Articles Posted in Office-in-Briefcase

Yes, the Bluebook is now online, with yes, a paid subscription.  A new annual subscription is $25.00. Subsequent annual renewals are

$15.00. Subscriptions of up to three years may be purchased at the

current rate.

Do you have quite a few websites you browse every day, or every week?  Then you should consider installing the Morning Coffee plug-in to your Firefox browser.

If you are like me and look at all of the court's websites everyday, as well as other law related sites, it can take time just to click and open, even if you have them on your bookmarks.  With one click Morning Coffee will open all the websites for you.  You can do something else like check email, or go get your morning coffee, or in my case (hot) tea, and come back to read your favorite websites.

You can retrieve the plug-in, as well as other useful plug-ins, from Mozilla.  Get Morning Coffee here.

I wanted to follow-up on some thoughts regarding my "office-in-a-briefcase"  (which many of you know is literally true for me).

You can find suitable scanners, color printers, and of course computers, which can fit within one briefcase.  All you need at that point is access to the internet.  Internet access in this day and age is pretty easy, even overseas, and even on military bases.  The current DoD policy on thumb-drives adds some wrinkles when you need to print out documents on-base, but that's why you have email.

Today the issue is faxes.  With the advent of email, Adobe.pdf software, and similar programs, the transfer of documents is easier and generally cheaper than mail and fax.  But there is still a call for you to have a way for a person to fax documents.  The benefit of an email based fax "machine" is that you can receive and send faxes while traveling, so long as you can get an internet connection.

I have two little helpers useful to cutting and pasting.

Pure Text (Free-shareware).  This little goodie allows you to copy text from the web, for example, and then paste to your document using your font, but without all of the formatting from the original text.  If used in conjunction with WordPerfect 12 or WordPerfect X-4, with "reveal codes" set, you can save a lot of time cutting and pasting from all kinds of documents into your motion or brief.  It works fine with Word, but Word is so stodgy on changing formatting.

CiteGenie (90 day trial, and then a small fee compared to value in time).  This is a plug-in to Firefox, with Explorer on the way.  This would be an opportune moment to shift to Firefox as your web-browser.  I'm one of those who believe that any browser than Explorer is better.  (Note:  for those of us in Virginia who get FastCase free through the bar, CiteGenie is not yet compatible).  The developer has this to say: