I do lots of presentations on law office management and technology. I also do some programs on lawyer’s use of the Internet. Whenever I mention RSS Newsfeeds, I always see some people’s eyes glaze over or attention start to wander. I can appreciate that as I didn’t immediately "get" RSS either. But this technology has an immense potential as a way for consumers to sort the type of online information that they wish to receive. Blogs produce RSS newsfeeds, allowing one to scan the posts from dozens (or hundreds) of blogs without actually visiting the sites. To receive RSS newsfeeds, you need a newsreader. There are several free or inexpensive newsreaders, but for the beginner I recommend Bloglines.com, this week’s Website of the Week. Bloglines is free and easy to use. It is browser-based and does not require the installation of any new software on your computer.

RSS is rapidly becoming more mainstream and there are more than just blog feeds available. Many information providers now publish RSS newsfeeds, such as CBS News and Sports, CNN, NewsOK.com, Stateline.org, LexisNexis and many others. You can even receive the Dilbert cartoon in your newsreader daily via RSS.  RSS could become as widely used as e-mail and Web browsing. So now is a good time to try a few of them if you haven’t done so yet and our Website of the Week, Bloglines.com, is as good a place to begin as you will find.

The typical law school graduate may enter the practice of law with little, if any, training in business management. This is perhaps not a critical problem for the new lawyer who goes to work for as an assistant district attorney, a public defender or an associate in a large law firm. But for the solo and small firm lawyer, this can be a significant gap in skills. To their credit, law schools are moving to fill this gap. In fact, next week I will be giving a two hour presentation to a class at the University of Oklahoma College of Law that focuses on starting a law practice.

The quandry of the solo/small firm lawyer is that he or she needs to manage well in limited time. Administrative responsibilities are non-billable and the more time that is spent on them means less billable business production that day. So there is a built-in temptation in the small law firm to give short shrift to those tasks in favor of providing client services. Client services are a priority. But good management is also critically important. It may be easy to fail to regularly review the financials because there is money in the bank or defer making decisons because of lack of time to consider alternatives. But what advice would you give a business owner client who failed to regularly review the financials?

I’ve located a good short course in management, thanks to the BizzBangBuzz Blog. You may be surprised to learn that it was written by an electrical engineering lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and is over ten years old. Read Basic Management Skills by Gerard M. Blair. Read these ten articles when you have time to think about them.

"Famous blawger" has to be an oxymoron. None of us have to deal with the National Enquirer calling or paparazzi sneaking up on us (unless you count Bob Ambrogi taking pictures at BlawgConnect.) But Evan  Schaeffer qualifies for this label. He has three weblogs, including the well-known Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground. But I like his Illinois Trial Practice Weblog the best. I do not overstate the case when I say that this weblog should be required reading for every young (or new) trial lawyer. Just last Friday he had a great post on "How to Start a Deposition." (For more fun, surf over to his other blog for "The Horror of My First Deposition.") A couple of weeks ago he outlined a list of validating questions to be used before impeachment of a witness at trial.

Great content, consistently delivered, earns the Illinois Trial Practice Weblog my selection as Website of the Week.

Microsoft has released a new free add-in tool which allows redaction of MS Word 2003 Documents before distributing them. According to the download site, "The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.

"Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents."

I’ve previously mentioned issues with properly redacting a PDF file. It seems like this release should cure that problem for PDFs generated from these MS Word documents.

Last month I did a post called "Paste Special – One of the Best Tips Ever." I was pleased, but not surprised, that I received several grateful e-mails from those who learned for the first time of this way to copy and paste the words, but not the formatting. But I also received a few e-mails, beginning with one from attorney Michael T. Newman of Ft. Smith, AR, pointing out there’s an even better way to do this- by adding buttons for Paste Special or Paste Unformatted to the toolbars. They are correct. I use it myself, but in a fast-paced tips program, I usually omit that part.

So thank you for the e-mail prompts to tell "the rest of the story."  You can easily add a buttom to your toolbar for any of the functions you now access by using the drop down menus. Customizing your toolbar to add buttons for things you do frequently and remove the buttons that you never use is a great productivity tool. You can learn how to add and remove buttons from the toolbar by using your word processor’s Help Files, but here are the steps as I’ve adapted them from the help files.

To Add a Button to a Toolbar in WordPerfect

1. Click Tools, then select Settings and click Customize.

2. In the Customize settings dialog box, click the Toolbars tab.

3. Choose a toolbar from the Available toolbars list, Click Edit.

4. In the Toolbar editor dialog box, choose a category from the Feature categories list box.

5. Choose a feature from the Features list. (Note: Each Feature Category brings up a different set of Commands here and the various "paste" ones are under Edit.)

