Textfixer.com, a website originally designed for web developers who were editing code, offers a text-editing tool that is useful to anyone who regularly cuts and pastes text between documents: a line break remover. Line breaks are the broken lines of text seen when text is pasted between documents that are formatted differently. For lawyers and law students, this is most often seen when cutting text from a dual-column PDF document, such as a statute or case prepared on WestLaw or Lexis, into a word processing document. Unlike most formatting problems, pasting text as “plain text” does not get around the problem of line breaks. Although line breaks can be removed manually or by a “find and replace” command, using textfixer.com seems to be the quickest and easiest way to ensure properly formatted pastes.

Additionally,Textfixer.com preserves paragraph breaks while removing only the line breaks from the text. To use the line break remover, simply cut and paste the text from the source to the website, hit the “Remove Line Breaks” button, and then cut and paste the resulting text into the document you are working on.

Headline Image Credit: Immortal412

2. Switch between text case: Highlight a portion of text and use the Shift+F3 combination to switch between text case. Word will toggle through sentence case, upper case, and lower case.

3. Switch to small caps: Use Control+Shift+K to switch highlighted text to small caps. This is especially useful for citations on law journals.

4. Delete entire words: The Ctrl+Delete combination will delete entire words, which will save you some time when you are making substantial changes to documents.

5. Quickly add annotations (also called “comments”): This shortcut works even if you don’t already have the Microsoft Word reviewing Pane open: hit Ctrl+Alt+M to insert an annotation (comment) into a document.

6. Switch between open Word documents on a Mac: If you are using Microsoft Word on an Mac, you may have noticed that the standard key combination to switch between open windows, Command-Tab, does not switch between open Word documents, but instead switches to the next open application. There is a shortcut to switch between open Word documents on a Mac:  Command +`. The ` button is the same as the tilda (~) button on the keyboard. It is usually right above the tab key, to the left of the 1 key.

7. Add a footnote in Word documents: If you are using Word on a Windows PC, the Alt+Ctrl+F combination will insert a footnote for you with out having to go through the insert-menu at the top of the page. If you are using Microsoft Word on a Mac, the combination is Option+Command+F.

8. Use the built-in thesaurus: The Shift+F7 combination will look up a highlighted word in the thesaurus sidebar in Microsoft Word.

9. Insert the date: The Alt+Shift+D combination will enter date quickly into a document.

10. Move entire paragraphs: The Shift+Alt+Up or Down Arrow combination allows you to move entire paragraphs up or down in a document.

Bonus Tip: Set your auto-recover to one minute: By default, Microsoft Word automatically saves documents every ten minutes. Since recreating ten minutes worth of work often takes more than ten more minutes, play it safe and change the auto-recover time to one minute. That way, if Word does crash, most of your work is easily recoverable. Here is how to change your auto-recovery time in Word 2007:

1. Click on the Office Button (the Office icon in the circle on the top-left of the window
2. Click on Word Options (it is on the bottom border of the menu).
3. Click on the Save tab.
4. Make sure the AutoRecover box is checked and change the interval to one minute

This is also a good time to change the AutoRecover location to something you can easily locate if you ever need to. I have my location set to a folder within the Documents folder on my computer.

If you are on a Mac, the steps to change the AutoRecover save interval are as follows:

1. Go to the Word Menu
2. Select Preferences
3. Click on the Save icon
4. Set the “Save AutoRecover interval to one minute.

As the amount of scholarly material available on the web increases, so to does the need to an efficient means to find, sort, organize and cite the material. Below are twenty of the best tools available on Firefox that researchers can choose from to build a customized, highly efficient research tool.

Part I: Find What You Are Looking For.

1.  Use Firefox Quicksearch

Setting up a quicksearch allows you to run searches from the address bar using very simple customized search commands instead of visiting a search engine or installing a toolbar to run searches.

For example, I’ve set up a quicksearch for Google, so that all I have to do to run a Google search is go to the address bar and type in “g searchterm” and hit enter.

Example:

Typing in “g olympics” and hitting enter

results in:

Adding thumbnails next to your Google results is covered later in the story. You can skip directly to it by going to Tip #12.

Creating a QuickSearch is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Visit any webpage that has a search field that you commonly use. (For example, go to http://google.com)
2. Right click on the search field. Choose Add a Keyword for this Search…

3. The Add Bookmark dialog will appear. Give the bookmark a name, e.g. “Google” and create a keyword e.g. “g” and click “Add.” The Keyword is going to be the command you use to run the search so keep it short and make sure it is something that is intuitive to you.

