NCBA CPM Learning Objectives: Tips to Make Your Practice More Efficient

So welcome everybody to today's New Year's learning objective program, Tips to Make Your Practice More Efficient. This is a whole lot of information really fast, so don't panic. You don't have to scramble to take notes. I will send you the slide deck with all the links to the tips and instructions and all that good stuff to go along with it. So we'll just get started. You can chat questions at me if you want, but I'll probably wait till the end because we have a lot to cover. So the first tip that I wanted to give you is one that you can shrink PDFs before you send them. So originally this slide deck was 12 megabytes. Usually the file size attachment that most email will handle is about 10 megabytes unless your IT department has been kind and has bulked it up. So with one click in Adobe Acrobat, the full version, not the, the free reader, I can shrink this very easily. So I opened it up as a PDF, this PowerPoint is a PDF, and then in Acrobat, go to File, Reduce File Size, and I shrunk it from 12 megabytes to 3 megabytes. So that's a pretty significant difference. There is one thing to be aware of that sometimes file images may be degraded when you do that reduce file size. And if you're trying to read the speaker's notes or other things, the links don't work if you're reading it in the browser, which is just generally a good thing to be aware of. When a lot of times when you open a PDF now, it opens it in a browser, so either Chrome or Firefox or Edge, but a lot of times you may lose some functionality, bookmarks, things like that. So if you— wanna see what all you can get out of a PDF, I would open it in Reader or Acrobat or, um, COFAX or whatever product you happen to have. So the first set of tips we're gonna go through is all the Microsoft 365 and Windows 10 tips. I don't have Windows 11 tips, and there's a reason for that. I haven't upgraded and I'm probably not going to for a while. We use, um, We use the, uh, um, professional version of Windows, and I'm not confident that Windows 11 even has a professional version. If they do, I'm not sure it's ready for prime time. So most people are not moving, um, if you're in a business environment. I got a question: is that PDF reduction available at older versions of Acrobat? And the answer is absolutely. So one of the things that I recently did that I find hugely useful, pardon the pun, is increase the size of my mouse pointer. I have two monitors, and the older I get, the harder it is for me to see the mouse pointer and the cursor. So you can— and I'll again send you the instructions on how to do this— but basically you go into Settings, Ease of Access, Cursor and pointer, and you can increase your pointer size and change the color. So I bulked mine up and turned it a pretty light blue, and now I can see the cursor, um, wherever it happens to be. Another thing that we are all experiencing is we have a whole lot of things we access through a browser. So the Microsoft 365, or if you're using Clio, or if you're using, um, many other tools that we're accessing through the browser, you can open up a browser and you're going to have tabs all over the place. And eventually that gets a little hard to see. And so one of the things that you can do is actually add these browser tabs as if they're apps and put them in your Start menu. And so you basically, in Microsoft Edge or in Chrome, you can open up a web page, click on Apps, install the site as an app, and now it comes up in your, your Windows Start menu. Tiles, which again, you don't have to worry about looking across your system tray. You don't have to look across the, the tabs in your browser. It's, it's right there and easy access. Another thing that's useful if you don't have two monitors or if you actually have two or three monitors, but you just need a little extra space to put things side by side, you can use the Windows key plus arrow., and you can, you can basically hit the Windows key on your keyboard and then start clicking arrows and it pulls up all the applications that you have open. And then you can instantly tile them side by side. So you don't have to mess around with trying to get your windows right. It just does it for you. It's, it's magical. You should try it. Also, if you like to add graphics or pictures to PowerPoints or Word documents, there is a ton of new stock photography in Microsoft Office, professional photography that you don't have to worry about whether or not you have permissions to use it. It's all built in and you just go to Insert and there's images and icons and videos and 3D graphics and all sorts of other stuff. So if you want to kind of spice up your PowerPoints or your documents and add some images, then go check out all the different options you have now. One of the things that everybody struggles with after everyone moved off of WordPerfect into Word is formatting in Microsoft Word documents. And basically all the formatting in Microsoft Word documents are controlled by styles, but sometimes it's a little bit hard to figure out where those styles are and how to change them. And sometimes if you copy and paste, you bring over a lot of formatting that you just don't want. So one of the things that I like to do is use what I call the magic eraser button in Microsoft Word. You open up a Word document, you select all the text that you want to remove formatting from, and then in the toolbar, there's a little square with an A and it looks like an eraser. If you click on that, that will erase all the formatting and you can apply your document styles and the other things that you want. And then there's some other key commands that you can use. Ctrl+Space removes character-level formatting, and, and these other options to remove more strategically and surgically remove formatting from different parts of your document. The other thing is the, the Microsoft Word Editor has gotten a lot better than it used to be. I used to use a product called Grammarly to go through