Stuff We Recommend Archives - Law Office Technology & Marketing

DYMO LabelWriter 450 Turbo Printer

All attorneys need to put USPS postage on letters, envelops and packages. Most lawyers and law firms need to print labels from time to time. The two most common types of labels are file labels and shipping labels. The DYMO LabelWriter printers are made specifically to print labels of all kinds, including USPS postage stamps. The printers are tiny and do not use toner. They use thermal printing technology that causes the content or image to be zapped onto the label paper. You buy rolls of paper for the type of label you want to print. The rolls contain 500 labels or 200 postage stamps.

Every secretary and legal assistant and some lawyers in my law firm have connected to their computer one of two little printers, the DYMO Label Writer 450 Twin Turbo label & USPS stamp printer or the DYMO LabelWriter 450 Turbo High-Speed Postage and Label Printer for PC & MAC. These great and inexpensive little printers make printing shipping and file labels and postage stamps a breeze.

Both of these printers will print USPS approved postage stamps that you can peel and stick on letters, envelops and packages. You purchase postage online using supplied software after you open a postage account. We use the DYMO Label Writer 450 Twin Turbo label & USPS stamp printer to print both shipping labels and postage stamps because it holds two rolls of paper, one for shipping labels and one for postage. Because it is a pain the neck to change the label paper you will want this dual purpose printer unless you never plan on printing anything other than one type of label or stamps. We only have one dual paper roll printer.

Printing one or more stamps is a piece of cake. You just go into the DYMO software, select the price of the stamp you want to print, select the quantity of stamps then click on the print icon. The printer immediately prints the designated number of stamps. You peel off the paper then peel off the stamps and place them on an envelope or package.

Except for the one person in our office who has the dual roll printer, everybody else has the single roll DYMO LabelWriter 450 Turbo High-Speed Postage and Label Printer for PC & MAC loaded with shipping label paper. When I need a shipping label it takes a few seconds to copy the entire name and address from a Word document or from Time Matters, our contact management database. I then click on the DYMO label icon in Word, paste the name and address into the DYMO software then click on the print icon. A nice high quality shipping label prints with our firm name and logo above the address. Lastly I peel the label off and stick it on the big envelope. The whole process takes about 15 seconds.

I have used a DYMO label printer for many years. It is a great little label printer – a must have item if you print labels or if you want to avoid going to the post office to buy stamps.

By Richard Keyt|2019-06-17T07:04:03-07:00May 31st, 2012|Hardware, Stuff We Recommend|1 Comment

Law Office Faxing in the 21st Century

Does your law firm have a stand alone fax machine that sends faxes the old fashioned way? I mean does your law office print the document to be faxed, insert it into a fax machine and push the send button and watch while the machine scans each page and then uses its modem to send the fax to the recipient? Do your incoming faxes come into your fax machine over the phone line and does your old fax machine then print a hard copy of the fax?

eFax

If so, your law firm needs to move into the 21 century and use the not so new fangled technology to send and receive faxes. My law office has used efax.com to send and receive faxes since 2004. It’s great. To send a fax I do the following:

Convert the item to be faxed to an Adobe pdf file. If the document is a Word document, I click on the Acrobat tab on the menu bar at the top of Word then I click on the “Create PDF” tab and tell the program where I want to save the pdf file. If the document is a hard copy document I put it in the sheet feeder of my Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner and press the scan button. A few seconds later the document opens in pdf format on my computer screen and I save the file on my computer.

Click on the eFax icon on my desktop to send an email to eFax. This opens the free eFax software. I enter the name of the recipient, company name (if desired) and the fax number. If I previously sent a fax to the recipient that information is saved and easily zapped into the proper fields for my fax. I can check a box to create a fax cover sheet that contains my recipient information and add more information if desired.

Attach the pdf file to the fax. I click the attach icon and browse to the pdf file I saved and attach it to the eFax email.

Click on the send icon. The email and attachment are send to eFax and it then converts the pdf and immediately faxes it to the recipient.

One very nice feature is eFax maintains a record (including the content of the fax) of every fax my firm has sent since we purchased the service.

