I am not judging, but I see a lot of lawyers making some elementary videoconferencing mistakes. If you are talking with a client or on behalf of a client, you want to look your best. How to Look Better on Zoom (and Other Video-Calling Apps) is really a nice basic training on videoconferencing.

Recently I was in a Zoom meeting with a few dozen people. One was a colleague from another state I’ve been in several such conferences with recently. Afterwards, I texted her “OK, don’t take this the wrong way, but you really looked nice today.” She quickly texted back “It’s my new light ring!!!” Enough said on the importance of light rings?

You do not want to pay for something you don’t need. But lawyers have to have good data security. So, Is Windows Defender Good Enough to Protect Your PC by Itself? This feature in PC Mag has some positive comments. You may want to read the comments to get a broader group of opinions. But learning of the improvements in Windows is helpful.

Now that you are using Windows 10 (because you shouldn’t be using Windows 7 anymore), you are no doubt aware there are a lot of features you have not yet tried. Windows 10 Optional Features: A Quick Guide to the Best Extras You May Want is a high-level feature targeted to IT types. But it is worth your time just to know how to activate these if needed and to scroll down the list of optional features available.

Notifications can be a distraction. They often interrupt a train of thought. If you are being notified of non-urgent information that you would likely learn of anyway later, you probably want to reduce your notifications. With iOS devices it’s easy to review all of your notifications. Just click Settings and then Notifications to scroll through all notification settings. You will note how many you already have turned off and can hopefully turn off others. Being from Oklahoma, I only need two notifications: severe weather warnings and OKC Thunder tip offs.

Using either the scroll bar or the arrow keys to move down a web page can be slow and time consuming. The next time you need to scroll down on a webpage try tapping the spacebar on your keyboard for faster scrolling. It’s a bigger target to tap on as well. Want to scroll back up? Just hold down the Shift key while tapping the space bar.

Since technology has taken over law offices, there’s always been one data management task where most lawyers didn’t behave like the software developers wanted us to behave. That is managing tasks with software.

I’ll stand with my fellow lawyers and agree that they are just following precedent. Because before previous generations of lawyers had ever used the word “data” in a sentence, the profession had to deal with deadlines and due dates. So back when quill pens ruled the law office, if you had an important deadline or a task that was to be accomplished by a certain date, you put the reminder in the only appropriate data management tool you had available. You wrote it on that day in the calendar.

Even as computers and internet-based services became indispensable parts of the modern law office and software provide great task management tools, we kept putting those deadlines on the calendar. And even today, I’d be hard pressed to argue with a lawyer who tells me that she is preparing a plaintiff’s case with a possible seven-figure recovery and the statute of limitations running soon and thinks that date should be on the law firm calendar.

But as you know, that doesn’t work if a law firm has dozens of such deadlines every day. And there is often the awkwardness of having appointments on your calendar that are tasks, not appointments. Microsoft wants business users to use Teams all day, every day. The way Teams works makes it simpler to note the pending tasks. Suggested reading today: Microsoft Teams: This new Tasks feature rolls out to all Microsoft 365 users from ZDNet.

Sometimes law firms struggle to come up with relevant website content. The “traditional” FAQ page may be one area that they should address. After all, we know people come to lawyers with questions. It is likely the same with law firm websites. So, answer the web visitor’s questions. Why Your Law Firm’s Website Should Have A Great FAQ Page is a very nice informative post from Law Quill. I’d encourage everyone to read it.

There’s another lesson for law firms hidden in this post. Law Quill provides services to law firms, including helping them with their FAQ pages. But instead of a sales pitch, they shared great information which I am now sharing with a broader audience. That’s how you do marketing on the internet!

It appears we still have a few more months of mask wearing ahead and research has shown some of those neck gators are as bad as not wearing a mask at all. So, what’s the best type of mask? Ars Technica has a nice feature — Mask up! How to choose and maintain the best masks for use against COVID-19.

American Bar Association Formal Opinion 477R (May 2017), …. describes the current threat environment: “Cybersecurity recognizes a … world where law enforcement discusses hacking and data loss in terms of ‘when,’ and not ‘if’…” a company (or law firm) will be breached.

The above sentence is from Cybersecurity for Attorneys: The Ethics of Incident Response by David G. Ries in Law Practice Today.

If the threat of a cybersecurity breach happening to a law firm is “when” and not “if” you will have a cyber security breach, the question is whether your law firm has an incident response plan and does it comply with your ethical obligations? David’s useful article will assist you with that. Forms for incident response plans can be located online and some are better than others. But key provisions of an incident response plan for a law firm (or any of a firm’s business clients) are unique to the firm. Where are our insurance policies? Who does the firm notify at the insurance company to help it deal with a cybersecurity breach (assuming you have coverage)? Who is your IT support in such a disaster? Is the situation so major public relations help is required and has the firm identified who to contact, especially if it is after business hours? There are many questions to be answered and all are better answered in an advance planning session rather than in the middle of a cyber-mess!