and make suggestions for changes and improve my documents. When you're editing your own documents, it's a little bit hard to do it on your own. I usually will write something, and if, if I'm not in a giant hurry, put it aside and come back to it at least in a couple of hours. If not, you know, I'd like to give myself a day to reread it. I also find that oddly enough, editing my own work, I can spot errors on my phone more easily than on the big screen. So sometimes I just take my phone and read whatever I wrote on my phone, and I tend to find other errors. But the Microsoft Word editor, which you can get as a browser plugin as well as built into Microsoft Word, has this inclusive language checker. It's not on by default. You have to go turn it on, but it looks for age bias and ethnic and gender bias and gender-specific language. So if you wrote postman, it would identify that as a gender-specific language and suggest the change of postal carrier, things like that. So it's, it's very helpful to double-check and make sure that you've used inclusive language in your documents. Also, I have an entire article on this, but as much as you can get away with not attaching attaching a document to an email and using a link instead, do so. And the reason for that— there's a couple of different reasons. One, when you email an attachment, A, you have to worry about file sizes. B, it's, it's pretty much permanent. You don't get to make changes anymore. If you send a link to a document, if you need to remove that permission to access that document, or if you need to make it read-only, you can— you have a whole lot more functionality in terms of of who has access to what. If you make changes to the documents, you don't have to send another attachment, and so on and so forth. So I'll send you the article about why you should stop emailing attachments and use document collaboration instead. And that can be through OneDrive, Dropbox, ShareFile, whatever you use. So another tool that comes with the Microsoft Office 365 suite for business is a product called Teams. Teams can take the place of a product like Zoom because it has really functional video conferencing built in, and it's really easy to use, and they keep making improvements. They're definitely trying to keep up with their competitors, so lots of new functionality rolled out all the time. But the other part of Teams is for collaboration with your internal workforce. You can have chat kind of like Slack. You can also create team workspaces and the workspaces, you can share files, you can have chat. So you could actually create like a little portal for client matters where for each matter or each client, depending on whether you have more clients or matters, have all the files associated with it, have meetings around it, have the chat from the meetings embedded into it, have, um, have project plans, all sorts of stuff. It's, it's a very robust and rich product that basically leverages everything out of Microsoft Exchange, several of the other products within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, and you can even incorporate other products. Like if you're using Asana or Trello or monday.com for project management, you can actually push these into your team's workspaces. So it's worth checking out. I'm also— I'm a Windows user, if you couldn't tell, so I'm quasi-apologetic about that. And I had been using Chrome forever. I thought Chrome was the best thing since sliced white bread, but Microsoft Edge is built on a Chromium base, so it's basically got the same backbone as Chrome, but they've made some significant improvements to how this browser works. And one of the things I really like is is the vertical tab outline. So instead of having tabs across the top of your page, you can have them vertically aligned. I just find that it is much easier for me to see all the tabs that I have open and get back to them having them vertically aligned instead of horizontal. The other thing I really like is the Immersive Reader. You can click on Immersive Reader and it scrubs out ads and extraneous content on the page so that you can read an article without getting distracted. You can also increase font size, change the page themes, and do some other things. And then finally, collections. If, say, you wanted to create a collection of links to— if you did EEOC work and you needed to create links for all the different resources that you typically use when you're researching a case for EEOC, you have all those in a collection. It's different from a bookmark because you can annotate these, you can add to them easily, you can export them into Excel. There's a lot of really interesting things about collections. So if you haven't used Microsoft Edge, it's worth a look. The other thing that I found with— I use OneDrive, I also use Google Drive, but in OneDrive you can actually go in create a folder, say you were working with a client, you needed them and you didn't have a client portal for your practice management application, you can actually go through and send a link to request files from OneDrive. So you create a folder and then you, um, can go and check the box on the folder and click on request files, get a link and send it to the client and say, okay, upload your files here. And so again, if you don't have a client portal through your practice management application or something, or your document management system, um, this This is a good way to, again, not email files back and forth, but rather give them a place to upload all the things that you need to move forward. You can dictate into and transcribe in Microsoft Word. And so I'm not a big dictation fan until I broke my right wrist. And then I had to learn that not only is it very difficult to use a computer with one hand, it's really difficult to use it with one hand that is not your dominant hand. So I started playing around with a lot of the dictation tools that are out there. And frankly, while there's a lot that you can do, like Dragon NaturallySpeaking and things like