Popular Articles from the CPM ICYMI Newsletter (April – July 2024)
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. The following are a few popular links from the past issues of the newsletter.
Spring Cleaning Your Law Firm Data (April 19, 2024)
Want to take advantage of new tools and applications? First, make sure your (data) house is in order. Jim Calloway writes that the basics, like file naming conventions and storage policies need to be addressed and followed, make sure your PDFs are searchable by running OCR (optical character recognition) on them, and make a plan for dealing with closing files in a way that lets you leverage the intelligence buried within.
Eight Advanced Google Docs Features You Should Be Using (April 26, 2024)
If you are a Google Docs user, a word processor that has made great leaps in functionality over the years, this article provides instructions on using some advanced features. Of special note to attorneys is the ability to add line numbers and embedding a doc in an email so you don’t need to send it as an attachment and the recipient can edit directly from email, and more.
Outlook: How To Set Up Breaks Between Your Meetings (May 17, 2024)
In Microsoft Outlook’s calendar when you set up a meeting the defaults are in 30-minute increments, which you can change by going into your calendar settings. However, many meetings don’t need to last a full hour, perhaps 50 minutes would work better and allow you some time on your schedule to finish up adding your meeting notes, identifying action items, or adding a note to the file. Often you schedule meetings to start on the hour, but you know that clients or colleagues are often five minutes late. To add meeting time buffers before and after meetings in Outlook check out this tutorial from PC Magazine.
7 Google Maps Features I Can’t Live Without (May 31, 2024)
There are some excellent features in the Google Maps app, including offline maps and setting departure/arrival times. You may be aware of many of these options, but there may be some you didn’t know about like saving your parking location in the app!
DuckDuckGo Now Lets You Talk to AI Anonymously (June 7, 2024)
While the DuckDuckGo solution to reduce your footprint on generative AI models (saved prompts and training the LLM) is a start. If you are wary of the chatbots you can try the DuckDuckGo tool, though there are some limitations as described in the article. This article by Bruce Scheier points out that over the years our privacy has been so thoroughly stripped away that we can’t look at what it was like a decade ago, but rather focus on the entirety of the issues.
What Is Masked Email? Try This Security Practice Now (June 14, 2024)
You may have heard of using email aliases to try to cut down on “bcon ” – email we have allowed, but not always requested due to signing up for whitepapers or special offers. Well, to try to further wrest some privacy and security you can go beyond the email alias and consider masking your email. Masked email creates a single use email account to completely hide your actual email. From a security perspective this is a great idea, since so many of our login IDs are our email address and it makes it easy for bad actors to send targeted phishing messages. There are a variety of ways illustrated in this article to get a masked email.
New And Classic Outlook for Windows Feature Comparison (July 12, 2024)
Have you tried the new Outlook interface? Did you like it? There are some cool features, but it lacks a lot of essential functions found in classic Outlook. If you want to see the differences sharply contrasted look at this detailed feature coverage matrix, highlighting updates and upcoming features.
The Future (Pricing) of QuickBooks / QuickBooks Online (July 19, 2024)
If you are using QuickBooks desktop (or considering it), be aware that Intuit will no longer sell new subscriptions to the desktop version as of September30, 2024 for many versions. Existing users are not affected by this change. For existing desktop customers, the pricing is going to take quite a leap as of October 1, while QB online users will see a slight increase in price. If this pushes you to shop for a new accounting system here are some considerations. Also note that Clio has announced an accounting add-on for its users.