Now to run a quicksearch, all you have to do is go to your address bar and type in the keyword and search term to run a quicksearch. If you set up the Google Quicksearch described above, try typing in “g olympics” in the address and then hit enter to see your results.

2. Find in Tabs

With the advent of tabbed browsing came the need to be able to sort quickly through open pages. The Find in Tabs extensions allows users to search multiple open tabs at once. It displays all occurrences of the search terms from your open webpages in  a display pane that also highlights the search results in context, making sifting through search results a breeze.

3. Resurrect Pages

Resurrect Pages allows researchers to bring webpages back after they have shed their ethereal coils. When a webpage is not longer available, either because the content changed or the website no longer exists, Resurrect Pages searches caches and archives that mirrored the content while it was available, so that in many cases you can still retrieve the information you were looking for. Resurrect Pages searches the best caches including Google, MSN, and Yahoo Caches, CoralCDN, the Internet Archive.

4. BugMeNot

BugMeNot allows users to bypass registration at many free websites. This is a great way to skip registering for news websites merely to read archived articles.

5. BlueOrganizer

BlueOrganizer creates “smart menus” and “smartlinks” based on the page you are visiting to offer helpful features that aid in research. For instance, it recognizes book names, movies, individuals, and songs to find more information about those items quickly and effortlessly.

6. Surf Canyon

While Google is often a researcher’s search engine of choice, there are times when you don’t find what you are looking for on Google. For those times, there is Surf Canyon. It adds top search results from Yahoo, MSN, Craigslist to your search results. The additional results remain hidden under a bull’s eye icon and can be easily displayed and hidden again by clicking on the icon. Surf Canyon can also find the most relevant results from deep in your search results and bring them to the forefront.

7. Customize Google

This add-on removes Google ads from search results, suggests topics as you type, and allows you to quickly search other engines like Yahoo, Technorati, and Ask Jeeves.

8. Update Scanner

If you have a page you want to watch for changes, Update Scanner will notify you of changes made the to the page. It highlights the changes made to a page since you last visited the page and can notify you when the page changes.

9. Breadcrumbs

If you have ever found what you were looking for, only to lose it again because you forgot to bookmark or print out page, you will understand just how useful Breadcrumbs is. Breadcumbs can search through the pages you recently visited so you can find the result you were looking for without retracing your steps by running the original search over again.

10. Read It Later

Read It Later is a tool specifically built for those pages you want to get back to to finish reading, but aren’t certain you want to bookmark just yet. Read It Later offers a simple interface that makes marking a page to read later as simple as clicking a check mark at the end of your address bar. Once you’ve read the story, click on the checkmark again to remove the page from your to-read list. You can also have your to-read list delivered to you as an RSS feed so it is accessible wherever you are.

11. Highlight All

This add-on highlights every instance of a given word or string of words on a webpage. To use Highlight all, hit F8 to enable the extension, and then select any word with your mouse, all other occurances of the word on the page will also be highlighted. This is an excellent way to focus you initial read of a long document when you are going through a large number of search results.

12. GooglePreview

GooglePreview adds a thumbnail image next to each of your Google search results so that you can quickly determine if the page is worth a further read.

13. Cooliris (Formerly PicLens)

Cooliris is to image and video searches what the iPhone is to phones. Cooliris offers an amazing interface that allows you to sort very quickly through hundreds of images and supports sites including Google Image Search, Youtube, Flickr, and Picasa. It is hard to imagine an interface that beats coverflow on Macs and iPhones, but the CoolIris interface does.

Check out the demo:

The interface is so good, that in response to user requests, CoolIris has even come out with a PowerPoint plugin and instructions for users of Keynote to add CoolIris functionality to desktop presentations.

Part II: Save, Organize, Annotate, and Cite Your Search Results.

14. Iterasi

As previously mentioned, Iterasi allows you to save dynamic webpages for future reference, even after the content of the original page has changed. Since I posted my review of Iterasi, Iterasi has added support for Mac OS X, and a scheduler which automatically archives webpages on a regular basis. In a conversation I had with Alex Williams, the Director of Product Marketing for Iterasi, I mentioned the availability of short permanent URLs to access the notarized pages would be a feature I thought users would really appreciate so they can more easily use Iterasi for citations in professional publications. I am happy to report that the most recent version of Iterasi offers this new feature. This is a company that is listening to what users want and responding quickly. Keep an eye on this add-on for additional features in the future.

