Email Management, Microsoft Office, Productivity, Security, Technology

Tips from the CPM ICYMI Newsletter (February – April 2021)

Every week subscribers receive the ICYMI enewsletter from the NCBA Center for Practice Management. The newsletter highlights tips, tools, trends, and techniques to help your law practice. Following are a few popular links from the past issues of the newsletter.

How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone

A step-by-step guide to freeing up space on your iPhone so you can download the latest app you’ve been eyeing or wait a little longer to shell out the bucks for the latest model with more storage.

Dump Chrome: 7 Alternative Web Browsers

Whether because of privacy concerns or lack of customization, you may seek alternates to browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Here is a list of seven options to consider. If anything, you may look at a secure browser for your smartphone that is not on this list. The secure and private search DuckDuckGo has a private browser app that has the private DuckDuckGo search engine, tracker blocker, encryption enforcer and more. It is available on iOS and Android. The mobile browser has a “burn” button to clear all tabs and data that is oddly satisfying (you will have to try it).

Sure-Fire Productivity Tips for Tackling Your To-Do List

Lawyer Kelly Nolan talks about her journey from using a to-do list to time blocking – and the lessons she learned along the way.

How to Disable Conversation View in Gmail

If you have been a long time Outlook or Thunderbird user, the Gmail conversation view can be disconcerting. If there is a long string of replies, if there is a “side bar” exchange of emails with the same subject line, or if you are just not confident you have seen all the messages in a thread you can turn off the conversation with instructions from How To Geek. Or course, if you like conversation view, you can now apply it to Outlook.

Your iPhone Has A Hidden Document Scanner

While the Acrobat app and the MS Office app have built in scanning, if you have not installed them you may not have the time or inclination to get them up and running on your smartphone to quickly capture a document on the go.  Not to worry – your iPhone has a scanner built in if you know where to look.

50 Startup Tips to Get Your Practice Off the Ground

Whether you are just starting a practice or need to rethink your practice, these tips from some of the best and brightest in legal tech and entrepreneurship are practical and actionable.

Make Time for “Me Time”

You know you should, but how do you make time for “me time”? This article provides a template and tips for carving out time to “put your oxygen mask on first”. You cannot effectively take care of your clients, your team, and your family if you do not take care of yourself.

7 Scary Excel Errors Your Team is Probably Making 

Excel is a powerful tool, but errors in coding or formulas can lead to negative consequences. Potential traps that could lead to miscalculations include merging headers to improve design but negatively affect function, self-taught formulas, and inadvertently leaving cells out of sums.

2021 Complete Guide to Email for Lawyers

Lee Rosen published the definitive guide to lawyers using email effectively, with many tips and tricks for productivity and time savings. He focuses on Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. In addition to effective use of the email applications themselves, he advocates for the use of add-on tools like SaneBox and TextExpander.

What Should I Do If I Accidentally Click on a Phishing Link?

Former Microsoft software engineer Leo A. Notenboom publishes practical and helpful tech support on his Ask Leo! website. This week he explores what to do if you click on a phishing link. Also helpful, his recent post on what to do if your email gets hacked.