Saving Emails as PDF Files

Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Outlook work together in many nice ways. A great tip for archiving Outlook folders is to right click on them and select "Convert [Folder Name] to Adobe PDF." Then you can have all of those emails and attachments in a single PDF file and delete the folder from Outlook.

As I was preparing for my ABA TECHSHOW presentation on using PDF files with my co-presenter Erik Mazzone, it occurred to me that I rarely used an equally powerful Adobe/Outlook feature. That is the ability to select several messages from your Inbox or other folder and convert those messages into a single PDF file. Sometimes I may just want to save an email discussion that is not about a client file. And if the ultimate goal is to archive them as PDF, why bother with the intermediate step of saving them in an Outlook folder? But what if new emails on the same subject come in later? As you can see from the graphic below, not only is "Append to Existing PDF" an option, but you also can see the last several PDF files that you either created via Outlook or used Outlook to append an email to the file.

Email Issues For Lawyers: Four Not-So-Frequently Asked Questions

Email Issues For Lawyers Today is my column in this month's Oklahoma Bar Journal.

Dealing with email is a challenge for many business professionals. I actually intended to write this piece about something that was related, but I was inspired by a blog post by Erik Mazzone, Should Lawyers Use Encrypted Email? and something very interesting that one of our Oklahoma family lawyer practitioners said in a presentation at our OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. You hear talk at technology conferences criticizing lawyers for using web-based email. But it is still widely used, at least by solo lawyers. I came up with four questions and some discussion about each, even if there are not clear cut answers sometimes. Many times a lawyer simply has to decide for himself or herself--at least until there is a consensus or some clear guidance from your jurisdiction. But there are some clear situations where the email that a client uses can be very problematic.

If anyone strongly disagrees with something in the column and sends me a link to an article, I might do a follow up with some links. I don't host comments on my blog. So to so that you will have to use ---- EMAIL!

Video Law Practice Tip: Search, Don't Sort in Microsoft Outlook

While zero inbox is a great goal for e-mail management, it seems to be an unattainable goal for many of us. Even those who claim success at this usually do it by moving e-mail from the Inbox to other Outlook folders, some of which may be pretty full. So this video tip is very brief (just over three minutes) and it shows you how finding a particular e-mail or group of e-mails in Outlook folders is almost always more easily done by search rather than any other method. (Note: You will want to view this video with the full screen view to see the details)

 

To learn lots of really great Outlook tips, you can purchase these nice books from the ABA by my friend Ben Schorr: The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2010 or The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft® Outlook 2007. The Outlook 2007 book is actually cheaper on Amazon.

Efficient legal document production for lawyers

There are many changes ahead for us in the future. But one set of changes that that I see impacting lawyers and law firms in the near future involves how we produce documents and bill for documents. There are some great tools that relatively few law firms are using now that I think will become common very soon. I direct you to my column in Lawyers USA on "Efficient legal document production for lawyers." Feel free to share the link with other lawyers you know. It will take some time to learn the tools and modify some parts of your business model. But with these tools we have the potential for less drudgery for lawyers, more efficiency and a better work product to deliver to our clients. It is hard to argue with that.

Pizza and Online Document Repositories

Let's discuss a really powerful free tool that you may not yet be using. I hope this blog post will convince you that you need to set up a free online document repository.

I have been finding many interesting uses for Dropbox and have encouraged others to sign up. Dropbox offers 2 GB of online storage for free. (Although with a few referral credits from blog readers, my free Dropbox account is up to 8 GB.) Recently Box.net increased its free online storage from 1 GB to 5 GB and business accounts now start at 500 GB. Just this week SugarSync increased its free storage from 2 GB to 5 GB. Drop.io used to offer the abillity to create many free document drops. But I say "used to" because Facebook just bought Drop.io and is shutting it down. So look for the future announcement that Facebook will be offering a document repository in addition to its photo albums.

I've also had many lawyers asking me recently what "the cloud" really means. I think the possibilities are starting to become interesting to many. Let's set aside lawyers and client files and confidentiality for a minute and talk about something simple--like pizza.

I've told many people that the above services are so neat because they synchronize your documents so you know a synchronized document is the current version of the document. It also saves you the trouble of e-mailing a document home to work on it or keeping it on a flash drive. But let's say you only work on one computer ever and you've made a decision never to ever store any business or client document in the cloud.

That's where pizza comes in. Two new "pizza by the slice" places have opened in my home town. They are located not very far from me, almost facing each other across Main Street. As I was picking up some pizza from one I asked the manager a few questions, like delivery charges and such. I took a paper menu from the counter. It turned out the pizza was good and I might order from them again. I went to put the paper menu in the "paper junk drawer" in the kitchen. It was stuffed full with menus and manuals. The manuals reminded me of another plan I had not yet put into practice.

