Desktop search remains an underutilized and underappreciated productivity tool for lawyers. Windows 7 has finally delivered a powerful search feature that will uncover content quickly. In what seems typical, the default settings are not the most powerful. Check out these tips to make sure that you’ve tweaked your search to be as useful as possible. …
An Order of Google, with Information on the Side
Google has delivered two new sidebar research tools in the past month. The first, the Research sidebar, appeared in Google Docs and copies the Microsoft Office research sidebar. Neither one is especially powerful unless the research resources you are looking for are embedded. Fortunately, you can find the Google Web search and Microsoft Bing search …
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Get to Your Dropbox Files with Online File Managers
One of the powerful components of the cloud-based services lawyers are using is the API. This enables services to talk to each other and for developers to create new tools to use those services. I am seeing more file management tools appearing that sit between you and your Dropbox files and whose goal is to …
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Quick Online Manipulation of PDFs
Someone sent me a PDF the other day, needing it quickly turned into an editable file (Microsoft Word or some similar format). Our organization long ago dropped a PDF editor from the standard software installed on our PCs so I had to hunt for an alternative. It was too big for one of the sites …
Look Up Information in Your Research Flow
I am always on the lookout for easy to use, right-click tools that can be added to a Web browser to speed up research. A recent addition is Liquid Information, formerly known as Hyperwords, that brings together a bunch of tools and is customizable to add your own reference and search resources. The basic premise …
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Bye, Bye, Browser Bar
The Web browser toolbar was for many years the way that expert researchers improved their Web browser. It provided nice added features (term jumping, highlighting) and saved search history. Google had one, Yahoo! had one, in fact nearly everyone who could do so created one. Some were little more than advertisements. …
Give Your Bookmarklets Some Ooomph
When I moved to the Incredible Start Page as my replacement home page, I found that my bookmarks bar was too cluttered to work well in this new layout. I moved most of my bookmarks into one of two folders, my primary folder and a utility folder. My primary folder appears on my Incredible Start …