6. Locate Paste Special or Paste Unformatted (I used both) and either click Add Button or drag your choice up to the place on the toolbar where you wish it to be located.

To Add a Button (or Command) to a Toolbar in Microsoft Word

1. Make sure the toolbar you want to change is visible. How? On the View menu, point to Toolbars. Click the toolbar you want to display.

2. Click the Toolbar Options arrow . (located on the right end of the toolbar)

3. Point to Add or Remove Buttons, and then click Customize.

4. Click the Commands tab.

5. In the Categories box, click a category for the command you want the button to perform. (Note: Each Category brings up a different set of Commands here and the various "paste" ones are under Edit.)

6. Drag the command or macro you want from the Commands box to the displayed toolbar.

7. On the Customize dialog box, click Close.

Look at your choices. You may want to add several buttons to your toolbars.

LLRX.com, the Law Library Resource Xchange, was launched in 1996. This webzine, now published monthly, continues to provide free cutting-edge articles about legal research, legal technology and related topics. Its archives are extremely valuable. I frequently direct people to its Court Rules, Forms and Dockets page, a great place for a first look at the procedures in an unfamiliar jurisdiction. Its regular columns are often "must read" resources. Its research guides can be enormously valuable when you need them. For an example, see this guide to researching Australian law. I’ve previously linked from this weblog to great articles on LLRX.com and no doubt will again, so LLRX.com is my Website of the Week.

This tip from Law Tech Guru Jeff Beard was news to me. We should all have at least one entry for the name ICE in our mobile phone contacts. ICE stands for In Case of Emergency. If one is incapacitated, then emergency responders may check your mobile phone to see if you have an ICE listing. Jeff notes that putting a period in front (as in .ICE) will put it at the top of the list of contacts. Jeff also suggests a contact named Call If Found with your landline number in case you lose your phone and some honest person finds it.

Recently I have had to send some files that are too large to e-mail. Most e-mail services seem to have a 5 MB (or less) attachment limit. I’ve been using YouSendIt.com and it has worked very well. You upload the file to this service and the person to whom the file is directed receives an e-mail from you including the link to download the file. The file is available for a few days and "a limited number of downloads." This service’s file size limit is 1 GB (or 200 times most e-mail service’s limit.) Best of all, it is totally free.

There are lots of e-mail electronic discussion groups. Many have valuable information for lawyers. All Oklahoma Bar Sections have these lists available.

Solosez is a thriving electronic mailing list-based online community. It is for the benefit of solo and small firm lawyers and neither ABA membership or even a law degree is required to participate. But with a large and active membership, the daily message volume can be overwhelming. Are you ready for an extra hundred e-mails per day? You cannot have a high volume list like Solosez routed into your inbox. You will have trouble locating your regular business e-mail in the flood. But a list where there are only two or three messages per month has little potential value. There are techniques for dealing with a high volume e-mail list. The two most common are setting up a rule in your e-mail client to route all Solosez messages to their own folder or just setting up a new mail account just for one or more high volume mailing lists. But I’ve found the best one, IMHO.

I periodically take a break from Solosez and resubscribe a few months later. I mentioned to Ross Kodner that I was about to resubscribe again and he said "Why don’t you just give yourself a Gmail Invite?" As most now know, Gmail is the free web-based e-mail service from Google with over two gigabytes of storage. Gmail is theoretically still in beta version and you join by getting an "invite" from a current user. (Anyone who wants one, e-mail me at jim.calloway@gmail.com. I had 50 invites left last time I looked.)

This has been great–for me anyway. When I log into my Gmail "Solosez" account, the various e-mails are displayed by threads, which makes them easier to quickly access. For example, if someone asked a question about X Software, and ten people responded, I see the subject of X Software with (11) next to it, indicating 11 total messages. Clicking on the subject line brings up all 11 in order. This is a great way to make sure I don’t miss a message on a topic of interest, while allowing me to skip threads on the substantive law of other states, for example. And now I’ve got over 2 gigs of storage on someone else’s server. That’s a lot of Solosez e-mail!

For more on high volume lists, here’s the classic: "How many electronic mailing list subscribers does it take to change a light bulb?"

Starting a law practice is a challenge many lawyers accept each year. But, for many, all that is associated with running a business in addition to doing the legal work for clients can prove intially demanding. This is particularly true for those fresh out of law school or those leaving a large firm where most administrative and management matters were kept out of sight and out of the minds of most of the lawyers. Resources for Starting and and Running a Law Firm is a web directory from the ABA General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Section. It provides links to many resources including back issues of the section’s New Lawyer, Unlock Your Potential (a 79 page PDF from the ABA Young Lawyer’s Division on setting up a practice) and the link to subscribe to Solosez. (We’ll talk more about Solosez later this week.) GPSolo’s fine collection of Resources is our Website fo the Week.