Scheduler Tool Unveiled:

15. Zotero

Zotero allows you to “collect, manage, cite” your research sources. What is great about Zotero is that it not only organizes saved webpages, and search results, it also allows users to add external material like files or documents to the organized structure.

16. Delicious Bookmarks

Delicious Bookmarks lets you to save bookmarks and tag the pages so you easily find them later. The bookmarks are available from any computer with access to the Internet by logging on to your Delicious account, which make it an ideal took for users who research from more than one location. Delicious bookmarks also allow you to find the most popular pages for any tag and access your bookmarks  from any computer.

17. Fireshot

At its most basic level of functionality, Fireshot allows users to capture images of the pages they are visiting. Unlike taking a screenshot using your operating system, Fireshot can take a picture of an entire webpage, even when portions of the page are not visible on the screen. Fireshot also features a built-in editor that allows you to crop the pictures, annotate them, and save them for future reference or to share with colleagues.

18. Diigo

Diigo allows you to highlight, annotate, and save annotated webpages for future reference. While registration is required, and it adds a toolbar to your browser, pages 2 and 3 of the registration process can be skipped and the toolbar can be hidden.

19. Clipmarks
This allows you to save portions of webpages for future reference, print only the parts of pages you want, and email portions of pages to yourself or others. It is the perfect tool for printing or saving multiple non-continuous sections of a page.

20. PrintPDF

If your computer does not already have the capability of “printing” a file to PDF format, PrintPDF adds the capability to save webpages as PDF files directly from your browser.

If you have a favorite Firefox plugin or tip for researchers, or if you agree or disagree with the suggestions, leave a comment. Thanks!

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Iterasi allows you to save a complete webpage on a secure, searchable account while retaining all of the site’s dynamic content. Importantly for lawyers, it allows you to “notarize” a website, which provides verification of the authenticity of the saved page. Once Iterasi is installed, you will see the Iterasi buttons in your browser menu, allowing for one-click notarizations and easy access to all the pages you have notarized. As the Iterasi website puts it, “When a user wants to save a page, one click on the Notarize button instantly transfers the page to a secure personal account, providing a high-fidelity copy of the page, including images, forms, transactions, receipts, confirmations and personalized content.”

Unlike bookmarks and favorites, Iterasi ensures the page you saw is available for future reference long after the site content has changed. While some websites like the Internet Archive and Google Cache are able to retrieve cached pages from the internet to show you what a page looked like in the past, (See eg. Yahoo, circa 1998) there is no guarantee the page you need will be cached from the date you need it or cached at all. Notarizing a website through Iterasi ensures you will be able to save all the data on a website. Because Iterasi also retains the interactive capabilities of a website, it is a much better option than saving a webpage as a PDF document. So next time you are using a “available at” citation to an internet source, consider using an Iterasi link as additional way to ensure the content you are referencing will available whenever you need it.

Iterasi, responding to beta-tester feedback, has also implemented an automatic scheduler that allows you to schedule notarizations of websites you want to keep an eye on. You can also add notes and tags to your saved pages so that your notarized pages can be found quickly later. Saved pages can be shared through email, and Iterasi allows the recipient to see the shared webpage without logging into Iterasi.

More about Iterasi:

The one drawback of Iterasi is that currently on the Windows platform is supported, though a Mac version is scheduled to come out later this summer.

Demonstration of Iterasi:

You can sign up for Iterasi and get more information here.
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PreCYdent seeks to provide lawyers, law students, and the general public with free and easy access to legal authority. While WestLaw and Lexis are used primarily by paid subscribers, PreCYdent seeks to provide anyone who has access to the internet a single interface to find all the cases and statutes that are available online and are already in the public domain. However, because PreCYdent is a free service, it does not have the financial resources to license materials that are not already available in the public domain. Herein lies the key drawback to PreCYdent: it does not provide comprehensive coverage of the law. Currently, the coverage of cases on PreCYdent is limited to federal Court of Appeals cases going back to 1950, federal district court cases going back ten to fifteen years, and coverage for state courts varies based on what each court makes available online.

