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5 Chrome Apps And Extensions Lawyers Should Be Using

Keyboard Law Technology

While it’s true that highly niched professionals like lawyers require a specific set of tools, sometimes something as simple as a Chrome add-on can be just as (or dare we say, even more?) powerful.

If you’re a lawyer looking for better, faster ways to get things done, working with Google Chrome can be a plus. Whether you’re on the web for legal research, accessing databases, or working remotely outside of the office, Chrome offers a long list of apps and extensions to help improve the way you work.

And the right ones can make a world of difference.

So take your online productivity up a notch. A couple of these Chrome apps and extensions can speed up the most common and time consuming tasks.

Collect Online Evidence With WebPreserver

When you have cases involving social media harassment, incriminating posts, or cyberstalking, it automatically means spending hours online gathering screenshots. Not only that, but your research needs to be legally admissible. Luckily, there’s an extension for that: WebPreserver.

This Chrome extension will allow you to preserve, timestamp and authorize your findings with a single click. The extension links you to a web capture system designed for law firms and agencies to instantly create legally admissible evidence.

Research More Effectively On WestlawNext With Bestlaw

This next Chrome extension is centered upon offering you an expanded toolset to improve your workflow with WestlawNext. Bestlaw claims to add the features WestlawNext forgot.

WestlawNext Research Toolbar

Image Source: Bestlaw.io

Bestlaw does this by adding a toolbar to the document you’re reading. With it, you can copy Bluebook citations, generate table of contents, jump to footnotes, look up case information on Google and Wikipedia, share documents via email or social media and more.

Use Locate A Lawyer To Quickly Find & Consult With Other Lawyers

Looking for another lawyer? Use Locate A Lawyer in your search. Developed by LawInfo.com, Locate A Lawyer can give you quick access from Chrome to its directory of pre-screened attorneys, all with verified qualifications and credentials. You can easily search by name, zip code, firm, and area of law.

Use Agilewords To Speed Up Legal Document Reviews

The review and approval process is necessarily a lengthy one at times, especially for legal documents that need feedback, editing, updating, and approval. For lawyers who need to collaborate on legal document, there’s Agilewords, the document reviewing tool you can access directly within Chrome.

This tool provides you with features such as real-time collaboration, secure uploading and hosting, revision tracking, online/offline editing, and the ability to audit your document’s access.

Instantly Look Up Citations From Webpages With Jureeka!

When researching a case, you may come across web pages with legal citations that appear throughout the article that aren’t hyperlinked. This Chrome extension can save you that hassle of toggling back and forth, looking up citation sources. Jureeka! will turn those legal citations into hyperlinks as long as it is on a web page. So even if the author of the article does not link the citation, Jureeka! does.

6 Innovative Alternatives To The Traditional Business Plan

Got an idea you think the masses will love? Thinking of starting up your own business? You’re not the only one.

Competition is fierce and many ambitious individuals have the same vision of success as you do. And the best place to start beating the competition (after coming up with a killer idea) is with a well laid out business plan.

Now if you’ve looked into the topic, then you know that there’s a lot of debate on whether or not the traditional business plan is still effective. For budding entrepreneurs today, the business plan is outdated, overly complex and unnecessary. This leads us to ask the obvious question: If you still need to map out your business idea for others, where does this leave you?

If you’re looking to create a business plan that can impress investors, here are some modern ideas and innovative services you should consider.

Use A PowerPoint Slide Deck For Effective Pitch Meetings

PowerPoint has always been the tool of choice for presenting ideas. Why not use it for pitching your business?

Walking potential investors through a PowerPoint presentation on your iPad can be very effective. Take Tim Young, founder of Socialcast, for example. He used 5 slides for a business pitch in 2010 and managed to raise over 10 million in investment funds for 2 startups.

From his experience, he found that a presentation can help your pitch because “by sharing a screen and sitting in close proximity to each other, the environment naturally becomes more comfortable and relaxed.” Certainly an idea worth considering if you get nervous while presenting.

