Category Archives: Computer Tips

Put This Injury Law Blog to Work for You

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42-15977462 How often you you get to put attorneys to work for you – for FREE?

Here’s a golden opportunity to tap into the legal expertise of the attorneys at the Ziff Law Firm. We created this blog and the ZiffLaw website to share information with current and potential clients. It’s a new line of communication with the community we serve.

Here are some ways you can put this blog to work for YOU:

Subscribe to our blog

When you visit the Ziff Law Firm’s NY Injury Law Blog, you can subscribe via e-mail or RSS feed. Just click on the orange “Get Blog Updates” button to choose the means – from AOL to Windows LIVE – by which you can receive the latest blog entries as soon as they are posted.

E-mail us directly with your questions

Don’t be shy. We welcome your e-mails and will do our best to answer your questions. Each name links to an online biography, where you can read more about our practice specialties, our credentials, and what we are like as people.

Sign up for our newsletters

You can read and download past editions of our print and electronic newsletters, aptly named “Legal News YOU Can Use!” Each issue is packed with information – we explain local issues as well as the big trends in jurisprudence.

Our newsletters can also be your invitation to informative seminars hosted by the firm, and/or discounts on legal services. Click on the title to find out about subscribing.

Don’t forget about the Search box

The NY Injury Law Blog contains more than a hundred entries by Ziff Law attorneys. We write about local events and big legal issues. We answer your questions or share challenges that came up in our practices. There’s much more, too. To find exactly what you may be looking for, use the “Search” pane and type in keywords for the topic that interests you. For example, personal injury, medical malpractice and insurance settlement all bring up informative results.

Talk back to us

We are lawyers. We like to exchange ideas (OK, I’ll admit it, we LIKE to talk talk talk). Tell us what you think about the posts we make. You can say thanks for the information – a pat on the back is always welcome – or let us know why you disagree. Let’s get a conversation going. It’s one of the ways you can get real value out of the NY Injury Law Blog.

Thanks for reading, Jim
_________________________________________
James B. Reed, Esq.
Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney
Ziff Law Firm, LLP
303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902
Tel. (607) 733-8866 Fax. (607) 732-6062
Toll Free 1-800-943-3529
mailto:jreed@zifflaw.com http://www.zifflaw.com

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Community Can Fight Crime, Too: Elmira Police Open Log Books Online

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Elmira, New York

The Elmira Police Department has a great new feature on their website that could make a big difference in how the public interacts with and perceives the department.

“Daily Activity Logs” allow anyone with Internet access to look at the last two weeks of Elmira Police Department incident records. The department has always had a daily activity log, a record of all incidents reported a 24-hour period beginning at midnight. With this new online service, the logs are available to view online for 14 days.

What’s on the log sheet

  1. The incident blotter number - a reference anyone can use when calling the department to share information about the incident or to find out more.
  2. The date and time the call was received.
  3. Type of call – whether it was a traffic stop, a disturbance, larceny or other type of incident.
  4. The number of the responding police unit.
  5. The location of the incident.
  6. This is very important – how YOU can report suspicious activity by calling 271-HALT or visiting www.271halt.com.

I applaud the Elmira Police Department’s effort to involve the public by sharing more information. Sharing these day-to-day details so quickly with the community will serve to make more residents a part of the effort to control crime in Elmira. Part of the department’s stated values is “achieving excellence in our services in our citizens through community-based, proactive policing.”

As Deputy Police Chief David Gardner said in the WETM story “New Elmira Police Service” (also pasted below), “Our community is our eyes and ears.”

Thanks for reading,
Jim
_________________________________________
James B. Reed, Esq.
Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney
Ziff Law Firm, LLP
303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902
Tel. (607) 733-8866 Fax. (607) 732-6062
Toll Free 1-800-943-3529
mailto:jreed@zifflaw.com http://www.zifflaw.com

New Elmira Police Service

Reported by: Naveen Dhaliwal
Last Update: 3/12 8:05 pm

ELMIRA – A new Elmira police web service will now allow you to keep a closer eye on what the department is doing.

There’s a new section on the police department’s website called Daily Activity Logs.

Every time an officer is sent to an incident they write a report or a log. Each log is assigned a blotter number. If anyone wants more information, they can request it through the police department using that number.

Officials say this service will reduce the workload for officers. They are also hoping people will step forward and provide more information to help their investigations.

“Our community is our eyes and ears. There’s usually between six and eight officers out there on the streets at any given time, but it’s a city, so we can’t be everywhere at the same time,” says Deputy Police Chief David Gardner.

The daily logs will remain on the website for two weeks.

You can find them at: www.cityofelmira.net/police/blotter.html.

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Innovation: Taking Baby Steps to Achieve Big Results!

