Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

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Email Etiquette

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Michael Hyatt, whose blog I enjoy immensely, has posted what he calls “18 suggestions for better e-mail communication and etiquette.” I encourage you to pop over to his blog and check out his full list.

In the meantime, here are my favorite of his tips:

Don’t overuse the “high priority” flag. Most e-mail programs allow you to set the priority of the message. “High priority” should be reserved for messages that are truly urgent. If you use it for every message (as one person I know does), you will simply be ignored. It’s like the boy who cried “wolf” one too many times.

This drives me nuts. There are some people who assign a high priority to every email that they send. If you need an immediate response, you should be able to convey that in some manner other than applying a special colored flag to the message. Also, high priority often just means, “I forgot to do this on time. Therefore, I need an answer from you now.” That’s not a high priority. That’s bad planning.

Don’t discuss multiple subjects in a single message. If you need to discuss more than one subject, send multiple e-mails. This makes it easy to scan subject lines later to find the message you need. It also contributes to briefer e-mail messages and a greater likelihood of a response. Also, the more specific you can be about your subject heading, the better.

Great advice. I keep all of my emails. Doing this makes it easier to file and sort emails.

Use a signature with your contact information. This is a courtesy for those receiving your messages. It also cuts down on e-mail messages, since people don’t have to send a second or third e-mail asking for your phone number or mailing address.

If you send me an email, make sure that I know how to contact you back by email, telephone, regular mail, fax machine, etc.

Check out the post, and follow up on the other great tips that Michael offers.

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How to Be a Better Public Speaker

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LecternHow to Change the World has an informative post that provides tips on how to be a better public speaker. The tips are compiled by the author’s friend, who is a professional singer. The post points out that public speaking is a performance art that is not substantively different from singing.

My favorite tips are

Bite your tongue. If your mouth gets dry in the middle of your presentation, try gently biting your tongue. Opera singers use this all the time to release saliva which moistens your mouth.

Use your eyes all the time. Hand gestures, pacing around the platform can all be useful tools in presentation, but the eyes…ah, the eyes have it! If you can’t engage people with your eyes you will eventually lose your audience’s attention. Your eyes always tell people whether or not you believe in what you’re saying! Scan the room, select a person to make a point to, and look right at them. It’s a little intimidating for them, but it keeps you focused on the individuals who make up your audience. Keep moving to new people—right, left, middle—it works! If all else fails, look at each person as though you’ve loved him or her all your life—like mom, or your child.

Get quiet. If you really want to get people’s attention, get quiet suddenly. It will scare the sound guy to death, but I guarantee the audience will pay attention. Singers use this trick all the time. That’s the “you could hear a pin drop” effect. Believe me, that’s what sells your talk!

I already use the Get Quiet tip. I have found this very effective. I love the tip about biting my tongue. I don’t look forward to doing it, however, I often get dry mouth while speaking for an extended period of time. Thus, I am thrilled to find this tip.

Using my eyes more effectively is something that I really need to work on.

Jump over and read the entire post. I am sure that you will find something that will help you become a better public speaker.

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Deleting an Undeletable File

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If you are like me, you have tried to delete a file and windows has prevented you from doing so. Geeks are Sexy gives us three ways to delete these files, regardless of how much Windows wants to prevent you from doing so.

My favorite tip is

Solution #1: Kill explorer.exe

  • Open a command prompt
  • Navigate to the location where the locked file is
  • Press CTRL-ALT-DEL, click on “task manager”, select the Processes tab
  • Kill the explorer.exe process via the “End Process” button
  • Go back to the command prompt and delete the file
  • Bring up the task manager windows again
  • Select file->new task
  • Type explorer.exe in the “create new task” field
  • Press OK.

The post includes two other solutions:

Solution #2: Use The Windows Recovery Console

Solution #3: Use Unlocker

Head over to the full post to see the complete description of the three options.

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Keeping Your Laptop Quiet

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I just saw a great tip from Futurelawyer. Most of us have been in a situation where weSilent Laptop wanted to turn on our laptop, but we knew that the windows start up sound would load and draw attention to us. Futurelawyer’s tip is very simple:

Take the speaker plug from an old set of earbuds; snip it at the end, and plug it in to your notebook. Presto, no sound.

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Organizing your Catagories

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From Daily Blog Tips comes 5 practical tips for organizing your blog categories. My favorite is tip number 3:

3. Make sure they fit in 1 screen: if you ask me how many categories your blog need the answer would probably be: it depends (no shit). Some blogs will work well with few categories, others will need 10 or even 20, just make sure that all the categories fit in one screen. Why? Because it is damn annoying to have to scroll down to see the complete list. Imagine I am trying to figure where a specific post was placed, once I get at the bottom of your categories I will probably have already forgotten what was on the top…

Check out the whole post to see the rest of the tips. Then, put them into action.

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Color Your World

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Adriana at I Heart Tech provides great advice for how to color code your entries in Outlook. Adriana explains the simple steps required to color your world:

First, in case you don’t know, when you create an appointment, you can assign it a color (called a Label in Outlook). It’s very easy to customize the Label list. You can either go to Edit > Label > Edit Labels (not kidding) or you can look for the icon on your toolbar that looks like a little Rubik’s Cube and click on it. Edit and save.