Create A Successful Business Model With LaunchBoard

With LaunchBoard, you can create, both simple or complex business models in no time. The tool is a perfect solution when you need to define your business and understand your customers. With several important features, such as analyzing data and deciding the best way to move forward, the tool has all the necessary options for any companies to succeed.

Image Source: LaunchBoard.io

You can track your team’s progress with an easy access to members KPI’s and the ability to get involved in every decision-making process. Discover and develop new market opportunities, brainstorm and test ideas, organize files quickly and make all information understandable to everyone.

Use A Lean Canvas For Concise Business Plans

Just because your business plan is short doesn’t mean it isn’t well thought out. When you create one with Lean Stack, you can boil down the essentials down to a one page blue print for quick at-a-glance reading.

Using a Lean Canvas is best for those situations where you’re making a pitch to investors who have very little time and can’t go through all the nitty-gritty details. This is a paid service, but offers free 30-day trials for both individual and team plans.

Grow Your Busines With Strategyzer

Image Source: Strategyzer.com

With Strategyzer’s business model canvas, you are getting a platform and services that understand their customers. The numbers speak for themselves — over 5 million active users. With Strategyzer you can easily create better products and quickly grow your business. Moreover, with this app, you can analyze any business idea and identify its market potential. It offers training options for the entire companies or simply one person.

Create A Visual Business Plan With Pinterest

This idea may go against what you know about best business plan practices, but using Pinterest can be a creative way of visualizing your idea for others. In fact, Tim Berry, angel investor, business planner and entrepreneur, stands behind the idea.

According to him, a business plan created with Pinterest is more accessible than a slide deck and is helpful in steering your business in the right direction. This method doesn’t describe your business; it focuses on the output of the plan.

As Tim Berry points out, “a business plan is worthwhile because of the decisions that result from it. If the Pinterest plan helps you organize a team and set the main points so you can move forward logically, why not?” I think that sums it up exactly.

Use Live Plan For Easy To Read Business Plans

Like the other suggested ideas, Live Plan tries to combine the serious nature of business plans with easy to read formats. It offers everything needed to keep your financials, business pitch and plan in check with an admin dashboard and support for team collaboration.

LivePlan Explainer from Palo Alto Software, Inc on Vimeo.

Live Plan makes it easy for you to forecast and prioritize the main financial elements of your business strategy like value propositions, key partnerships, cost structure and so on. This service is perfect for pitching a concise business plan investors and banks can instantly understand.

In this day and age, packaging and presenting your business plan effectively is becoming increasingly important if you want to stand out. Have you created a traditional business plan in the past? Which alternative would you use?

5 Great Ways To Convert Text To Speech

Audio Headphones Unplugged

As the school year starts up, you’re probably just getting yourself oriented with your classes and gauging the size of the workload you’ll have to deal with.

It may be daunting after a long lazy summer, but anticipating the amount of reading you have ahead of you is a good idea. It’s never fun to all of a sudden find yourself lagging behind. You need to get ahead of the curve way before the heavy reading assignments even start. And we have a perfect tip for that: to help lighten the reading load use a convert text to speech tool.

Converting speech to text can come in handy in so many ways. It can free you up to get away from the screen for a bit or help you learn a language. Also, students with disabilities can use text to speech tools to easily access digital content. Text to speech tools are perfect if you need help with proofreading, catching up on your notes, or getting some eBook reading done.

So here’s a look at 5 different ways to listen to your reading assignments with these free easy to use text to speech tools.

Listen to MP3 Files of Your Text with SpokenText

For those who need to catch up on reading while commuting, running errands, working out or multi-tasking, SpokenText is a straightforward online text to audio converter. SpokenText allows you to convert any number of files such as PDF, DOC, PPT, TXT, HTML and Emails to an MP3 file. Once you have your MP3 files are created, you can then download and put them onto a mobile device. You’ll be able to take your readings with you.

Have Online Documents Read Out Loud To You

Have a document online that needs to be proofread? If the file is shared on the web with a file sharing or collaboration tool like Google Docs, then you can have the text read to you directly from within your browser. You can listen for grammatical errors while working with other things on your computer–all without missing a beat.