What PreCYdent does do, though, is provide excellent search results for the content and areas it covers. By default, the cases are ranked according to “authority” which basically means by number of times the cases were cited. Search results can also be organized in chronological order or based on the hierarchy of the court that wrote the opinion.

While users do not have to register to use PreCYdent, there are a number of unique features that are available only to registered users. For instance, registered users can rate cases on a five-star system, mark cases as relevant, add keyword “tags” to cases, as well as upload opinions, and statutes. There are also discussion pages where registered users can post comments or questions about cases or statutes. Additionally, PreCYdent has a professional networking feature that allows registered users to connect with other attorneys.

The ability to locate key cases on a given subject makes PreCYdent an excellent place to start a search. However, PreCYdent’s limited coverage means it is not a replacement for services like WestLaw and Lexis. With many new features though, PreCYdent.com will definitely be a site worth keeping an eye on.

My thanks to Professor Thomas A. Smith, cofounder of PrecCYdent.com and a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, for taking the time to answer my questions about PreCYdent.

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1. Quicksilver
Quicksilver is a program launcher that uses simple commands to rapidly bring up any program, file, folder, or website. Quicksilver learns what files and programs are most often accessed and adapts so that those items are pulled up almost instantaneously when the user starts typing the name of the item in the Quicksilver interface.

For example, in screenshot below, I pulled up the Quicksilver interface with a single keystroke and then by typing in “ex” brought up Excel. Using the tab key I was able to bring up specific commands such as the option to open a specific excel document, move a document to another folder, or email a specific file. Quicksilver is very intuitive and allows users to execute specific commands so quickly that using the built-in OS X dock to open a program seems slow by comparison.

Anxiety brings the iCal task list to your desktop. It provides easy access to your to-do list so that tasks can be added or marked as complete without opening your full calendar. Anxiety stays in sync with iCal and disappears when not in use.

OS X has a great power saving feature built-in: after a short period of inactivity the screen automatically dims. Caffeine allows you to turn this feature on and off with a single click so that presentations can be run without interruption. It also prevents your Mac from going to sleep or starting the screensaver.

4. Growl

Growl provides unobtrusive notification messages from various programs that run on OS X, including Adium, Firefox, and iTunes. They simply pop up as semi-transparent notifications on the top right corner of your screen and then disappear.

5. Adium

Adium is by far the best instant messaging program I have ever used. You can seamlessly send messages to your friends using various protocols including AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, and MSN Messenger. Adium also supports tabbed conversations so you can keep all your conversations in a single window.

While there are a number of free text editors available for OS X, my favorite is Smultron. Smultron allows you to have multiple documents open at the same time in an easy-to-use tabbed interface. Another popular free text editor for OS X is TextWrangler while users who want a word processing application with features closer to what Word or Pages offers, Bean is worth checking out.

7. Skim

Skim is a PDF reader that is cut above Preview, the default viewer in OS X, because of Skim’s enhanced markup capabilities. You can easily add notes, highlight portions the document, and quickly jump from one marked-up section to the next through a convenient side panel. Skim also allows you to create presentations and then run the presentations using the Apple Remote.

9. iStat Menu

One of my favorite features in Vista is the pop-up calendar that is displayed when you click on the time in the taskbar. iStat Menu brings that feature to OS X. It also allows you to display multiple time zones, open your iCal calendar, and add additional menus that display everything from the temperature of your Mac to the remaining space on your hard drives.

Rachota allows users to track the time spent on various projects. Rachota can also summarize how much time was spent on each project and provide helpful time-maximizing tips.

1. Browse Westlaw and Lexis Faster: 3G Connectivity

The new iPhone will run on a “3G” or third-generation network. While that translates to speeds of up to 42 Mbps, (think ten times faster than DSL or Cable), here in the United States, we likely see only a fraction of that. Initially, we will see speeds approaching the speed of your home DSL or cable connection. By the end of

the year, speeds should increase five-fold. Even at the lower speeds though, the improvement over the current offering will be dramatic, and you will finally be able to access Westlaw or Lexis on your iPhone without waiting five minutes for a page to load. It will also mean you will be able to upload large documents and multimedia files quickly. Fortune reports that only 73% of the 3G network is currently in place, but AT&T is quickly rolling about the remainder of the network.

2. When You Can’t Be There in Person: Video-conferencing

The increase in speeds will allow the new iPhones to run full-fledged video conferences, something that the current model is not natively capable of. There are also rumors that the new iPhone may have a front-facing camera to support video-conferencing.