What I like best about eFax is that all incoming faxes are converted to Adobe pdf and sent to us as an attachment to an email message. I can add up to five people in the firm to receive the same fax. Both of my legal assistants get every fax I get and they handle most of the faxes. Any email can easily be forwarded to another person in our firm or anybody outside the firm. When we get a fax that we want to keep we click on the Time Matters save icon in Acrobat and save the pdf file to the client or matter in our Time Matters document management system. For more on our document management system see my article called “A Simple Inexpensive Way to Create a Paperless Law Office.”

Every attorney in our firm has his or her own dedicated eFax phone number. This allows each attorney to have a fax number that causes faxes to that number to go only to the attorney associated with the number and up to four additional recipients in the firm. eFax also retains every incoming fax in case you need it.

Here’s the cost of an eFax Plus account as of the date of this post:

With eFax Plus, you’ll get a private and secure way to send and receive faxes as email attachments.

	Choose a local or toll-free number
	150 Included inbound fax pages per month
	150 Included outbound fax pages per month*
	$.10 per page overage charge
	$10.00 one-time setup fee
	Lifetime storage

Monthly Plan: $16.95/mo

Do yourself and your staff a big favor and switch to the new way of sending and receiving faxes.

What do you think? Do you use a different digital fax service? Tell us about it.

By Richard Keyt|2019-06-17T07:03:58-07:00May 18th, 2012|Paperless Office, Software, Stuff We Recommend, Tech Stuff|0 Comments

Macro Express

Must Have Productivity Software by Insight Software Solutions

Macro Express is the premier Windows macro utility. It can automate all of your common computer tasks. I love Macro Express because it saves me a tremendous amount of time and makes my computer life easier. Macro Express satisfies my biggest requirements for law office software, i.e., it makes me more efficient and productive. Everybody in my small law firm uses Macro Express constantly throughout the work day and they love it.

Do you type the same text into Word, email messages or other programs over and over? We all do. Every attorney and law office staff person is constantly typing the names, phone numbers and email addresses of themselves and firm personnel into email messages and letters. Imagine how much time you and other people in your office would save if the contact information could be zapped instantly into a Word document or an email message. Using macros to insert repetitive text has the added benefits of always inserting the desired text (no omitted text) without any spelling errors.

Macro Express is a program that allows you to create a macro (memorized computer keystrokes) to automate virtually anything you do repeatedly on your computer. I use it primarily to insert text into Word documents or email messages. If you use the same text or phrases over and over, why waste time typing the text from scratch each time you need the text when you can type a short abbreviation that inserts the text instantly at the point of your cursor? Not only does Macro Express save time it eliminates typos and insures that the exact desired text is generated every time just the way you want it.

For example, when somebody calls and asks me about forming a limited liability company, I ask them for their email address so I can send them a marketing email message that has links to pages on my website about LLCs. The message is several paragraphs of text. With Macro Express, I simply type “.llclink”

[the name I gave this particular macro] and Macro Express zaps my canned message into the body of my email message at the point where my cursor is located.

I have several email signatures that I can insert as closings to email messages depending on whether I am sending a message to a person related to estate planning, entity formation or some other area of law that I practice. If I am sending an email message to an estate planning prospect I want my signature block to read:

Richard Keyt
Wills, Trusts & Estate Planning
Phone: 602-906-4953, ext. 1
Fax: 602-297-6890
Arizona Estate Planning: www.keytlaw.com/arizonawills

BM (before Macro Express) I either had to type this closing from scratch or have it saved somewhere that I could access, copy the text then paste it into the message. AM (after Macro Express) all I need to do is type the text that invokes the macro and a second later the text is inserted perfectly into my email message.

Macro Express makes it simple for me to have a different email signature block that is area of law specific for the intended recipient of the message. If you are trying to get somebody to hire you for widget law don’t send the person a message with a signature closing that says you do thing-a-ma-jig law.

Macro Express is an incredibly powerful macro recorder and playback utility. Automate all of your common tasks by simply turning on the recorder, performing the actions one time, then playing back the macro when needed. Or use over two dozen Quick Wizards to guide you through a series of questions and build the macro for you. To create more powerful macros, utilize the Scripting Editor.

Macro Express can also automate procedures. You could create marcos to configure Word to print to your color printer, your black and white printer or to Adode pdf. Think of Macro Express as a recorder that records your key strokes. You start the recorder, hit whatever keys and/or mouse clicks you want to record then stop the recorder. Give the macro a name and the short keys you want to use to invoke the macro and you are done. Now when you type the keystrokes that invoke the macro the program will replay the recorded keystrokes. Macro Express has a wizard that makes creating macros extremely easy.