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Baby FeetIt’s that time of year when many of us are setting goals and making plans for what we hope will be a successful and prosperous 2009. It’s very tempting to set goals that are so lofty that you just know you will never achieve them. I suggest that rather than create a master plan that is so ambitious that you know it will never get off the ground, consider taking “baby steps” to achieve big changes in 2009….

This isn’t to say that you can’t dream big, it’s to say that you need to break the BIG dream down in to a series of realistic and achievable baby steps that will ultimately culminate in achieving the big dream.

Let me use myself and my law firm as a brutal example. For years we kicked around the implementation of many types of technology– electronic files rather than paper files, computer trial presentation, digital dictation, voice recognition software, video depositions, etc.

Without fail, not one of these great technology “ideas” got off the ground until we decided to just bite the bullet, quit screwing around with the “thinking” about the idea, and just dove in to the implementation of the new technology by taking the first “baby step”. Sure, just diving in occasionally resulted in some mistakes, but those mistakes often showed us the way to an even better solution.

Let me use the implementation of our “paperLESS” office system as an example. 5-6 years ago we decided to try to convert the inefficiency of our paper-based file system to a digital-based system. At the time, scanners were expensive, scanning software was clunky and confusing, and our staff thought we were nuts to change from the tried-and-true paper file system with which they were so comfortable. Realizing this was going to be an uphill battle if we rolled out the scanning system to the entire office, we decided to just roll it out to two of our personal injury paralegals who were enthused about the idea. Long story short, after working out some of the initial bugs, these two paralegals LOVED the new electronic files (no more hunting for paper files or documents!) and slowly but surely every paralegal, secretary and lawyer in the office was clamoring for a scanner for their own desk. Now, every shred of paper in the office is quickly converted to an electronic file and we no longer rely on the paper file.

The bottom-line is that we could have researched/debated/discussed this conversion to digital files to death or we could just take the baby step of putting a scanner on someone’s desk and letting them run with it.

Guess how we do it now in our office whenever we want to implement a new technology? Yep, gotta love those baby steps!! :-)

Thanks for reading.

Jim
_______________________________________________________
James B. Reed
NY & PA Injury and Malpractice Lawyer
jreed@zifflaw.com


NY Accident Lawyer recommends CiteGenie– A GREAT, free, Firefox Add-on

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NEW YORK - MARCH 05: (FILE PHOTO) Comedian St...

For our lawyer readers of this blog, a recommendation for a VERY useful tool– CiteGenie.

For those of you who are using FireFox as your browser, I recently discovered an awesome free Add-On called CiteGenie. It lets you cut and paste from Westlaw directly in to a Word document and it automatically pulls over all the citation info in Blue Book perfect form!!

This saves tons of time when you are researching because you can just cut and paste the good quotes and the citations are all there for you to use.

CiteGenie not only works for legal citations but also for other information that you cut and paste from the web—it brings over the website information and also lists that information in the proper Blue Book format.

I highly recommend CiteGenie. Here’s a recent review: http://www.llrx.com/features/citegenie.htm

You can find this Add-on at: http://www.citegenie.com/download_stable.html

Jim

_________________________________________

James B. Reed, Esq.

Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney

Ziff Law Firm, LLP

303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902

Tel: (607) 733-8866

Fax: (607) 732-6062

Toll Free: 1-800-943-3529

Email: jreed@zifflaw.com

Web: http://www.zifflaw.com

Visit the New York Injury Law Blog at: http://www.NYInjuryLawBlog.com

Email me at FreeReports@zifflaw.com for two free books concerning NY

Car Accidents and NY Car Insurance Secrets YOU Need to Know.

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So what exactly is a “blog” anyway?

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Sometimes I am dense. I’ve been reading blogs for years (and now blogging myself), but I never stopped to explain to those folks who may be new to blogging what a “blog” is and why subscribing to blogs can be a great idea. As someone who may have stumbled on to this blog via a search engine search or a link from another site and who may not really understand what all this “blogging stuff” is all about, I thought it would make sense to briefly explain what blogs are and how you can subscribe to a blog to bring interesting information to you (instead of you having to go out and search for info).

As someone who loves to “play” with new technology (just ask my long-suffering wife!), I sometimes forget that other folks barely tolerate or even hate new technology (folks like my Mom, whose VCR has been flashing 12:00 for 3 years.)

But what I have found is that even these technology-haters will embrace new technology when it serves an interest or need in their lives. So I thought I would use this article to explain why I think everyone can benefit by reading blogs on topics that interest YOU. And trust me, there are blogs on virtually every topic you can imagine from the most exotic hobbies, to travel, to professions, to sports, to technology, etc. If you have an interest, there is bound to be at least one and maybe hundreds of blogs that discuss that interest in great detail.