SpeakIt! is available for Chrome and allows you to read text displayed in the browser. For FireFox, there’s Text to Voice which can also let you download your text in MP3 format. And Opera users can try VozMe. Once any of these extensions are installed, just highlight the text you want read out to you and activate the plugin.

Convert Text From Multiple Sources With NaturalReaders

NaturalReaders is a popular text to speech tool whose online version comes with basic yet advanced features to get the job done. Click on Add Documents and you can start building and accessing your list of files from popular services like Dropbox, Google Docs, and more. Handy for students working on public computers or using Cloud services.

Get Social With Your Text On YAKiToMe!

People who are used to in browser music players will love the look and feel of YAKiToMe! It’s a free online text to speech service and network rolled into one where you can share your audio books and files with other YAKiToMe user groups. If you’re lucky, you may find a user with an audio version of a book you’re looking for.

Text to Speech Tool

YAKiToMe! lets you convert text from .doc, .pdf, .txt, .html, .xml, and email to speech. Choose a reader, a reading speed and an input method for uploading text: Field (copy-paste text directly), File, RSS, and Email. Then click on the Run Text To Speech button.

Convert PDF Text To Speech with PDF2Speech.com

PDF2Speech is exactly what its name suggests. It’s a free online PDF to speech converter. This is perfect for professional and academic uses where PDF reading is a common task. On-screen PDF reading can sometimes be a chore, but listening to one doesn’t have to be.

Convert PDF to Audio

To use this tool, simply upload your PDF files to the site and hit the Convert button. This free service allows you to convert up to 20 pages which will allow you to get a good chunk of your readings checked off your list.

There are many simple yet powerful text to speech freeware tools to suit any occasion or need. The good news is that it doesn’t require a lot of money or any bloated text to speech download.

How To Use Google Docs And Sheets Add-ons For Writing Papers

If you’re a student, you’re probably always on the lookout for ways to cut costs wherever possible. And a free online word processor like Google Docs, is a popular alternative. It’s where you go when you need to share, edit and store documents.

But do you always have what you need when working with Google Docs? Now that Google Drive offers Google Docs and Sheets add-ons, you do. They offer more functionality and flexibility when creating complex documents online. If you haven’t tried these out yet, you should.

The life of a student is made up of a lot of information, and you need to be able to break down, organize, write, and carefully cite your arguments. With Google Docs and Sheets add-ons, you can now accomplish almost everything needed to write a paper, from start to finish.

Here’s a quick guide on what we thought were the handiest add-ons for the job.

Plan Out Your Argument With Gliffy Diagrams

One of the first steps for creating any paper is the outline. For an essay of any notable length, you need to map out your arguments clearly and effectively. In Google Docs, you can use the Gliffy diagrams add-on where you can easily create a flow chart or mind map on your topic.

Image Credit: Gliffy.com

The add-on takes you to the Gliffy site where you can start creating a simple map out of your ideas and then access or insert it right into Google Docs to keep yourself on track. With a free account, you can create up to 5 diagrams.

Use Texthelp Study Skills To Sift Through Your Notes

When it comes time to sift through class notes and first drafts, it can be frustrating to have to go through them all one by one and extract what you need. But by using the Texthelp Study Skills highlighting tools add-on, you can speed up the sorting process significantly.

Texthelp Highlighting Tools

These highlighting tools allow you to highlight important points and then collect that highlighted text into a new document. This is handy as you can then start filling out your paper around the text. No need to copy and paste or toggle back and forth. An extremely helpful add-on for integrating your research notes with the actual writing of your paper.

Get EasyBib To Create Your Bibliography

As you write and incorporate your research and quotations, use EasyBib to create a bibliography. This eliminates the tedious task of manually documenting sources, especially when they can come in every possible type of format.

You can cite sources into MLA, APA, or Chicago style directly in the side bar. Easybib makes it as easy as pasting in the title, ISBN, or URL of your source.At the end, clicking on the Generate Bibliography button will add it neatly to the end of your paper. This way you can focus on the writing instead of the details of your citations.