that, I really didn't have the time or the inclination to train it up. And so I just started dictating in Word. You can also dictate into Outlook. And so if you are the kind of person who dictates, these tools work really well. The other thing that you can do is transcribe any kind of WAV file or any kind of audio file into Word. And I've put the instructions in your materials and I'll send it to you. But in the case that you say I wanted to transcribe this program, I would take the MP4 and upload it into Word and then do some editing and put it out as the transcription. Okay, let's talk about email, something that we all have to live with every day, no matter how many other tools we have to communicate, we're still using email. One of the things that I really like in Microsoft Outlook is an add-on called TechHit, or rather SimplyFile. And SimplyFile basically learns my folder structure and guesses at what folder the email should go in. So I don't have to drag and drop. It makes it a lot easier for me to keep my inbox clean. And so I just, you know, it'll suggest either in the inbox or from the message itself or in my, my sent mail, which folder it thinks it should go to. And then I just click over and send the email on its way. In my often failed attempts to keep inbox zero. The other thing is, remember that you have the ability to create multiple signatures in most email applications, and Outlook for sure. And so you can create multiple signature blocks, and so you can have one with your confidentiality disclaimer, you can have one for new messages that go out. You can have one for just the responses. I will note that a lot of people automatically for replies and forwards have a truncated signature block that doesn't include their email address. And the reasoning I've heard is because the email address is in the email. Well, we've all been there where we get a thread forwarded to us or something like that where it's really hard to find the person's email address. So I tend to, even in my short truncated response signature block have my name, my phone number, and my email address. They probably don't need my mailing address at that point. Those are the kinds of things. And then in the email itself, if you mouse over your signature block and right-click, you get a dropdown menu in Outlook and you can pick which signature block you want to use. So you can use this for all sorts of different things, even as, um, kind of an auto-text feature. So there's my truncated one. Also, one of the things with trying to manage email in Outlook is that it's got a folder structure, and typically it's kind of a one-to-one. You have a folder, you put an email in it. What if you wanted to be able to cross-reference that email with other types of types of categories, trying to put one email in two different, um, uh, folders is kind of a pain. It can be done, but it's not easy. So if you want to, you can add an additional intelligence by adding in categories. And the nice thing about categories is you can categorize anything in Outlook. So that can be contacts, calendars, tasks, emails. And so you can add as many categories as you want, and then you can search by the category and find everything that you've categorized. So say, for instance, that you, you practice frequently in 3 or 4 different courts. You can color code emails that have to do with a specific court. So you're keeping all your client matter emails in their matter folders, but you can also tag it by the court so that you can see all of the things that you have to do in a particular jurisdiction or court. Bunch of different ways to use categories, but it's, it's, um, a really handy organizational tool. Also, I'm a huge fan of turning emails into calendar events as fast as I can so that I block out my time. And in Outlook, there's a button that is Reply with Meeting. It, it's not very obvious, but when you get an email and you've agreed upon a time and place to meet, then you click on Meeting and it replies with meeting, it puts it on your calendar, it sends them a calendar request. One of the reasons that I have to keep my calendar effectively blocked and tackled is because I use a tool called Calendly. And Calendly for the basic use is free. There's lots of different products on the market that do this kind of thing. Acuity is one, bookings through Microsoft 365. But basically I can send someone a link and they can check my availability ability and schedule time on my calendar. It all sets it up for me. So they click on the link, they get an email confirmation with a calendar for their personal calendar. I put the Zoom link in it so I don't have to go back and do any of that stuff. It's, it's, it's quite magical actually. And I have a whole article about all the things you can do to kind of make sure that people don't book too much time on your calendar in terms of the settings. And this, I just find that even if I had an assistant, which I don't, I'm not sure that it's a good use of that person's time to have to manage my calendar when I— as long as I'm pretty good about keeping it blocked and tackled, this works great. I also use templates in email. If you find yourself going back to a sent mail with any kind of frequency and you realize I just like to copy and paste that, it's a couple of different ways you can create templates, one of which is something that's been in Outlook forever. It's called Quick Parts. The problem with Quick Parts is it's not portable. It's— they're saved on your computer. The new templates function built into Microsoft 365's Outlook has, um, you can do it from your browser if you get into Outlook Online, um, and then you can just create these messages and drop them into an email. They're really easy to create, and I have, of course, an article about how to do that. There's a lot of automation you can do using— there's all sorts of different automation tools. One that's very popular is called Zapier. There's IFTTT. There's one for the Macs. But the one that's built into the Microsoft 365 