Wellness and dealing with stress were important subjects for the legal profession long before 2020. Wellness is a critical topic for everyone during 2020. People working in law firms are the most important asset our law firms have and they all need to take care of ourselves. They are doing sometimes stressful work in stressful times.

Margaret Ogden is the wellness coordinator at the Supreme Court of Virginia. The Virginia Lawyers’ Wellness Initiative is providing resources and educational opportunities to help attorneys prioritize wellbeing. Sharon Nelson and I welcomed Margaret Ogden to our Digital Edge podcast to discuss the history and development of this new initiative and how attorneys can seek assistance, take advantage of CLE opportunities, find resources, and more.

The episode is entitled Supreme Court of Virginia’s Lawyers’ Wellness Initiative: A Rousing Success!. There is also a transcript of the podcast for those who would rather read than listen.

Marketing, or as many lawyers prefer to call it, rainmaking takes time. Actors often grumble about being labeled an overnight success for a major performance after they have been working in the field for decades.

Effective rainmaking takes time. In Rainmaking Recommendation from Jaimie Field: The Myth of the Overnight Success, the author makes this point and several other excellent points.

Rainmaking is about three things, according to Field. This may be one of the best summaries of rainmaking you will encounter. But I’m not sharing that here. You need to go to her post to read the three things.

Joshua Lenon is the Lawyer in Residence at Clio and he has just posted The Ethics of Law Firms Accepting Credit Cards.

It is challenging to write about legal ethics for the 50 states where the ethical standards are not uniform. This is a good general treatment.

For Oklahoma lawyers I might add that it is certainly legal to accept credit cards for legal services in this jurisdiction, but retainers and other unearned fees must go in the trust account. So, it is generally a better business practice to use a credit card processor that allows you to deposit into either the trust or operating account but deduct all service charges from the operating account. See my prior tips video on this subject. And, apart from any ethical considerations, in my opinion, it is not good for the law firm’s image to “nickel and dime” clients by attempting to recover credit card processing fees from clients. As Joshua notes in his post, 2% of $10,000 is only $200.

The Clio Cloud Conference is next week and Clio CEO Jack Newton will be addressing the OBA Annual Meeting in November on The Client-Centered Law Firm: How to Succeed in an Experience-Driven World. We appreciate Clio’s support of the OBA Annual Meeting.

My Law Practice Tips blog is hosted on the LexBlog network. They are now working with a group of lawyers on a new personal injury law portal called Trial Lawyer View Daily. It is described as “a portal that brings together insight and legal commentary from lawyers with a focus on personal injury law. With 19 blogs currently added and more on the way, it’s your go-to place for insights on topics such as personal injury claims and meditations in different states.”

It is a very well-designed portal and, with insights from that many legal bloggers, it could be a very interesting source of information.

Printers can provide more evidence than most might suspect. Digital evidence hidden on the printed page is a wild idea. But apparently the FBI is well aware that many printers hide yellow dots on printed text that identify when a document was printed and the serial number for the printer. So, if your client paid for a printer with a credit card and then used it to create anonymous threatening letters sent to a number of important government officials, there could be an FBI knock on the door in the client’s future.

This isn’t a new idea. But if you want to learn more about it, read Why Printers Add Secret Tracking Dots.

Scribble is a new feature in iPadOS 14. It looks quite handy.

Jeff Richardson of iPhoneJD explains Scribble in this post:

“One of the interesting new features in iPadOS 14 is Scribble, the ability to use an Apple Pencil to write text into a text field instead of using the on-screen keyboard.  I wasn’t sure how useful the feature would be when it was announced, but now that I’ve been using it, I really like it. When I then need to enter some quick text — such as to search for something in Safari or Mail — it is incredibly convenient to just write a few letters or words with the Pencil that is already in my hand….  If you haven’t tried it out yet, I encourage you to do so.  It is yet another reason that the Apple Pencil makes me more productive in my law practice”

This isn’t so much a profound tip as an interesting story. DSL lines can be subject to different types of interference. You will probably never forget that fact after you read this story:

“A 400-resident village in Wales suffered 18 months of DSL Internet outages each morning until the culprit was identified as electrical interference from an old TV set,” according to this post on Ars Technica. Eighteen months! The service provider replaced cables and took every remedial measure that they could think of.

Finally, they resorted to walking around the village with something called a Spectrum Analyzer. The technicians recounted that they “walked up and down the village in the torrential rain at 6 am to see if we could find an “electrical noise” to support our theory. And at 7 am, like clockwork, it happened! Our device picked up a large burst of electrical interference in the village….The source of the “electrical noise” was traced to a property in the village. It turned out that at 7am every morning, the occupant would switch on their old TV which would in turn knock out broadband for the entire village.”

The embarrassed TV owner promised never to turn on that TV again. So, the story has a happy ending!

Sitting too much is an occupational hazard for lawyers. The same is true for many who use a computer every day. Sitting too much is dangerous and can lead to long-term health problems. We have seen many office workers opt for a standing desk environment. Proper stretching can also help. In 14 Stretches to Counteract The Effects of Sitting, From a Physical Therapist stretching exercises to counteract the challenge of too much sitting are outlined, as well as some other techniques and ideas.

Speech recognition in Teams is still under development. In fact, there have been reports that even muting a Teams call still doesn’t allow one to use Microsoft Speech recognition to operate without exiting Teams entirely.

I was in my Teams staff meeting and needed to type several sentences into Teams. I decided to try a modest hack. Without even muting our conversation in the Teams video conference, I opened up Microsoft Word and hit the Dictate button to dictate those sentences into Word, fully expecting a failure or error message of some sort. But, no, Microsoft Word recognized every word correctly. Then I could copy and paste into Teams. Since then I have tried it several times and it always worked. Until Teams has native speech recognition, this is an easy and simple workaround.

Tracking of our internet use, personal interests and the sites we visit online is getting more pervasive. You are not going to avoid it all unless you are willing not to go online. But you can minimize the tracking. Most of us have by now had creepy experiences that make us question how much we are being tracked, like the evening my wife showed me her phone with a coat for sale on Amazon she thought I’d like and within the hour I was served an ad for the very same coat on a social media stream on my phone.

Our June 8, 2020 Tip Avoid Having Your Online Searches Tracked with DuckDuckGo is an important piece of the puzzle for online search privacy. I installed the DuckDuckGo app on my phone and placed it next to Google, so I could be reminded, “Should I use Google for this search?” The first time I used the DDG app for a search it informed me it blocked six websites trying to follow me.

Many lawyers are familiar with privacy-focused search tools. But do you know which browsers are bigger “snitches” than the others?

Bleeping Computer recently published Privacy-focused search engines & browsers that protect your data. You will be interested to read how highly this author ranks your browser of choice and learning about some privacy-focused browsers.