3. Getting Where You Need to Go: GPS

The new iPhone will have turn-by-turn GPS directions. The current model triangulates you position by using cell phone towers, but it can’t really pinpoint your position, it only gives you a rough idea of where you are. This new feature will allow you to get rid of yet another gadget: your GPS device, adding to list of things your iPhone replaces: your GPS device, you phone, and of course, your mp3 player.

Unfortunately, the iPhone is still only available for AT&T. (Sprint users should check out the upcoming Sprint Instinct, which offers many similar features.) The new iPhone is an exciting addition to the Apple family and Apple expects over ten million units to be sold.

Photo: Engagdet

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Update: Here is Steve Job’s keynote presentation squeezed into one minute.

The one minor gripe I have with the service is that there is not convenient way to jump a couple of months ahead in the calendar. Luckily, it does display 15 days at a time so if you are scheduling meetings in the near future, this won’t be an issue for you.

I decided to give PreCYdent a trial run to see how it compares to Westlaw and LexisNexis.

Natural Language Search

PreCYdent is miles ahead of both Lexis and Westlaw when it comes to natural language search capability. A natural language search is the simplest form of a search, and it is how most people use Google: just type in what you are looking for and hit “search.” Boolean searches, on the other hand, depend on the use of Boolean operators such as “and,” “or,” and “not” to allow very specific queries. For example, the use of the “/s” or “w/s” operators between search terms on Westlaw and Lexis respectively will limit the search results to cases where the terms searched for appear within the same sentence.

To test the natural language search capabilities of Westlaw, LexisNexis, and PreCydent I ran a search for “arrest warning” without the quotes to see where Miranda ranked in the results.

Lexis

(Click on images for full-size)

Miranda was the 25th result on Lexis using the Natural Language search function. The query was “arrest warning” (without the quotes) in the Supreme Court Database.

Westlaw

Miranda was the 6th result on Westlaw using the Natural Language Search. The query was “arrest warning” (without the quotes). The search was limited to the Supreme Court Database.

PreCYdent

Miranda was the very first hit, even without limiting the search to Supreme Court cases as I had for Lexis and West.

While PreCYdent provides excellent search results, the service is not without limitations. In a future post, I will cover the limitations of PreCYdent, some features unique to PreCYdent, and the utility of PreCYdent to lawyers, law students, and the general public.

Update: Part II

Fortunately there are easy ways to back up documents.

1. Email yourself the document.

With many of the popular free email services offering ever expanding, or even unlimited storage space, one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to back up documents is to email documents to yourself. For law students and lawyers alike, it is also an easy way to back up daily updates on major projects. An added advantage to this is, if you are emailing yourself you work as it progresses, you can go back and look at prior versions of a document at any time.

2. Use Mozy to back up your personal documents.

This tip is especially useful for law students because non-commercial use of Mozy, an excellent back up program I have been using for over two years, is free for up to 2 GB. Mozy is a small program that sits in your system tray, and on a daily basis encrypts and backs up your documents to a remote server. While Mozy can be used to back up a wide array of file-types, you can choose to limit the files backed up to documents, while will maximize the utility of the free 2GB account. Mozy Free is also the perfect solution for attorneys who want to back up their personal documents.

For commercial use, Mozy has options starting at $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month. Another option for commercial users or users with a lot of data they want to back up is Carbonite, a service I have not used myself, but has received rave reviews from many professional users. Carbonite has the advantage of having a flat-rate of $49.95 for unlimited data storage.

3. Use SyncBack Free to back up your data to an external hard drive.

If you already have an external hard drive, using SyncBack is the easiest way to back up a folder or group of folders to be synced to your external hard drive on a regular basis. Once you set up a back up profile, each time you run the program it will scan your folders for any changes and then update the folders on the external hard drive with the latest versions of the documents and add any new documents to the remote location. Because external hard drives can be stolen, I suggest using TrueCrypt, one of the most respected pieces of open source software, that encrypts your data to encrypt your external hard drive. It can also be used to encrypt USB keys.

SyncBack Tutorial

TrueCrypt Tutorial

Even if you are backing up to an external hard drive, remember to back up your data remotely either through email, or one of the services listed above to ensure your data is recoverable in the event of a natural disaster, theft, or other local phenomena.

Good luck, and stay safe!

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