Monthly Archives: April 2010

Bundle Up With Firefox Extensions

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Posted in Add-on, Firefox | Tagged , ,

I mention more than a dozen extensions in the text that you can use to enhance your research using Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.  If you want a shortcut to add a bunch of useful extensions that (a) someone has identified for you and (b) that are bundled with other, relevant extensions, you want to look at Mozilla’s add on collections.

The obvious choice for lawyers and legal researchers is the Reference Desk bundle, although most of these will not improve your Web browser search experience.  I’m biased, but I think you’ll get better mileage with the ones I mention in the text!!

Perhaps it helps to look at them in a different way.  If you are a heavy Mozilla Firefox user, there are collections that will make your experience faster:  shortcuts, utilities to zoom images and perform other custom actions.  Take a look at the popular collections as well as the ones created by the editors.  You will find more collections, and they include some add-ons you might not otherwise stumble upon.

Google Chrome users will need to search for the 10 best or favorite lists of Chrome extensions; they are not gathered together.  Internet Explorer users will need to consider switching to Chrome or Firefox to really leverage extensions.

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Rinse Out Your Inbox. Repeat.

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Posted in E-mail Management, Outlook, Thunderbird | Tagged , , ,

Mashable’s recent post on an inbox cleanse is a great reminder that your interaction with your e-mail client is an ongoing one.  They focus on your inbox and that is a great place to start.  Managing your inbox is one of the biggest challenges some lawyers face in their practice communications.  When you see how many lawyers are disciplined for poor client communication, you can understand why this should be a priority.

E-mail is like a garden.  You subscribe to discussion lists and current awareness tools, interact with current clients and other lawyers and the court.  Then someone you e-mailed copies you in on a new discussion, or sends you a joke or something else.  You make an online purchase for office supplies or some new tunes, and you get the purchase acknowledgement, and perhaps follow up messages giving you the status and precise location of your purchase as it wends its way to you through meatspace.

This accretion of e-mail starts to fill out your inbox like weeds growing between the flowers you originally planted.  Even when you go through an inbox cleanse, you need to be prepared to repeat the process on a periodic basis as your inbox gets overgrown.

At the same time, you may want to go through your other folders and clear out some of the detritus that has accumulated there.  Identify current awareness discussions you’ve stashed away and unsubscribe from them, look for where you have filtered content out of your inbox, and clean it out of these other folders.  Unsubscribe from lists that are no longer providing you with good information or discussions, and archive out your old online purchase information.

I talk in the text about search folders, and this is a great way to spontaneously get your Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client to round up messages that may be ideal candidates for deletion.  The search folder can aggregate them from across all your folders.

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Web Browser Round-Up

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Posted in Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer | Tagged ,

Your Web browser is one of the most important pieces of software in your law practice.  That’s why a large part of the text deals with how to get the most out of your browser, saving you time and making your research experience more efficient.  It’s a regularly changing world, though, so here’s a brief update on some of the more recent changes.

Kill Internet Explorer 6

Even Microsoft wants you to get rid of it.  Internet Explorer 9 is still under wraps.  You can get a preview demo if you’re on Windows Vista or Windows 7.  The demo is not a “real” browser and isn’t intended to be used as a replacement to IE8/7/6.  Expectations are that it will be faster, and comparable in speed to other browsers, since being faster than the currently available Internet Explorer versions would only be a small advantage.  The platform preview should be refreshed shortly, but no beta or release date is available yet.  So get yourself to Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 in the meantime.

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox is still doing dot upgrades (3.5, 3.6) to their desktop version and are looking at mobile versions too.  Lawyers shouldn’t get their hopes up, because there are no plans for either an iPhone or BlackBerry version, and those are the leading Web-enabled smartphones in the legal world.

Google Chrome

I’ve been seeing more complaints about Google Chrome crashing – and seeing some of this behavior myself – so it may be that Chrome’s going through a bit of growing pains on version 4.  Version 5 is now in beta (it seems like only a few months ago that 4 was in beta) and it will be interesting to see what usability enhancements they include.

What About Apple’s Safari, Opera, and Others?

I don’t mention these browsers much in the text because they are not used much by the legal profession, which uses them even less than the rest of the world.  Their lack of extendability is the biggest reason, and what slight speed advantage they have is not significant enough to recommend them in favor of Firefox or Chrome.

UPDATED: 4/28:  Mozilla has released a pre-alpha version (pre-beta) of Fennec, it’s mobile version of Firefox.  Here’s the story on Ars Technica.  If you like to live on the edge and have an Android phone (they are not developing a version for Windows Mobile, iPhone or Blackberry), you might want to download it and give it a try.

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Tip: Go Where the Experts Go

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Posted in Canada, Canada Law Book, CCH Canadian, HeinOnline, LexisNexis, U.K., U.S., Westlaw | Tagged ,

When you are in practice, that’s your work.  Legal research is a piece of it but it’s often not a big piece  in comparison to the many other things you do each day.  One goal of the text is to help you to become a bit more expert – and provide you with a resource to refresh your memory when you may not have used a particular skill for awhile – because the reality is that most legal professionals do not have law librarians at their immediate disposal.  You can bridge a bit more of that expertise gap by looking at where librarians get their inside information, from the publishers themselves.

A  good example of this is the LexisNexis InfoPro site.  Compare it to the normal LexisNexis sites (US, Canada) and you’ll see that it’s much less about making the sale and much more about giving you information.  Check out the weekly tips page for regular updates (like how to find out Canadian private corporation information) or use Zimmerman’s online encyclopedia, a free resource originally compiled by a law librarian with quick links to an amazing number of resources, browsable by keyword [examples:  Canada, Canadian Legal Materials, United Kingdom].  These can be shortcuts to getting you to information quickly, and not just to information available from LexisNexis.

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