So instead I put the menu in the home scanner and scanned it to PDF. named it SandrosPizza.PDF. created a new folder c:/MyDocuments/MyDropbox/Menus and saved the file to it. I scanned a couple of other menus from the drawer and placed the files there too, just to get into the rhythm. So now those files will be available from my Dropbox subfolder on my computer or by logging into the Dropbox site from any computer. But that's not the point. I could locate it in the drawer at home and the restaurant has a website. The point is the synchronization with my iPhone (or any popular smart phone.) So now i can get to the menu whereever I am if I have my phone, whether that means calling in from work before I leave to pick up food on the way home or just not having to get up and rummage through the drawer to find it. I can, in effect, have a file cabinet's worth of documents that are easily accessible from my phone.

It's not a perfect system to read a menu from an iPhone screen, but it is doable. Of course if it was a 20 page document I had saved to my online Document Repository, i'd read it on the computer or the iPad which also has a Dropbox app. Menus are not really the best example anyway as restaurants often have websites with the menus online, often in PDF format.

You may not want your tax returns or medical records in an online repository. That's your call. But think of all of the documents you could store there that you might want to access from your phone and you'd definitely like to have out of the way. For your children, there are school directories, sports team information and schedules, special events and assignments, just for one set of examples. Every new product comes with a manual. why not just go to the web site of the manufacturer and download to the PDF of the manual for your product to your drop? Sure it will probably be still there online sixteen months from now when you need it, but why not keep it where you can grab it is seconds.

All of these documents don't even fill up your phone. Unless you specify otherwise they are just links and the document loads in a few seconds when you click on the link.

There are lots of tools you can use, but at a minimum you need one of these free online document repository accounts and a scanner. It is better if your scanner can scan in duplex (two sides at a time) mode. It is better if you own a PDF management tool like Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat reduced the size of the menu file from almost 2 megabytes to about 750 KB and would have OCR'd it if needed. But think of the fact you can get from two to five GB for free and 1024 megabytes equals one GB. That's a lot of documents! (Of course, if you start uploading lots of photos, you could fill up your alloted space pretty quickly.)

Of course if you really start scanning many documents, you might fill up your free space after a year or so and have to start paying the small fees. I assume that is what the vendors are hoping.

If you do not use your scanner much, you may want to invest the time to set up a "scan to drop" setting so you can just scan everything to a My Scans folder under the Dropbox folder on your computer. Then you could just feed things into the scanner and only periodically do the clean up work of changing them from that location to the proper location with a proper file name.

These repositories also make it easy to share documents. Basically you can copy a link to a single document that allows someone to download that one document without granting them complete access to your repository. Just recently I was tied up in a meeting so I copied the link to the document that was due that day and used my iPhone to e-mail it to my assistant wth a note to review it and suggest any changes. When I got back to my office, her edits and suggestions were in my inbox. Once you have this set up, you will find your own uses, like Grandmother asking when the next grade school basketball game is and you responding by e-mailing her the complete schedule or a lawyer keeping blank new client information sheets and other documents to easily e-mail potential clients from the smart phone outside of normal office hours.

Take some time to try this out now as it probably represents your future document filing system for your personal papers. You may fnd that you can set this up in less time than it took to read this post.

 

The Ins and Outs of Metadata Mining

"The ins and outs of metadata mining" is an article published this week in the Canadian edition of Lawyers Weekly.  I was quoted in the article, along with Canadian legal technology experts like Dominic Jaar and Dan Pinnington.

September's Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology podcast was titled Metadata – What You Can't See Can Hurt You. My podcast teammate, Sharon Nelson, and I discussed metadata. Sharon, as a principal of a computer forensics firm, has practical insights on this topic. I discussed the ethical issues of metadata mining. We hope you find this podcast enjoyable and informative.

Last month I did an Oklahoma Bar CLE webinar on Legal Ethics and Metadata. The archived version of this can be purchased and viewed for MCLE ethics credit, depending on your jurisdiction's MCLE rules, of course.

The Lawyer's Weekly article notes some metadata mining techniques and contains a lot of useful information. Some lawyers remain uniformed about the significance of metadata, but with online resources like the three listed about, there's really no reason for that.

Cool Tools - Dropbox

I've decided to create a new category today called Cool Tools. These tools will primarily be very useful and practical tools that can be used in a law practice, but I reserve the right to post about some tools just because they are cool. Even though I never do guest posts here, I'm going to kick off this new category with a guest post/reprint. (Note to PR Flacks: No, I don't want to hear from you or your CEO about another guest post.)

I have to note that Dropbox is one cool tool I have started using this year and now I keep asking myself why I took so long to try it out. The balance of this post is from Tom Mighell and is reprinted (with permission) from his publication, The Mighell Marker: A Legal Technology Weekly. It is from the August 1, 2010 edition and you can subscribe to The Mighell Marker at Tom's blog Inter-alia. I recommend it. Now on to Tom's comments on Dropbox:

"This week I want to talk about DropBox, which is quickly becoming my favorite currently-used application. DropBox is a file synchronization tool that allows you to access your most important files from any computer you use. Here's how it works.

