed, it adds a new option to the browser’s right-click menu to “Copy with CiteGenie.”  To use CiteGenie, simply highlight the text in the court opinion, right-click and select the “Copy with CiteGenie” option (or just press Ctrl-Shift-C).  Then you can paste the text into any other program, such as your word processor, and the text will be pasted, along with the pinpoint citation for the selected text from the court opinion.

        This sounds almost too good to be true. However, a review of CiteGenie on LLRX.com reveals that it may work as easily and accurately as promised.

        I have not yet had the opportunity to use CiteGenie in a brief. However, I have installed it in my browser and am ready to take advantage of it.

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        WebMail Notifier: Another Great Firefox Add-on

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        FirefoxAs I have said before, one of the reasons that I love Firefox is that it allows you to install add-ons to make the browser work the way that you want it to work. The newest extension that I have fallen in love with is WebMail Notifier.

        WebMail Notifier checks your webmail accounts (including GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and others) and lets you know when you have new mail and how many messages you have. For my work email, I use Outlook. However, I have a variety of other email accounts that are aggregated into my GMail account. Before installing this add-on, I often forgot to check my GMail account. Since installing the add-on, however, I have remembered to check the account on a daily basis.

        The add-on simply puts a small envelope on your bottom status bar. When you have mail, the envelope lights up. It’s very unobtrusive, yet effective.

        If you have a webmail account, I recommend WebMail Notifier.

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        My Review of Adobe Acrobat 9

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        TechnolawyerLast week, my review of Adobe Acrobat 9 was published by Technolawyer. The review can be found on my Files page or downloaded directly from here.

        The short version is that I love the program and would recommend it to anyone who has not yet upgraded. There are several new features as well as improvements to existing features. As I said in the review:

        The greatest improvement that I have seen, however, resides in the Forms feature. With Acrobat 8, I could create a form. However, doing so was not an easy process. Every time I tried to use the feature, I ended up spending a lot of time trying to get the form right. And I still usually ended up with a form that worked, but was not what I wanted.

        With version 9, however, Adobe has made the Forms feature much more functional. The form wizard recognizes the form fields better. Also, I can now easily add new fields or modify any of the automatically recognized fields. Plus, Adobe has made form creation even easier by having all of the fields appear in the left sidebar. This means I can easily access and modify them, and I can change the tab order of the fields simply by dragging the field names around.

        Download my full review here.

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        Rocket Matter is Getting Things Done

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        By now, most people have at least heard of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The key to implementing GTD, however, is to ensure that you have a good system that fits the GTD philosophy.

        Recently, Rocket Matter has written a post about how to use Rocket Matter to implement GTD. In the post, Larry Port, the guy behind Rocket Matter, explains:

        We built this notion of a User Dashboard, where you can see all of your calendar events and to-do’s at a glance.  You can quickly capture next actions, then assign them to matters.

        Matters in our system allow you to trap your file information, but really they can organize any information. So, you can just as easily create a matter “Rocket v. Matter” as you can a matter called “@Phone”, and assign a to-do item to either one.

        You can easily re-assign a to-do item from one matter to another, allowing you to easily track your next actions.  And with Rocket Matter, all to-do’s can be converted into billable activity.

        Rocket Matter is one of the new online practice management systems to hit the market. The things I have heard about it have been good. Knowning that you can easily implement the Getting Things Done system just makes it that much better.