Check out Adriana’s whole post (and the rest of her blog while you are there).

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When Technology Goes Awry

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If you do any speaking at all, this post from Michael Hyatt is a must read. He providesPowerpoint three tips to avoid a technology breakdown:

  1. Make a backup
  2. Print your notes
  3. Test your equipment

He also provides three tips for what to do if your technology fails:

  1. Apologize once and stop apologizing
  2. Fish or cut bait
  3. Remember you are the presentation

He goes into detail for each of his tips. My favorite is his fish or cut bait tip.

Make a decision to “fish or cut bait.” You have to retain control. Everything feels like it is in slow motion. You want to scream. But give them a couple of minutes. You have to go with your gut. Are you confident that they know what they are doing? Or, are they clueless and just hoping they get lucky? Only you can make the call. If it is the latter, than you have to ditch the PowerPoint and get the techies off the stage. This is where you need to be direct but not rude. “Gentlemen, don’t worry about it. I will make the presentation without my slides. Thank you very much.” And then, to the audience, “Let’s give these guys a big hand for a valiant attempt.”

Check out the post and read up on all of the tips and suggestions from Michael.

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Secure Your Computer

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Jim Calloway provides a great tip for keeping your computer secure and making sure that you do not disclose privileged or confidential information. Jim explains:

But today I want to talk about one particular keyboard shortcut that protects your privacy as well as your clients’ privacy. That is hitting the Windows key (with the Windows logo) and at the same time the L key (for lock.)  This locks the computer and no one can access it again until you hit Cntrl+Alt+Delete and enter your password.

If you are leaving the computer to take a brief break, make a habit of locking it every time. I know you don’t allow anyone access to your office whom you do not trust. But still, maybe you don’t want your secretary to read that e-mail from your spouse or see just how far along you really are on that brief or view that open online game. This is just a good business privacy habit.

The great thing about this tip is that it is very simple and easy to remember. Notwithstanding the fact that the tip is simple, it can keep your confidential and privileged information secure.

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Going PaperLESS

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Ross Kodner of Ross Ipsa Loquitur gives us six great tips about going PaperLESS. Going paperLESS was the best thing I ever did. Sitting on my laptop is a copy of every document in every case I currently have open. This means that I can work on any case, anywhere I happen to be. Plus, I can easily and quickly find any document in any case in a very short period of time, all without opening a single physical file.

Ross’s best piece of advice is:

3) There’s no halfway in this process – the two easiest approaches are either (a) scan nothing, or (b) scan everything. Scanning just SOME things guarantees failure. Why? Because if what is to be scanned is left to anyone’s discretion, invariably they will eventually make the wrong decision and not scan something that really should have been. If a lawyer who is told they will be able to see a “complete” client file in electronic form on their PC screen stumbles across just ONE situation where some key document wasn’t scanned and thus, a file they were expecting to be comprehensive, wasn’t . . . the process will die right there from lack of confidence. File fragmentation creeps back in when someone says, “ok, I can look at MOST of the file onscreen, but since I can’t trust that it is complete because someone might have decided not to scan something, then I have to waste otherwise billable lawyer/staff time again looking for the paper that might not have been included.” It’s really all or nothing in my experience. In-between doesn’t work.

Jump over to Ross’s blog and read the rest of his post.

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Bates Stamping Your Documents

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Anyone who is involved in litigation is familiar with the need to Bates stamp documentsBates Stamper that are produced in discovery. Ernest Svenson of PDF for Lawyers makes a compelling case for why all Bates stamping should be done electronically.

Svenson explains:

Let’s say you have 1,000 documents to bates-stamp. I seriously doubt that any paralegal could finish the task in less than 4 hours. It would probably take at least a day, maybe more. But to scan those documents would only take about an hour, maybe two hours if you had a really slow scanner. Once you’ve scanned the documents it takes about 30 seconds to bates-stamp them using Acrobat 8.0.

Using a computer to bates-stamp ensures that you don’t miss any pages. And you can tell Acrobat to shrink the borders of the page and apply the bates-stamp in the resulting white area. This guarantees that the bates-number on every page is visible. Also you can add text before or after the bates number, (e.g. as “2nd Production – No. 000345”). Finally, if you realize you made a mistake and included some pages that should not have been bates-stamped, you can remove the bates-stamping and start over.

He then concludes:

In short, there’s a smart way to bates-stamp documents, and a really stupid way. Why anyone would want to make someone bates-stamp documents by hand is beyond me. Frankly, I think it should be considered a form of cruel and unusual punishment. Apparently, though, it’s not all that unusual.

And that is really sad.

I could not agree with him more. Jump over to PDF for Lawyers to check out the rest of his post.

Once you Bates stamp documents electronically, you will wonder how or why you ever did it manually before. Plus it is super easy to stamp documents now that the latest version of Adobe Acrobat includes the Bates Stamping ability.

If you use CaseMap to organize your case, you can use a CaseMap plugin to stamp your documents and then automatically import the Bates stamp values into the documents portion of your CaseMap file. This makes your life doubly easy.