Your increased productivity will quickly pay the small cost for Macro Express. Use it to automate boring, repetitive computer tasks. Perform tasks quicker, more reliably and with less stress. Reduce wear and tear on wrists and hands. Macro Express provides all the tools necessary to create macros that will simplify your computing life. You do not need to know any programming language or have any programming skills. Everything is created in simple steps. Use Macro Express for quick insertion of boilerplate text, international characters or symbols. Speedily populate a database with information from a file. Manipulate text strings, open web pages, prompt users for input, back up files and much more.

The program contains hundreds of commands to automate practically any function on the computer. These include keystrokes, mouse movements and clicks, launch programs, send email, move and resize windows, variables, logic, input boxes, questions, menus, ASCII delimited and text file processing, network connections, file manipulation, math calculations, waits, pauses, repeat loops and much more.

For more powerful and complex macros, it’s easy to create if/then/else logic that examines variables and makes decisions based upon what it finds.

Macros may be launched via hot keys, shortkeys, mouse clicks, window controls, a window title, a pop-up or floating menu, or via the macro scheduler. Assign macros to play back in all Windows programs, in only one specific window or program, or in every program except the one defined.

Your time is valuable so give yourself a productivity present and buy Macro Express. It’s only $39.95 for a single user license. Click here to buy Macro Express.

By Richard Keyt|2018-01-14T08:40:47-07:00May 6th, 2012|Software, Stuff We Recommend|1 Comment

My Favorite iPhone / iPad Apps

I’ve had an iPhone and an iPad since each device was first offered for sale. I do love both of these incredible electronic computers/phones/do-it-alls. Today at lunch two of my long-time former law partners showed me their new first time-user iPhones and they asked me what apps to get. Which apps to get from iTunes is something that comes up a lot with me and my friends. Here is a list of my favorite iPhone & iPad apps for lawyers, attorneys, law firms and other iPhone and iPad users:

Productivity

Dragon Dictation – free. This is a must have app because it is a great tool for converting your voice to text which you can then send as a text message, email, make a copy, send to Facebook or Twitter. It’s conversion of your voice to text is very accurate. You can also edit the text to make corrections or additions. A great tool for sending your thoughts to yourself or secretary.

TurboScan – Use your iPhone to scan any type of document. Once scanned you can email it as text, a pdf or a jpeg. You can also open the document in pdf, print it or save it to your iPhone camera roll. I checked the app on iTunes today and it had 2,285 five star ratings.

HP 12C – $13, but it is two great calculators, a standard calculator when held vertical, but it changes to the HP financial calculator when the device is held horizontal. P.S. It uses reverse polish notation logic. Use the financial calculator to find loan payments based on the loan amount, interest rate and number of payments.

Google – free. Touch the microphone icon and speak your search words. This app then quickly does a Google search and displays the results. My lunch group buddies crack up every time they ask me to do a Google search such as who do the Arizona Cardinals play next week?

PDF Reader Pro – free. Allows you to open pdf documents.

Fake a Call – free? Maybe this should be in a different category, but you can use it to get out of a meeting. Set it to fake an incoming call during a meeting so you can excuse yourself.

Travel Track Pro – $. Great for trips. Enter all of your trip information into this app such as airline flight information, hotel and car rental info and reservation numbers. All information is then at your fingertips when needed. It will tell you if your flight is delayed and when it will arrive. Lots of great information for trips.

News Apps

Wall St. Journal – free, but I pay $9 a month to get all of the paper on my iPhone & iPad

Los Angeles Times – free

New York Times – free app, but $ to get access to all of the content

USA Today – free and no charge for a lot of well organized content

Social Media

Facebook – free

LinkedIn – free

YouTube – free

Videos – free. A great way to watch the music, TV show and movie videos you buy from iTunes

Games

Solitaire City – $. 21 different solitaire games. At one time everybody in my family was hooked on Alternations, a great solitaire game.

W.e.l.d.e.r. – $. A fun word spelling game.

Wurdle – $. Another fun word spelling game.

Tetris – $ Years ago in the days of playing games on the PC I wasted too much time playing this classic game.

