All Nighters, No More!!!

Well, no more. Presenting the Basics of Law series, which will make your life as easy as you want it to be. Taking law the tech way, these small applications will change the way you did that last minute study. Now, both on Torts and Jurisprudence.

Dealing point wise with every topic that your curriculum may have, the apps offer a no frills user interface with no popping ads. The apps also mention the important case laws with citations and also the point of law laid down in them, whenever required.

So, no all nighters and you pass as well! Whoever said life can’t be easy, maybe was not having a smartphone!  

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Enhance Your Office Experience – Tabs in Word, Beautiful PPTs, Automated Proofreading and much more

It’s a product which we use everywhere and we will tell you the tricks to take the experience a notch higher!

MS Office has become indispensable part of many of our lives (Open Source just died a silent death somewhere?)  Though office on its own is pretty complete in itself I would tell you here of some add-ons which will take your Office experience to the next level. I would be mainly focusing on Word and PowerPoint in this article as these two software are what mainly used by legal fraternity.

Yet to get that law firm job, Outlook will come after that ;)

Automated Proofreading – Remember that time when your supervisor at your internship took your case because of that missed comma/bad formatting/ misspelling etc. We all hate Grammar Nazis, don’t we?  At least I hate them for sure.  (Pro tip – When confronting a Grammar Nazi, softly say to them, “There, their, they’re”) So now to avoid this not so welcome situation, I offer you Ginger. Yeah sounds funny name for a proof-reader but believe me it’s a life saver. Ginger has many medicinal benefits, the first one being that it saves you from headache.

But do remember that Ginger at the end of the day is a software prone to err, use your brain before accepting the recommended changes by the software. Add Consistency Checker to Word and your formatting is also taken care of.

Tabs in Office – We all love Tabs, don’t we? One of the most horrid aspects of MS Office and especially word is that each document opens in a different window making use multiple windows simultaneously a PITA. Well we have a solution here all you need is Office Tab and you are good to go.

Better Presentation – I suck at making presentations. I am pretty sure there are many of you who fail miserably when it comes to making an attractive PowerPoint presentation.

Yes, we all dream of that powerful and beautiful board-room presentation, even though it’s going to be presented in class.

I have a way out! Add Visual Bee to PowerPoint make a simple PPT and click on enhance PPT. Select a nice theme and you are good to go. Alternatively you could also use import PowerPoint in Prezi and come up with an attractive flash based presentation in a single click.

Flowcharts – Remember that Property or Family case law which had more parties to the case than characters in the Lord of the Rings? The only way to remember who was who was by making a flowchart. Lucidchart and Gliffy Diagrams are two great free add-ons which let you make complex flowcharts in MS Word. Yes, absolutely free!

Citation Management – One bane that legal writing suffers from is citation. Often I found easier to write a legal paper than correctly cite it. These guidelines are so stringent that it takes forever to cite only. The details are too many, italicize the author’s name, and write this in upper case, that in lower case and so on. Zotero is the solution. Just feed the basic info to Zotero and it will generate the correct citation for you.  (I personally prefer CiteThisforMe for one or two citations). Zotero’s integration with MS Word is quite handy and makes life a bit easier. Mind you, just a little bit J

Dictionary – How about Merriam Webster Dictionary, integrated in MS Word itself? You know what the best part about it is, it’s completely free and yes, it’s authoritative too.

Drafting – Ever heard of legalzoom the legal documentation website? Well, you have now.  They have created a free nifty addon for MS Word which provides common templates used for drafting. (You could also check out kagzaat, a simple legal documentation site).

Note – Some of the suggested apps above may not be compatible with your version of MS Office.

If you liked this, do also check our series on enhancing your web browser over here and here.

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Using Macros – Making Life Easier

The big question is what are macros?

Well macros are set of repetitive instruction that help you do the job faster.

Well so without further ado lets begin

So in order to explain how Macros work I am gonna teach you how to make a macro that could do multiple kind of formatting option in one go

i.e. from 'I love this blog' à 'I LOVE THIS BLOG ' (Yeah all this with one single command)

In Word 2010 Go to View and click on Record Macros (I am guessing its same for Word 2007 but if its not then please figure it out) 

Name macro anything just don’t give spaces in between it should be one word only. Basically keep it simple and don’t try to add special character etc as you might get an error.

Type a description if you want. 

Now click on keyboard and assign a shortcut key. I am going to assign it Alt+M. To assign shortcut key , press required key/key combination in box and click on assign.

Now when you press close you will see the mouse pointer attached to a macro symbol.

Now comes the real job. So suppose you want to change text to small caps. Now lets set rules first say you want this text to be bold, underlined, and small caps. Lets do that. Go to your font panel and click on bold, then click on underlined optioned. Now select the desired font and size.  Then click on font ribbon. And select the ‘small caps’ option. 

Should look like this.

Now go to Macro and select Stop Macro.

That’s all. Now you are done just select any text and press Alt+M or the shortcut key you had typed assigned to the Macro.

Think up of some innovative uses of Macros and let us know about them here.

Also in case you want to script macros grab a free sample chapter of Macro Cookbook click here.

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Speed Up My PC

I am agnostic. The only time I pray is before starting my computer!

