January 2005

It was a lot easier keeping confidential material safe and secret when it only resided in your head and on paper. Now we have Internet connectivity, e-mail, databases, and electronic copies of at least every document that your office prepared. The privacy and security enemies list includes virus writers, hackers, phishers, adware and spyware. My

My four-part WordPerfect Lawyer feature is concluded by this post. It included links to great sources of WordPerfect help, with hours of reading material, and lots of free downloadable macros. I probably didn’t discuss WP templates enough, so do not forget these powerful tools.

Is WordPerfect a viable option for the future for lawyers? Well,

One can generate extremely useful WordPerfect macros simply by recording them. But even more power can be unlocked by learning how to create them yourself. Everyone in the office need not learn this skill. Your resident WordPerfect Guru can create them and the rest of you can just enjoy running the macros. Of course, you

What happened to WordPerfect to relegate it to a niche product primarily used by lawyers and some government officials? In a word, Microsoft happened.

The primary reason given by law firms for conversion from WordPerfect to MS Word is that their clients wanted documents in MS Word format, not WordPerfect. In many cases, that was

Are you a WordPerfect lawyer in a Word world? You are not alone.

Texas attorney Craig Ball was doing a tips program with me and several others at our 2004 OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. I gave a WordPerfect tip and he said “Now, how many people are still using WordPerfect?” Taking the bait

By now many of us have hundreds, or thousands, of digital images on our computer hard drives or CD-ROMs which we have downloaded from our digital cameras. You can potentially acquire quite a collection of these over the years. How do you manage (and edit) all of these digital images? I know what tools most

Do you still receive e-mails with broken links? The sender wants to direct you to a website, but you click and get an error message, only noticing afterwards that part of the web address (URL) is not highlighted as hypertext. Veteran Net users know how to work around this problem. Novices usually give up. Let’s

Many of you know that I’ve been named Chair of ABA TECHSHOW this year.

ABA TECHSHOW will be held March 31- April 2, 2005 at the Chicago Sheraton Hotel and Towers. I’ve been a presenter at ABA TECHSHOW the last few years and I can tell you I always learn a lot there. From the

The cover story of the Washington Lawyer this month is The Tyranny of the Billable Hour by Robert Pack. It is not really about methods of alternative billing, but rather the impact of minimum billing quotas on the lives of larger law firm associates and, now, even partners. There was mention of how a firm