Scrabble – $. The tech version of a board classic. Play the computer, a random live opponent, friends or join a local multiplayer game. Way better than the board game.

Monopoly – $. The Parker Brothers classic. I like to play against two computer opponents and have all the cards dealt at random to the players.

Miscellaneous Apps

iPhone Secrets – free. A great way to learn all the hidden secrets of the iPhone.

iBooks – free. A great place to get ebooks (low cost best sellers and many free books). I’d rather read a book on my iPad or iPhone than hold it in my hands the old fashioned way.

Instagram – free. It’s Twitter for pictures, no text. In five seconds you can take a picture and post it to your Instagram account and all of your followers can see your pictures on their Instagrams. Great for a family. Make your profile private then only allow your family members to follow you. Whenever anybody who you follow posts a picture you can see it immediately and so can all all of the other people who are following the picture taker. You can add captions to your pictures and people can like and comment on other people’s pictures.

Facebook Camera – free. This is Facebook’s version of Instagram, but it integrates seamlessly with Facebook to put your photos on your Facebook timeline. It is Instagram created specifically for Facebook.

Zinio – free. This is a magazine reader app. You purchase subscriptions to your favorite magazines and read them on your iPhone or iPad. Reading magazines on the iPad is awesome. Links on pages are hot and take you to another part of the magazine. My favorite magazine is PC Magazine, but a few years ago it stopped making prints and went entirely digital through Zinio. I love reading PC Magazine using my Zinio reader. Every issue is retained on Zinio unless I delete it.

RedLaser – free. This is a must have app. It scans bar codes on products and then gives you a list of websites that sell the same product and the price of the product. If you finder the product cheaper online you can quickly buy it using your iPhone or iPad. Barcode scans can be emailed, sent to Facebook or Twitter or turned into a text message or added to a favorites list. RedLaser will also scan QR codes and interpret them.

Amazon Mobile – free. This app also scans bar codes, but it only give prices for the products sold on Amazon. I love this app because Amazon has very low prices. If you have an Amazon account like me you will be able to instantly purchase a product after you scan and get the results. Slick. It has a camera feature that lets you take a picture of the cover of a book, CD, DVD or video game and get Amazon’s price for the item.

Yelp – free. Find local business such as restaurants and read reviews written by customers. Write your own reviews.

iPhoto – free. PC Magazine’s May 2012 issue gave this app its Editor’s Choice award for being an excellent iPhone/iPad photo editor.

Shazam – free. If you hear a song you like but don’t know its name let Shazam listen to the song. It will not only tell you the name, but if the sound quality is good it can distinguish between different artists singing the same song. You can also buy the song from iTunes.

Flixster – free. Great for checking the movies playing at your local theaters. Lots of information about each movie including start times.

Pandora – free. Create a “radio station” for your favorite recording artist. Pandora will then play songs by that artist mixed with other artists is selects that have a similar sound. It’s a great way to listen to your favorites and find other artists and music. If you don’t like a song press the thumbs down button and you will never hear that song again. Give your likes a thumb’s up. If you hear a song you like you can buy it from iTunes at the click of an icon.

Sex Offenders – free. Not an app I use much or that has much value, but it will amaze you when you ask it to search your surrounding area and list all the registered sex offenders. Here in central Phoenix where I live there are literally thousands of them. The app shows their locations on a map and via a list ordered by closest to farthest away. Click on a person on the list and it tells you that person’s address and conviction(s) including a picture.

What are your favorite iPhone and iPad apps? Please tell us by making a comment.

By Richard Keyt|2018-01-14T08:40:47-07:00May 2nd, 2012|Ramblings, Stuff We Recommend|0 Comments

Why I Love WordPress for My Law Firm

I love WordPress. WordPress for attorneys is a fantastic tool for generating clients and more revenue. I have been creating my websites using WordPress since 2009. As of today I have created 11 WordPress websites. You can access them from the menu link at the top of this page. Of these 11 sites, I am the only person who adds content to 7 of them, two sites contain content created only by two other KEYTLaw attorneys and two sites contain content created by me and other KEYTLaw attorneys.

If your website is not a WordPress site, you are making a mistake unless you have the money to pay a consultant or web development company a ton of money for a super-duper site. My experience is always been that I can invest the time to learn a software program so I can use the program and its powerful features without being dependent on a high paid consultant who probably isn’t really that knowledgeable. See Keyt’s Technology Rule Number 1.