suite is Power Automate, and it used to be called Flow. But just to give you a for instance, I can go and set up an automation so that when I get an email with an attachment from a specific person, that attachment is automatically saved to that person's folder in OneDrive. And so, you know, again, if you're using a practice management application, Power Automate may not work, but Zapier may work for that exact same kind of thing. So there's a lot of different automation tools out there, and start simple because you can get a little too ambitious with your automation. So do the things that you either forget to do or you wish they could just happen for you and start building off your successes from there. And a, a lot of these things are add-ins. And so in the new version of Outlook through 365, there is a button called Get Add-ins and you can see the add-ins you've gotten or you can search for them. So say if you're a Clio or Rocket Matter user and you want to get the add-in or you use Law Toolbox, or something like that, just go into Add-ins, type it in, and you can get the add-in added to your, your ribbon. Google Tips. Even if you don't use Google Workspace, you probably use Gmail in your personal life, possibly in your work life. One of the things that I find A little confounding about Gmail is the way it does the, the chronology and replies. And so it puts the oldest at the top and the newest at the bottom, which makes no sense to me at all, especially if you are an Outlook user. And so I have a plugin for Chrome and Edge that is called the Gmail Reverse Conversation Extension. And basically it reorders so that the newest one is on top and the oldest one is the bottom, which is how it should be. One thing that you can get in Gmail is unlimited email aliases, which is a super useful thing when you're signing up for newsletters or you're signing up to get a white paper or you're shopping online with a— I mean, I did this at Christmas. I shopped with Sharper Image because they had a really cool lamp. I'm probably not going to be a Sharper Image customer much longer. And so you can create an email alias, and basically you can kind of siphon off the emails that come into that, write filters for them more easily. It's not a disposable— it is kind of a disposable email address, and all you do is create a name plus and then @gmail. And so it's your, your email plus whatever you want to add @gmail. And, and then you can kind of, like I said, you can unsubscribe from things, you can tell what's spam, all that good stuff. If you were doing searches in Google, and I still find that Google has one of the best search engines out there, there are some things you can do to refine those searches. And so one of them is going over— first you have to do the search and then you click on the more button. And once you do that, it will show you some filtering that you can do. One of the filters that I really love is what is called anytime. And if you click on that, you can actually say I want to search the index for all time, or I can search the index for just the last week, just the last day, or a certain time period. When you're looking for the latest information or breaking news or something like that, you can actually go in and instead of doing a search of the entire Google index, say I just want to search in the last week in news. And you're going to get that, you know, most immediate recent information. And a lot likely, you know, if it's something you heard in passing on NPR in the car or whatever, and you want to go read more about it, that's the technique that I use. Excuse me. There's another product that I— it's another Chrome extension. It's called TabCopy. I can't believe how much I use this. So I do a lot of research for attorneys to help them find information. And so I will go through and open up a whole lot of tabs, and then I'll kind of cull through them, find the ones that I, you know, the ones that I think are the most useful, and then I click on one tab copy, copy all 11 tabs, and basically it copies the name of the file and the link. And then I can paste that into a Word document or an email or something like that. It just makes it look nicer, and I don't have to go and copy and paste all that, nor do I have to try to identify what the link was from the, the URL. It's, it's just one of those easy, easy to use things. I did a whole lot of programming around Google Maps because there's all sorts of things that you can use Google Maps for. One is the Street View, and so, you know, you can do a search for an address and then go to the Street View, but I wanted to point out for evidentiary perspective, if you need to see when that particular image was collected, look up in the Street View, click on this little time button, and it will actually show you that this picture of the Barr Center was taken on July 2012. If you see underneath, there's a slider to 2018. You can actually slide it over. Sometimes, especially for more public buildings, there are multiple captures. Captures, and so you can see something through time. So just be aware that you can see, and if it's user-submitted, you can see who took the picture. You can, you can dig into this stuff and get a lot of information about that Google Street Map or Street View on the Google Maps. Another thing that I, I like about Google Maps is they have live and typical traffic. But one of the things, again, from an evidentiary perspective that might be useful to you is if you go and look at the traffic view at the bottom, there's a little legend. You can get historical typical traffic. So you can go to a specific day and say what was the typical traffic like in terms, you know, on this day. This is the kind of thing where if you say it was impossible for my client to have gotten across town because there was a big wreck, on that day, these are the kinds of things that can help back that up. Okay, video conferencing, because we're still living it. I mentioned transcripts, but Microsoft Teams actually will do live