Have ProWriting Aid Double Check The Text

When you’re ready to edit and proof read your finished draft, make sure you catch all errors by using the ProWriting Aid add-on.

ProWritingAid Text Checker

It not only performs instant checks for grammar, but also checks consistency, plagiarism and overused words. ProWriting Aid will provide you with a full report in the side bar. And from there, you can edit and rewrite your text as needed.

Consult Thesaurus To Give Your Writing A Boost

As an added measure, the Thesaurus add-on is helpful when adding the finishing touches to your writing. Just select a word in your document and activate the add-on. A side-bar will pop up with suggestions right within Google Docs, which is more convenient than having to Google around for another word in another window.

By no means do you have to pigeon-hole yourselves to these add-ons. All the offered add-ons are general enough to help with any writing need you may have. So check them out and let us know which ones help you the most.

PDF Usability And The Web: Is The Format Still “Unfit For Human Consumption”?

There has always been a well-documented love-hate relationship between users and the PDF format. You either love it when things go right or hate it when it doesn’t co-operate.

Yet for better or worse, the PDF document is in our daily lives. We convert and create PDFs, always emailing and reading them no matter how much we may complain about the format.

But think about what it was like before. Back in 2003, authoritative web usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, criticized the usability of the PDF on the web in his article PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption, in which he catalogs what he calls the format’s “usability crimes.”

If you were an early PDF adopter in the late 90’s or early 2000’s, then you could probably relate very strongly to the article. But would you still agree with it after more than 10 years? Probably not. You can’t deny the format’s improvement since then.

Despite the misgivings we have about the PDF, we can’t do without it. Because of large scale adoption, ISO standardization, and third party tools, the PDF format is a heck of a lot easier to work with. But it’s also due in large part, to the Internet itself and how it’s been shaping our user habits.

The State Of Our Online Behavior

Today we live in a highly technological world that co-exists hand in hand with the Internet. And whether we like it or not, our compulsion to stay connected online greatly influences our need to edit and work with documents on the web, including ones that weren’t meant to be edited.

We connect and communicate online. Blogs, social media, and forums are endlessly engaged in discussion. Social networks are highly public, yet personal. We need to access and do things online, to create an individual work space which we can control.

Photo Credit: Justin Marty via photopin cc

It’s no surprise then that because of this necessity, the digital documents we use daily are following this trend. Our files have become part of the interactive and streamlined user experience.

Developers have been giving digital documents like the PDF a lot of integrated support. Online app services like Google Drive, for instance, allow us to upload PDF documents for viewing, commenting, and sharing, all with a simple URL. Desktop tools are also extending document sharing to real time collaboration over the web.

We can log in from anywhere and check in with our files on-screen. Whether a professional on a tablet or a student enrolled in an online class, we can always connect with PDF contracts and research papers. And on top of this, we can read and download PDF e-books from the web onto our mobile devices.

Using The Internet As A PDF Tool

Let’s not forget that Google has been able to index PDF files since 2001. Since then, the popularity of PDFs online has grown to such an extent that by 2013, 80% of non-html documents posted online were PDF files.

Admittedly, web browsers back in 2003 didn’t support PDF viewing very well. However, browsers like Chrome and Firefox have begun including native PDF viewers. Add to that the ability to create a PDF for fast web viewing and your PDF documents are easier to go through than ever.

What’s interesting to note is that this online PDF viewing and sharing has gradually changed the role of the format itself. Before, the PDF was considered only a final print format. But thanks to online services and advanced PDF creation and editing tools, it can be manipulated at any point in the workflow.

Photo Credit: Saad Faruque via photopin cc

Consider how and when you’ve used online converters and web apps, or social networks and document search engines for a PDF. What did they do to help you with the file? Given the right utilities and extensions, we can interact with PDFs in our browser or annotate, highlight, and merge them instantly.

Truth is, it isn’t as hard to work with PDF files online as it used to be. In fact, presenting PDF content online is now perhaps the most basic thing you can do.

But what do you think? Is the PDF still hard for you to consume online–viewing, handling, or otherwise? It seems that with the way the Internet and the format are developing, there’s no better time to be a PDF user than now.