I started the original www.keytlaw.com website in the winter of 2001. At that time I was a partner at one of the largest law firms in Arizona. The firm’s board of directors told me I could not have a website and that a firm website was worthless for generating new clients. I knew that virtually all lawyer websites did not generate new business because they were nothing more than electronic firm brochures. I was convinced that I could create a website with original content that informed the public about legal issues and that it would generate business.

I was right. Since leaving big law in 2001 I have obtained over 6,000 new clients most of whom hired me and my firm because of my websites. A good informational website is a great way for a lawyer to obtain new clients. During 2011 the total combined traffic on my websites averaged 163,000 visitors/month. Per Avvo and www.alexa.com the KEYTLaw website is one of the 35 most visited law related websites in the United States.

Microsoft FrontPage

When I took the plunge and created my first website in 2001 the two most popular HTML editors were Microsoft’s FrontPage and Adobe’s Dreamweaver. FrontPage was cheaper and sold to the public as more user friendly than Dreamweaver so I bought FrontPage.

For eight years I used FrontPage to create every page on the old www.keytlaw.com. Take a look at an old FrontPage created KEYLaw page. The old site look and feel worked well for me for many years despite it’s cludginess. I designed the look and feel of the site without any knowledge of what I was doing, which is why the site looks like it was made by somebody that didn’t know how to design a site. I knew I wanted a website and so I just loaded FrontPage and started creating web pages.

My original website and now the other ten WordPress sites generate a tremendous amount of web traffic because they contain content. See an old web log report for the month of December 2006 which shows www.keytlaw.com had 91,489 visitors that month, an average of 2,859/day. For the year 2006 my old site averaged 85,500 visitors a month and 2,850 visitors a day. Every year the number of visitors increases because we are constantly adding content to our sites. Web success is very very simple – the more good content you have on your site the more visitors it will have.

FrontPage was actually user friendly for its era, but the problem with HTML editors is that you start with a blank screen and you must build every page and every feature of your website from scratch. A simple website was easy to create in FrontPage, but to create any feature required a ton of time and html editing.

WordPress

In 2009 I decided to create a law blog so I did a little research and concluded that WordPress was the way to go. The difference between WordPress and FrontPage is as great as the difference between night and day. FrontPage was a low tech do everything yourself program. WordPress is a high tech do everything for you program. WordPress combined with WordPress plugins is a winning combination that allows a novice to do anything with a website/blog with very little effort or knowledge needed by the WordPress user.

WordPress comes in two flavors, i.e., wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The .com version is hosted on WordPress’ website. The .org version is free downloadable software that you must install on a server (shared or dedicated) and that is accessed by people who go to the URL of your domain.

WordPress.com

The .com version of WordPress is a website that as of today hosts 426,536 free WordPress blogs. To have a blog on wordpress.com all you need to do is sign up and two minutes later you are in business on the internet. Your site will be a subdomain of www.wordpress.com such as www.lawfirm.wordpress.com. WordPress hosts your site on its server. Although it is actually very easy to have a WordPress.org site on your own domain, the WordPress sites on wordpress.com are even easy to use. See a list of features offered for free by www.wordpress.com.

The downsides to the .com version are:

1. Your site is not on your domain.

2. You will not have access to the vast universe of plugins available when you have WordPress running on your domain.

3. You cannot have any ads.

4. Customization is limited.

5. Moving your site to a Wordpress.org site later is a big deal for the average WordPress user.

Reasons Why I love WordPress

1. WordPress is Very Easy to Install: With a good webhost like Bluehost anybody can create a WordPress law firm website or blog simply and easily. I’ve hosted my websites at Bluehost since I created my first blog in 2009. Bluehost hosts millions of WordPress sites and is adding 20,000 new sites a month. I cannot say enough about Bluehost. It’s cheap ($5 – $7) month. It’s got great tech support 24/7, which I have used from time to time. What I love best about Bluehost is that is uses something called Cpanel and Simple Scripts. What these two programs mean to the WordPress user (prospective or actual) is that you can create a new WordPress website/blog in less than ONE MINUTE. Yes! In a future video I’ll demo how to do it and how quickly I can create a new site.