transcripts now. And so if I wanted, if we were using Teams for this video conference, I could enable auto transcription. When you enable auto transcription, you have to talk a little bit more slowly and distinctly, and so that's something thing to keep in mind probably for all of our video conferencing, but you do have that built into Teams if that's something you need. The other thing is if you are setting yourself up to look good on products like Zoom, there are studio effects in Zoom, and you go into settings and backgrounds and filters. You can give yourself a mustache or a beard. You can give yourself lipstick. You can add filters like Instagram filters. You can give yourself eyebrows, set your virtual background, and I like mirroring my image because when you look at yourself in the mirror, you see a mirror image of yourself. When you look at yourself in a video conferencing screen, if you don't mirror the image, it's, it's the reverse of what you see when you look in the mirror, and I find that very discomforting because it doesn't look like me to me. So I always have my screen mirrored. You know, these are important things. Another one is if you really just need to get off the call and you want to choose from crying baby or bad connection or construction or echo, you just turn on Zoom Escaper and then you go, I'm so sorry, I can't hear over the leaf blowers today. We're going to have to reschedule this call. Call. Only use in case of emergency, of course. So some things to keep in mind about video conferencing. You think we, we're used to this by now, but if, if it is very important, make sure you arrive early and test everything. Don't assume that it works because it worked earlier this morning or yesterday. I don't know why, but there are gremlins, and fairies and things that make things go bump in the night, um, in your computer. So if you need it to work, make sure you test early. Um, give the attendees the link and the dial-in in the calendar event if you can, so they don't have to go looking for it. I can't tell you how many times people have sent me, you know, we're going to have a video conference, and then they forget to send the link. So go ahead and get that set up when you do it, um, so you don't have to remember to go send it If it's very important, have a backup platform. For instance, if my Zoom just wouldn't work today, then I could have sent you all a link to a Teams video conference. And then finally, remember, I mean, my cat has finally settled down, but the other day we were on an all-staff meeting and my new cat, who's very shy, all of a sudden decided he was going to make his debut appearance for the entire staff. So we have to be a little bit forgiving about these things we're still kind of coping with. Now, in addition to whether your kids have gone back to school, snow days. All of a sudden you've got your kids at home. So be kind and forgiving. Okay, security and privacy tips. This is something that I tell new lawyers and pretty much every other lawyer is that email is the most dangerous tool you use every day. And it's not because, um, you get hacked or you click on a phishing email. It's actually because it's super easy to send an email to the wrong person. It's super easy to, um, hit reply all when you don't mean to. There's actually statistics on legal sector breaches out of the UK year over year that show that people sending emails to the wrong person are greater confidentiality and, and data breach risk than malware, ransomware, phishing, unauthorized access, and cyber incidents combined. So think about that— 22.64% of breaches were caused by missending an email versus malware, ransomware, phishing, hacking, and all the other things, um, at a rate of about 2 to 1. So it's super easy to send an email to the wrong person. There are some technology tools that you can use to reduce that. There are some tips that you can use, like writing a rule in your, uh, in Outlook or Gmail that hold an email in your outbox for a certain amount of time before it gets sent, because it's inevitable if you hit hit send and you didn't review it and you think, who did I just send that to? If it's sitting in your inbox for about 5 minutes, you have a fighting chance of figuring that out. Also, if it's something that's really important, it's super hard to really review and, and think about the email when you're sending it from your phone. You're using it, you're usually doing that in haste from your car or something else. So, you know, think about, do I really need to send this now, or do I need to be in a place where I can do a better review of who it's going to? Similarly, like I said, the dangers of reply all and not noticing that someone else had been added to the thread in the last go-round. And then, you know, a lot of attorneys BCC themselves. Um, I don't love BCC because if the client hits reply all— say you're representing someone in a divorce and you BCC your client on a response to opposing counsel— um, if the client hits reply all, it's going to go back to them too. Um, you may have privilege waiver, you may have a lot of other issues. So in this particular case, rather than BCCing your client, just forward the email. If you need to give them a heads up up of what's been said or what's been sent, forwarded to them versus BCC. Someone asked about Outlook delay sending email feature. So there is a delay sending feature, but basically it's an Outlook rule. And then Gmail has an undo send, but I think it's 30 seconds, which is probably long enough to figure out that you missent something, go try to find that undo button and realize it's too late. The— there's a recall button in Outlook. Don't rely on it. In fact, if they're outside of your, your email environment, your Exchange environment, all the recall button does is give the person a heads up that they should really read the email that you just sent because they get the original email and then they get a secondary email that says, um, Katherine would like to recall this email. Email, but