Put most simply, a “blog” is simply a great way to have information delivered directly to you AND, if you wish, for you to be able to send your comments, questions or ideas back to the blog author.

The good news about the automatic delivery of blog articles is that you don’t have to go out and hunt down information– once you have subscribed to a blog (I will explain how easy it is to subscribe to blogs below), new information is automatically sent to you whenever the blog author writes a new article. That means no more having to go back to a website you enjoyed to see if they have added any new information since the last time you visited– you just sit back and let the new stuff be delivered to you.

As for being able to add your own comments to the blog: This lets you share in the conversation about the topic with both the blog author and the blog readers. The two-way communication between the author and readers can be very interesting and thought provoking. Commenting is totally optional and if you just want to be a silent blog reader you can easily do so for as long as you want without ever posting a comment.

So how do you subscribe to a blog? Let’s use mine as an example. If you like what you are reading here and have an interest in topics involving New York law, you can easily subscribe to my blog several different ways:

The easiest way is to just sign up here and we will automatically send new posts to your email address.

Another easy but more sophisticated way to subscribe is to use something called an “RSS Reader”. This is software that goes out and automatically grabs the posts from any blogs you have subscribed to and pulls them back on to your computer in one convenient location for your reading pleasure. If you already have an RSS Reader installed on your computer, you can just hit the Subscribe button on our blog.

If you do not have an RSS Reader, you can download a great FREE RSS Reader at: www.google.com/reader. Google’s Reader is great and the price can’t be beat!

Want to learn more about blogs? You can download a cute and highly informative video about them by going to http://www.commoncraft.com/blogs. They also have a great explanation of RSS here.

Happy blog reading!

Jim
_________________________________________
James B. Reed, Esq.
Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney
Ziff, Weiermiller, Hayden & Mustico, LLP
303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902
Tel. (607) 733-8866 Fax. (607) 732-6062
Toll Free 1-800-943-3529
mailto:jreed@zifflaw.com http://www.zifflaw.com


The Billion Dollar E-Mail Ooopppsss!

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E-mail can be a tremendous tool for the busy trial lawyer trying to stay in touch with his clients and office. In fact, I LOVE E-mail and I frankly advise new clients that the best way to keep in touch with me is via E-mail for two reasons: (1) E-mail is easy to file in our case management software so I always have ALL the details of the E-mail to refer to as the case progresses, and (2) I respond more quickly to E-mails than I do to the phone (that’s probably a personal quirk of mine but I find myself always turning to my E-mail Inbox first and my Voicemail second– my thinking is that since I have this quirk, it’s better to embrace it and use E-mail than to fight it! :-)

But E-mail can also be VERY dangerous if not carefully used. A billion dollar oooppppsss by an attorney illustrates the point. A lawyer for the drug company giant, Eli Lilly & Co., was working on a billion dollar drug case. This lawyer had two people named “Berenson” in her Outlook Contacts: one Berenson was co-counsel in the case and the other Berenson was a New York Times reporter.

By now you are probably guessing what happened with a “confidential” E-mail that the lawyer was mailing to her co-counsel regarding a “confidential settlement” that they were working on in the case….. Yup, it got emailed to the Times reporter rather than to her co-counsel. Can you say OOOOPPPPSSSS?

The moral of the story is a simple one: Always, always, always check to make sure that the TO: address in your E-mail is the correct person. For those of you who use Outlook, you may want to consider turning off the Auto-Complete function that automatically inserts an E-mail address as you type the first few characters of the E-mail address. Some people also configure a default Delayed Sending feature in their E-mail program so that ALL emails are automatically delayed a certain period of time– this permits you to delete an E-mail IF you discover your mistake before the E-mail sending time.

The bottom line is Be Careful and Practice Safe Computing. The computer CAN be our best friend or our worst enemy…..

Thanks for reading,

Thanks, Jim
_________________________________________
James B. Reed, Esq.
Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney
Ziff, Weiermiller, Hayden & Mustico, LLP
303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902
Tel. (607) 733-8866 Fax. (607) 732-6062
Toll Free 1-800-943-3529
mailto:jreed@zifflaw.com http://www.zifflaw.com


Searching for a Zip Code?

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Have you ever experienced the frustration of trying to find a zip code for a particular address? Well, the good news is that there are several easy ways to find a zip code:

  • Google it! Just put in a simple search: zip code Elmira, NY. It will provide the various zip codes for Elmira.
  • There are many internet search sites that can provide area codes: Addresses.com
  • Most phonebooks have a page in either the front of the book listing all the local zip codes.

If you are looking for local zip codes in our area of the Twin Tiers (Upstate NY) here is a pretty comprehensive list:

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