To learn more about everything Bluehost gives you for $5/month go to its hosting features page.

2. WordPress is Very Easy to Learn: It takes me about 15 minutes to show a person everything he/she needs t know to add content to WordPress. Only one person in your firm needs to be the administrator of your WordPress site and know how to do things like add, configure and update plugins and do the admin stuff. There is a higher learning curve to be the administrator, but there is virtually no learning curve to be a WordPress content creator. Everybody only needs to know how to create a blog post or a web page, both of which are extremely simple.

3. WordPress Themes: A WordPress theme is software add on to WordPress that gives the entire site a certain look and feel and built in features. In my bad old days of using FrontPage, I had to create the look and feel (theme) of my website. It is not an easy task for a novice, which is why my theme was not too spiffy for eight years. WordPress, however, for some reason I do not understand offers 1,549 free themes that you can download and install in a matter of seconds. Yes. That’s right SECONDS! See the free WordPress themes yourself. If you see one you like all you have to do is click on the “install” button then 5 seconds later click on the “activate” button and your WordPress site has a new look and feel. I use a very popular theme on all of my sites called “Atahualpa,” which had been downloaded 941,182 time as of the date of this article. There are also thousands of themes that you can purchase if you can’t find a free theme you like. Update: I now use the Avada theme on most of my websites. I love this theme. It is state of the art including being “responsive” out of the box. A responsive site is a site that looks great on smartphones, iPads and tablets.

4. WordPress Has Plugins: The thing I like best about WordPress is that there are thousands of plugins (19,330 free ones as of the date of this article) that I can quickly download and install on my WordPress site. Most plugins are free, but some require that you purchase the plugin before downloading. A plugin is essentially software code that you can add to your WordPress site literally by making two clicks with your mouse. Unlike the FrontPage days when the website developer had to create all the code to do anything on a website, there are probably several free WordPress plugins that will do anything you could imagine doing with a website or a blog. See WordPress’ plugins page where you can find all the free plugins. Here are the four most downloaded plugins (I use all of them on all of my sites) with a description of what the plugin does:

Akismet – downloaded 9,949,581 times. This plugin detects comment spam and deletes it. Yes Comment spam is common whenever you have a website/blog that allows visitors to leave comments.

Contact Form 7 – downloaded 6,732,250 times. Allows the administrator to create a contact form to collect information when people want to contact the website creator or somebody in the company that owns the site. See one of my contact forms I created with this plugin.

All in One SEO Pack – downloaded 10,606,267 times. This plugin has fields into which I enter the title of a page or a post, the keywords therein and a description of the page or post that is not more than 160 characters in length. When a page or post is saved this information is included in the meta data for the page or post and used by the search engines. This information is important for good search engine optimazation.

Google XML Sitemaps – downloaded 7,368,379 times. Every night this plugin creates a sitemap of my WordPress site and sends it to Google and the major search engines to assist them when their bots crawl my site.

How to Learn How to Use WordPress

There are many ways you could learn how to use WordPress, but here are my recommendations:

1. Teacher-Student Method: If you know somebody who is a serious user of WordPress, ask him or her to give you a lesson and if you can call from time to time with questions.

2. Watch Lynda.com Training Videos: Whenever I want to learn how to use software I go to Lynda and watch one or more training videos. When I wanted to learn how to make Adobe Acrobat pdf fillable forms I watched a 20 hour training video on Lynda. Today Lynda has a 6.5 hour course on the self-hosted version of WordPress and a 5 hour course on the WordPress.org hosted version. Both of these courses are about version 3.3 of WordPress, the current version.

You can pay to watch individual videos, but for years I have paid Lynda $25/month for unlimited access to all of its training videos.

3. Watch My Demo Videos: You can’t watch them today, because I haven’t created them yet. In the very near future I will have demo videos that show lawyers interested in learning WordPress everything they need to know to install a WordPress site on Bluehost , configure it with a theme and plugins and how to add content. Check back in the near future or enter your email address in the field in the top of the left column of this page if you want to get an update when I add new content.

Your thoughts? Do you or your law firm use WordPress and have any gripes? Do you use something else that you like? Leave a comment.

By Richard Keyt|2019-06-17T07:03:15-07:00April 28th, 2012|Blogs, Stuff We Recommend, WordPress|0 Comments