it doesn't actually recall it. They are working on it. When everybody is in the cloud, then that's going to work, but it doesn't yet. The other thing is they are getting smarter and smarter and smarter in terms of the phishing attempts. And so you really, really, really need to scrutinize everything that comes in. One of the things that still works looks but isn't 100% is mousing over a link. And so in this particular instance, it looks pretty legitimate. And, you know, verify your email because we get this all the time. This email had the, you know, it had the legitimate-looking logos and the footers and all those kinds of things. But some of the tells are that it says, do not ignore this email, it's very important. Is probably Microsoft's not going to say that to me, and they're trying to get you to take action on something. And then the other thing is, if you mouse over the link in it, you can see this is obviously not going anywhere that you want to go in terms of this is not a Microsoft verify your email address. So just remember, it's at this point to be more suspicious than trusting, and don't click on things that, uh, you even consider, um, especially if it's trying to get you to provide an email address, um, click on a link, verify a password, those kinds of things. DocuSign gets scammed a good bit, um, the Microsoft and Google products get scammed all the time. Time. So it's just be super careful. The other thing is, used to be, you know, we would say sending out an email, um, is like sending a postcard. And the reality is it is still like sending a postcard. It's not encrypted in transit, in, and in storage in the way that you would want to. So you— this is actually an opinion from the Texas Bar about do you need to encrypt your email, and they provide a number of scenarios thinking about not just do you need to encrypt it with an additional encryption tool, but in the scenario, what's the likely outcome if you don't. So in this one that I highlighted, sending an email to a client when it's possible the third person knows the password of the email account, you don't want to send an email that is automatically decrypted when that person opens it. Then they need to authenticate or use a password or something else. I have a lot of attorneys say, I don't want to have to ask my clients to do that. And, you know, depending on the situation, you may not need to. But for instance, say you're representing someone in an employment case where they're— they are— so there's a whistleblower and you've got their Gmail account. And so you're emailing back and forth. Well, what if that person is at work, the place that they're, you know, they have a— they've had a whistleblower or an informant or whatever, and they open up that Gmail on their network. It could be— and the case law goes in both directions— it could be that that is part of the discovery. And so I just would suggest an abundance of caution and think about, yes, Your client is going to have to use an authentication method or an additional password, but depending on the nature of the communication, that may be necessary to maintain confidentiality and privilege. There are tools on the market that will do kind of fake phishing tests. The one that we use at my work is called KnowBe4, but there's another one called Phishing Box. Basically, you set it up and every month a fake phishing email is sent out to everybody on your team, and then you find out who has clicked on it, and then they have to go through mandatory security training. I did, um, at the beginning of the pandemic. I got an email at my work email that said that I had a message in WhatsApp, and I clicked on it. And I know that I don't have my WhatsApp anywhere nearly associated with my work email, but that was how I was communicating with my brother in Southeast Asia at the beginning of the pandemic. You know, there was a lot of concern about people who were traveling internationally at the time, and I clicked on it and had to go through the, the mandatory security training. But you know what, I'm really careful, more careful than I had been before. So these products don't cost a lot, but if you want to just kind kind of test your staff and keep them on their toes, this is a good way to do it. And also remember that we're not just getting phishing emails anymore. We're also getting smishing, which is SMS phishing, and vishing, voicemail phishing, and heck, we're getting letters. So there's a whole lot of ways that they are trying to get us to reveal information, and it's not just email. So you have to be very careful. Like, um, everybody in my family who uses Venmo got a text message from Venmo that said to verify their account, and I had to do a little research before any of us could do it. I— it, it turned out it was legitimate, but if you get a, you know, a, a message through, um, text messaging, we haven't been attacked there, so we don't think about it as much. But unfortunately it's in everything. Also, every year I feel like I read an article about somebody who messes up redaction, and it— there's— redaction is a fairly easy process, but you have to have the right tools to do it. This is something that is going to be even more important to North Carolina lawyers because we're about to have statewide e-filing. It is rolling out now in a couple of the courts in beta, and I think the The target date for the statewide rollout is end of 2024. And so as you're doing e-filing, you're going to have court rules that require PII, minor information, things like that to be redacted. It needs to be redacted properly. And so there are a couple of tools. Adobe Acrobat Pro does redaction. Kofax PDF has redaction. Nitro, I think, has redaction. There's an add-on from the Payne Group for redacting a Word document, but don't draw that black box over it and in Word and then save it as a PDF or print it to a PDF and think you're, you're good because you're not. That text is still under there. You can select the text even with the black boxes over it and then