Well, not sure if God exists or not but your computer can be made faster for sure! So keep your god troubles aside, read on! And no need to jump out of the window till the time your windows starts up. It’s a small step, but a giant leap for the speed of your computer

Clean Up that Junk – Delete all the junk from your PC. Remove any unwanted software and delete media files which you do not need.  Use Revo Uninstaller if any program is giving you trouble during its uninstallation. Use Duplicate Cleaner  to automatically delete duplicate of video, music and other files.

Remove Startup Processes – Press Windows Key + R and you will get the run dialog. Type 'msconfig' (without quotes) in it and press enter. Alternatively, you could type msconfig in Start menu’s search box. Then Click on Startup tab.  Untick all the software you don’t want at the startup. Some Popular choices you might want to remove are Microsoft Office, Adobe Products, Google Update, etc. Press Apply, then Ok and then restart the PC. After restart. Go to C:\Windows\Prefetch and delete all files. Press continue if Windows stop you from accessing the folder.

Extensive Cleanup – Use CCleaner and run the Cleaner and Registry Tool.

Use Alternatives – Use Foxit Reader instead of Adobe Reader, VLC instead of other heavy media players, Open or Libre Office instead of MS Office.  

Disable the Aesthetics – Go to My Computer à Properties à Advanced System Settings (In Windows 7, last option on panel on left)  à Performance Settings à Select Adjust for Best Performance à Apply à Ok.

Turn Unwanted Windows Features à In Windows 7’s Start Menu type ‘Turn Windows Feature On or Off’ (without quotes) and open it. Remove unwanted services such as ‘Indexing’ if you don’t use search option much (Disabling indexing doesn’t disable search but merely slows it down, if your PC is running slow it’s not worth keeping it ticked until and unless you make at least 5-10 searches every day.), ‘Tablet PC Components’ if you don’t use one,  ‘XPS Services’ and ‘XPS Viewer’ which you neither use and nor will in the future. Depending upon your usage you could also disable ‘Windows Gadgets’ and ‘Internet Explorer’.

Terminate Unwanted Processes (Only for Advanced Users) à Use Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and terminate all unwanted processes running in background. Another useful utility which could be used instead of Task Manager is Process Explorer. The Golden rule here is to not end any process which has its user as ‘SYSTEM’.

Malware – Even after doing all the above if the problem still persist either you are using a PC older than your age or there might be a malware. Use Malwarebytes and see if this is the issue.

Antivirus – Use some lightweight antivirus. Personally I am using Avira Free and have found it to be par if not better to other free or paid alternatives. Remember whatever Antivirus you use it’s useless if you don’t update it regularly.  (Read our series on how to get the best security suite for free here.)

Format – Nothing works? This is always an option. Format the drive and do a clean install of the Windows.  Though likelihood of you needing to resort to format is quite low if you have followed the above steps.

I am sure if you followed all the steps mentioned above then you will observe a significant change in its performance. If not either you are doing something wrong or you are lying. Yes if this doesn’t help nothing can.

If this honestly doesn’t help maybe it’s time you start saving for an upgrade or a new PC altogether. Best Wishes!

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Technolyser Series – Making Facebook Less Intrusive & Knowing Your Rights Part 2

This is the second post on Facebook in our series Technolyser. (Previous post here) Last time we had just stopped short of discussing Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. So we are gonna begin from where we left. Without much ado let’s start with Clause 2(1) which under the heading ‘Sharing Your Content and Information’ states that

“subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

Not much can be done here. Easy fix is that you change the privacy of any post (Hereinafter post includes comment/photo/video) you don’t want to be available to the world at large to ‘only me’ or ‘friends only’.

Clause 2(2) states that even after you delete your account Facebook may retain some of your post for a reasonable period of time in their backup.

Muddy waters begin from Clause 2(4) which gives Facebook the permission to use your name, profile picture, information etc.  in connection with commercial. So liking that Porn Star’s Page does not seem the best idea if you don’t want something like ‘John Doe and 17 other friends like XXX. Click to like this page’ to pop in your friends’/relatives’/siblings’ feed.

Things get even more interesting from Clause 2(5) onwards where Facebook can unilaterally change its terms and will notify them on its Facebook Site Governance page instead of individually notifying you like Google and your continued use of Facebook for 7 days after change in terms will amount to your acceptance to the new terms. So do like this page so that you are notified every time Facebook changes its policy not that you care.

Clause 2(6) provides for a Forum Selection Clause and states that all disputes are subject to U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California or a state court located in San Mateo County and laws of State of California will govern the Statement. You need not worry much about this as Indian Courts are not much fan of such provisions and one could always invoke cases like Modi Entertainment Network v. W.S.G. Cricket PTE. Ltd. [(2003) 4 SCC 341] where it was held that “in an exceptional case for good and sufficient reasons, with a view to prevent injustice in circumstances such as which permit a contracting party to be relieved of the burden of the contract.” Not being able to go to US to file a lawsuit seems a sufficient reason enough apart from the fact that it takes away the jurisdiction of Indian courts something I doubt Indian judges would appreciate.

Clause 2(7) takes your consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Nothing much you could do in this regard and anyway it doesn’t matter much with NSA spying on you through Heartbleed (bug in OpenSSL encryption) since several years anyway.

To tell you more, Facebook is also fighting a legal battle in India, K.N. Govindacharya v. Union of India ,W.P. (C) NO.  3672/2012, Delhi High Court. The case has helped in getting grievance officer which you could contact here. To see how legal research can be done, please refer to our earlier post.

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