"To get started, you'll need to install DropBox on all the computers you own/use. DropBox essentially places a new folder in your Documents or My Documents folder - you may also find the DropBox icon in your system tray. This folder is actually a portal to an online folder, which resides on DropBox's computers. Then take the files you want to use on other computers and drag them into this folder - DropBox will automatically sync all of your other folders with the newly added files. Just open your DropBox folder on another computer, and there are your files, ready to work on!

"I use DropBox to hold files that I work on regularly, whether I'm at home, at work, or on the road - I can always access these files and they are up to date. I also use DropBox instead of email - instead of mailing a file to my work email address, I'll just drag the file to DropBox, and pick it up on the other computer.

"You can also use DropBox to share files securely with other people. In fact, I just did this yesterday - I created a folder within DropBox and added the files I wanted to share. I then went to DropBox online and entered the email addresses of the people with whom I wanted to share the files. They got an email from DropBox with a link to a site with the files - they could only see those files and none of my other DropBox items, and they were able to download the files without me clogging up their email, or making extra copies of the files.

"I don't use the iPhone app very much, but when I have it's very useful - I can actually view the documents I've stored in DropBox from my iPhone - or Android phone, or iPad, if I had those. So DropBox is also great from mobile devices.

"And DropBox is secure, too - all transmission of file data occurs on an encrypted channel, and the files are also encrypted while they are stored on the DropBox servers. And when you've started using DropBox, check out these Cleverest Ways to Use DropBox that You're Not Using - interesting ways to use this great service!"

http://bit.ly/d0sHNM

http://www.dropbox.com 

P.S. from Jim -- And Dropbox says they will give both you and me some extra free space if you sign up using this link. https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTk2NDQ2NTc5

Bluebook Now Approves Citation to Internet Sources

Yesterday, I posted a link to an interview I did with University of Oklahoma professor Darin K. Fox. The interview was done a few months ago, but there were delays in posting it online. Professor Fox has informed me that there is a new, improved rule in The Bluebook. Here's the update from Professor Fox, which I think is good news for lawyers.

"After we spoke about legal citations, a new edition of The Bluebook was released in May, 2010. The Pace Law Library prepared a helpful chart indicating the changes from the 18th to the 19th Editions of The Bluebook which can be found here: http://pacelawlibrary.blogspot.com/2010/06/changes-in-19th-edition-of-bluebook.html One of the key changes relates to Rule 18.2 on Internet Sources, which we discussed in the interview. The new Rule 18.2 addresses some of the issues I highlighted back in February. It is now acceptable for attorneys to cite to an Internet source as if it was the original print source in certain cases.

"Here’s the rule: 'When an authenticated, official, or exact copy of a source is available online, citation can be made as if to the original print source (without any URL information appended).'   

"An 'exact copy' refers to a PDF file (or scanned page image) that preserves pagination and other attributes of the printed work. So, this permits citing to PDF files of cases on Westlaw and scanned version of journals on HeinOnline. As I mentioned in the previous interview, there is a need for states to make online versions of their statutes 'official.' Along these lines, The Bluebook now says 'Many states have begun to discontinue printed official legal sources, instead relying on online versions as the official resource for administrative or legislative documents.' Where a state government or the federal government designates an online version of the statutes or regulations as official, those may now be cited as if they were the print."

Legal Citations: An Interview with Professor Darin K. Fox

I have a confession to make. Sometimes when I write articles for the Oklahoma Bar Journal, I'll just include a TinyURL for the citation. I don't think anyone has really noticed. After all, the point of citations is to find the original source. So if a link that can be typed into any web browser gives one the entire article, that should be good, right?  Certainly better than seeing an obscure law review article cited where you have to either physically travel to a large law library or pay for someone to get the original source content for you. (I sense the collective blood pressure of librarians rising as they read this.) Well, it was just that line of thinking that led me to do An Interview with Professor Darin K. Fox.  Professor is director of the Donald E. Pray Law Library and associate professor of law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. I hope you enjoy reading the interview.

Composing an E-Mail Without Leaving MS Word

My friend and colleague, Reba Nance of the Colorado Bar, shared a well written tip with several of us. It illustrates how to quickly type and send an e-mail without ever leaving Microsoft Word. I was going to use it as a tip here, but another colleague, David Bilinsky, appropriated it to his blog first. As much as I hate to reward David's bad behavior, (that is beating me to the post, not using the tip--which we both had permission to do) I think I'll just link to his blog post on Composing an E-Mail Without Leaving MS Word.

All kidding aside, this is a simple and great tip for when you are working on documents in Word and need to send someone a quick e-mail without opening Outlook and running the risk of being distracted by your Inbox.