For many years, I did a Website of the Week for the Oklahoma Bar site. After a while I stopped updating it and when there was no great negative response, I moved on. After 5 years or so, locating interesting sites was a bit harder anyway.

With the huge number of blawgs springing up and the easier method of posting my blawg provides, I’ve decided to resurrect the feature here. Look for a Website of the Week every Monday morning here. Some will be blawgs, but many will not.

Tulsa County, Oklahoma has always had an interesting and useful family law site with its www.familiesintransition.com. The front page provides a picture of each of the family law judges and under each picture is a link to this week’s docket for the judge. There’s an online child support calculator, forms, a map to the courthouse and lots of useful things. Well, now they have added a brand new page with a News and Commentary section at http://www.familiesintransition.net. It covers news of interest to family law practitioners, including summaries of recent opinions relating to family law with links back to the full text of the opinions and statutes on the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network. FIT News is powered by Blogger software, so I guess it qualifies as a court blog. (Note to others: Does your state now have all your case and statutory law online at no charge like OSCN does?)

No, it’s not a typo. My friend Reid Trautz has started his new blog, Reid My Blog. Reid is the practice management advisor for the D.C. Bar. His blog will focus on “furthering innovation in management, governance, and ethics for lawyers.” I’ve encouraged Reid to do this because I know he will have some foward-looking ideas to share with law firms .

Reid is a great resource. Reid and I have enjoyed doing several CLE presentations together. I’d suggest you bookmark his blog in your Favorites if you browse or subscribe if you use RSS feeds.

I’ve talked to lots of people about blogs this past week. (Many refer to lawyer’s blogs as blawgs.)  I’ve decided I won’t spend much space on my blog discussing how to set up a blog, how useful they are and so forth. There’s a lot of that information already available in the blogosphere and I’m going to focus on my primary topic of law practice management and tips.

So my tip for lawyers who want to learn about setting up a blog is to begin with Dennis Kennedy’s blog. My friend Dennis writes a lot about blogging and understands it as well as any lawyer. See his recent post on most common mistakes a new legal blogger can make. I’m not just referencing it because he says nice things about me in it and in his post on naming a blog. (Thanks, Dennis.) Many of us recognize Dennis as a blog pioneer and the "go to guy" for blogging advice.

When I was at the ABA Midyear Meeting, my laptop refused to connect to the Internet. The underlying problem was simply some corrupted DLL files, but, as the doctors would say, it presented itself in such as way as to send us down a lot of blind alleys. I received help from an outstanding IT person, but because of our schedule of presentations to attend and give, I was off-line for a couple of days. I didn’t just need to check e-mail, however. I had completed projects I needed to send back to the office.

My USB flash drive (aka jump drive, aka thumb drive) really helped salvage the situation. I could quickly copy the work to it and then just find any Internet-connected computer with a USB port to e-mail the project out. I could have done the same thing by burning a CD, perhaps, but this was easier. I also had a person ask to borrow my laptop for a PowerPoint presentation. About 15 minutes before it began, she handed me her presentation on a floppy disk. Of course, none of the 3 or 4 laptops in the room had a floppy drive. I rushed to the business service center where they had a floppy drive and they copied it to my flash drive.

These keychain-sized devices can hold lots of information. You can get one with a capacity of 128 megabytes for around $20-$30 and 256 megabytes for $35 or $40. Every lawyer should have one in his or her toolbox. I keep duplicates of many of my PowerPoint presentations on mine. If my laptop suddenly dies, I can still do the presentation if can I locate another computer.

UPDATE: After thinking a bit more about how my flash drive aided me so much, I took the logical step and dumped my old keychain in favor of my JOGR flash drive on my keys. This particular model is rubber coated, shockproof and waterproof. We’ll see how it does coping with keys and change in my pocket. I bet within the next three months, I’ll be really glad I had it around to either obtain or share some computer data when I didn’t have my computer handy.

The mouse is a very useful tool. We click on pull-down menus, graphical interfaces and icons to choose from among literally thousands of options. But there are many operations we do many times in a day or week. Memorizing the keyboard shortcuts for these tasks makes us more efficient computer users and speeds our workflow. For even the most difficult keyboard shortcut can be executed as quickly as one can grab the mouse, much less pull down menus. So if you are still clicking on the Edit button in your word processor to copy and paste text, perhaps it is time to set a goal to learn and use one new keyboard shortcut each week for a few months. Here are a few of the keyboard shortcuts many use every day. Do you know most of them?

Control + C

Control + X

Control + Z

Control + A

Windows key + E

Windows key + D (This one is fine to test now. Hit it once and then again.)

Alt + F4

Ctrl + Alt + Del (OK, that one’s a gimme.)

Two files are attached to this post. One is a ten page paper I once did on keyboard shortcuts. No warranties are expressed or implied. The other is a two page "cheat sheet" designed to be printed on the front and back of a piece of paper and kept handy. Some may decide to design their own version of the cheat sheet so it is only one sheet.

Keyboard shortcuts from OBA-MAP.pdf (190.2K)

Shortcut tipsheet.pdf (449.3K)

This week is the ABA Midyear meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah. I will be attending  to, among other things, participate in the National Association of Bar Executives meetings. It’s a great place to get ideas to better serve our members. I’ve been invited to speak on a couple of panels. Wednesday I’m doing "Champagne Bar Services on a Beer Budget" with four really great people. Thursday I’m doing a program on RSS Feeds for Bar Association Webpages with Toby Brown and Lincoln Mead of the Utah State Bar. Then Friday I’m going over to do a luncheon program on practice management with my buddy, Reid Trautz for the members of the Utah State Bar. I decided to post my reading list on RSS for the Bar Executives here. If you don’t understand RSS feeds, here are the links to some good introductory articles to read.  Download RSS Resources for Busy Bar Executives.pdf (7.1K)

Spell checking in your word processor is a useful tool. But here’s a goofy way to spell check anything that appears on your screen in any application. First, install the Google Deskbar. (Internet Explorer only.) Then when you want to spell check a word, double click on it to select it and hit Ctrl+Alt+G, then Enter. This will do a Google search for the word and give you the results on about 1/4 of your screen. If it is mispelled. most of the time Google will suggest the correct spelling. But even if Google doesn’t, only a few hits means it is probably misspelled while millions means it is correct, or at least you are in good company.

If you need to locate an Oklahoma lawyer who practices in a certain geographical and practice area, you can do that online at OklahomaFindaLawyer.com. It is a free service, both for our members and the public. Not all lawyers are listed, only those who choose to sign up.  If you’re an Oklahoma lawyer who hasn’t signed up yet, here’s an article outlining how you sign up for this, the OBA-NET, your lawoklahoma.com e-mail account and other OBA Internet services.