copy and paste it and all that data is still there. The other thing to be be aware of is if you are using a tool like Adobe Acrobat, you can select the text and highlight it for redaction, but until you apply it, it's merely marked it. It hasn't applied it. And I, I see this trip people up all the time. So it is a multi-step process. You go through, you make your marks for redaction, and then you apply it, give the document a new name with like _redacted so you know that's the one. Plus it actually does— the redaction actually does remove everything. So, you want to make sure that you have a, a copy with the content, um, before you eradicate it. If you are nervous about storing very sensitive information in the cloud, you can use third-party tool to encrypt the data before you put it in the cloud. And so it's actually encrypted on your local, um, desktop, and then you can send it to Google Drive or OneDrive or something like that. So if you have, um, a lot of files that have, you know, trade secrets, mergers and acquisitions, Social Security numbers, banking and routing numbers, things like that, you may want to add either a password to those documents, which in effect encrypts them when you store them on the cloud, or add a third-party encryption tool like Boxcryptor or Kryptomator, and then you basically drag the file through that product. It encrypts it. It's encrypted in the cloud storage, and when you want to open it, you open it up back through Boxcryptor and it decrypts it. It's really kind of frightening how the, the Google Street View will show you people's houses, and so if you do any work with domestic violence or witnesses or, you know, other people who want to kind of keep themselves hidden, you can blur your house in Google Street View. So there's a request that you have to send to them to blur your house. Keep in mind though that if your house has been on the market for, in the last 10, 15 years, you're gonna have to go to Zillow and Redfin and all those others and ask them to blur your house as well. Because even though you can get Google to blur your house in the Street View pretty easily. There's pictures of your house in a lot of other places, so it's, it's a multi-step process, but it's pretty easy to get it blurred out with Google Street View. I have made the argument for using a password manager so many times, and I, I think that it's essential now in order to maintain long, strong, and unique passwords, um, to use some sort of password manager, preferably a business for the entire firm. So LastPass, Dashlane, um, Keeper. The nice thing is that these tools are also now building in two-factor authentication, because if you've kept up with the news, you realize that the second factor, um, being sent via text message is relatively easy to thwart through SIM swapping and some other techniques. And so So back in the day we'd say have a password manager and use two-factor authentication, the second factor being your phone. And so when you try to log into something from an unknown computer, you would have to verify it with the text message code. That is, that is something that can be thwarted now. So what I'm suggesting is easier using something like Google Authenticate or Microsoft Authenticator, or using your password manager's authentication tool. At work we use a we have a product called Keeper. It does all of that for you. Is it a pain? Kind of, yeah. Is it giving us a much better security attitude? Absolutely. This is something that came up because a lot of people were working home, at home during the pandemic, but just be aware that it isn't just Alexa or Google Voice that's listening to you. You have a lot of things that are listening to you, and it's funny because there's a whole kind of sub-product market for these devices. I just saw one from the CES last week, the Consumer Electronics Show, where it was a charging station. It sat on your desk, it was a cute little box, and you put your phone in it and it charges it, but it also turns off all of the things things that are listening to you automatically. There's a thing that you can put on your Alexa called Paranoid, or you can just unplug the thing. But basically just keep in mind that these things that are listening to you all the time can be triggered by words other than their trigger word, which has been proven. They're also recording, and they're being reviewed for accuracy and improvement of the AI. But if you're having a very confidential conversation, conversation with a client or someone and you don't want that stuff recorded, you need to turn these things off. So this is a scary— this one is the Amazon Astro talking about new products that are listening to you. I read all the— even the people at Amazon were like, this is a terrible idea. It's this little robot that listens to you all the time and does things and records everything. And then here's the bracelet of silence. It's very similar to Paranoid except it's a wearable device. Unfortunately, as cyberpunk as this looks, it's never actually hit the market. So for your mobile devices, um, know how to wipe your phone. I tell the, uh, the newly admitted attorneys that your phone is an $800 disposable device. Make sure the thing is backed up. Um, including your texts, and then be able to know how to delete or find it and wipe it if necessary. So if you lose your phone, um, you can wipe it and you don't go, but I've got all this stuff, maybe it'll turn up again. Um, the attitude needs to be, it's backed up and I'll wipe it so nobody else can find it and have access to the information on it. If you are a Microsoft 365 user, there's the Office app. The Office app, in addition to giving you the ability to access your documents and actually edit them, it has a scanner built in. You can sign PDFs. It, it basically takes the place of having PowerPoint, Word, Excel, all these different apps. It, it's a really cool app that I use remarkably all the time. For instance, I was putting together an article and ideas come to me. So I started the file on my desktop. And then over the weekend, I just kept picking up my phone and adding thoughts to the document, rather than creating notes somewhere, then having to go incorporate the notes back into the document. So I find this app very useful. On your phone, also be aware that you're being tracked all the time. And so especially Google Chrome on your phone is tracking a lot of, you know, basically everything that you do. In fact, it's a little frightening because the other day I had an IT person working on my phone. He had opened up the Chrome browser browser, he was typing something into the address bar and all of my recent searches from my phone showed up there because I've got them synchronizing. So if you want to keep a little bit more privacy on your phone and specific, you can use the DuckDuckGo private browser for mobile. So you can do your searches, you can do the reading, and then you can click on a button that says, um, clear all tabs and data. And what it does, it actually does what you just saw. It does little flames and it clears everything out that you've done before you close it out. So no cookies, no tracking, um, no history. I also find that if I am in a place where I get good Wi-Fi but not great phone reception, you can turn on Wi-Fi calling, um, and get much better reception. This doesn't happen to me so much here, but inside hotels and things like that where you're on a very interior space. Wi-Fi calling basically uses the Wi-Fi rather than your cell phone service. So if you find that your connection is spotty but in a place that gets Wi-Fi, try that. We're running out of time. I'll do a couple of more. I'll send you the rest of the deck. But at the office, if you haven't gone back yet, this is just a silly thing. It actually is a, a tool that you can keep people 6 feet away from. It's called the Social Distancing Zapper. It's only a 4.5-volt zap, less than a cattle prod. I have been seeing a ton of ads for things to again zap you if your posture is bad, which I may actually need, but I If you are in pain at the end of the day, go Google good ergonomics and make sure that everything is aligned. I actually had to get out of my office chair and sit in a straight-back chair from my dining room table because I find that I— because it doesn't have arms, because I was resting on the arms of my office chair. So now I'm forced to sit up a little bit straighter. So you have to do what you have to do. Um, virtual assistants are something that's been very hot for a while, and this one, if you need some help, like, you know, going through a database or cleaning up your contacts or something like that, not necessarily something you need someone in your office to do, um, you can hire— there's a service called Hire My Mom, and it's basically women who were in the workforce who either needed to care for aging parents or children, and they're available on a contract basis. But So there's basically virtual assistants for every kind of work you could conceive of. If you are still at home or you're working from home and you need some distraction, there is the sound of colleagues, and you can increase the ambient noise of the room, the sound of a coffee machine in the background, rain on the window, the printer and the fax machine, the telephone. So if you miss the office and you want the office noises, Oddly enough, it adds just enough kind of background noise for me to keep me a little bit more focused. It sometimes— dead silence is a little too much. If you are— this is why I like Teams and Slack and other tools like this, keeping your kind of team communication separate from your client communication. So client communication goes through email as per usual, but team communication can be done in one of these chat tools, you don't have to worry so much about retention on that kind of stuff. You can also create a water cooler for people to have discussions. But there's tools like G Suite Hangouts, Slack, Microsoft Teams chat. We also, we use Slack at work, and we often will just hop on a video conference after we slap back and forth with each other in the grill as we need to talk. You can just fire fire up a video conference right from the tools and, and chat away. It's like being in the office. I have a whole article on project management tools. I'm a huge fan of, of trying to keep everybody on board and tracking on projects. It does require a certain amount of discipline. There are tools of all sorts, shapes, sizes, and price points for you to use. And my last tip, which I just added yesterday, because I got an email about work from home tools, is the desktop dry erase board. And I just kind of need this. And so I, I, this is a little thing that just sits on your desk and you can write all your notes. And so you can do away with all your sticky notes and your notepads, and it'll probably speak to you more. So I just thought this was cool and it's $22. So someone asks, is there any progress in stopping spam calls? It really depends on your, um, on your cell phone. I would say yes, it depends on your provider. You may have to actually look, um, and contact your provider to find out if there's anything you can enable. I use T-Mobile and I would say that 90% of the calls that come through my phone are identified as scams, and I just let them ring over into voicemail. It doesn't stop them, but at least it identifies them for me. On your work phone, I don't know that they've made so much progress with that. So, and, and the thing is, if you're an attorney who works with consumer clients and you're beckoning business on the web, you can get a specific phone number that reroutes to your primary phone number so you can kind of this is coming from my website and stuff like that. But yeah, spam calls are still a, a problem we have yet to completely solve. So I will send you the rest of the slides and all the notes with them so you can see how to do the stuff we talked about. And I'll stop the recording, and then if anybody has any questions, you can ask me now.