LAW PRACTICE TIPS
Start Your Own Clipping Service
By Jim Calloway, Director
OBA Management Assistance Program
What would you do if a good client called today and quickly needed copies of two Oklahoma Supreme Court opinions and one particular Oklahoma statute? You would be happy to supply the client this information. But there’s one complication. The client is on the road and not near a fax machine, so he wants the materials e-mailed to him. Could you do this in the next 10 minutes or so for this very important client?
Well, many lawyers could not. But by the time you finish reading this article and spend just a few minutes practicing the techniques, each of you will be able to do this quickly without investing in any more equipment or software — at least as far as Oklahoma law is concerned. In fact you may find that you are able to do many things for yourself that organizations have traditionally paid clipping services to track for them.Let’s follow the scenario out a bit more. Many lawyers have paid accounts with legal information providers and know how to save the results of that research to digital files. But after hanging up the phone you may realize you don’t know what word processor the client uses. For those who are not digital legal information subscribers, the next step may be to grab the law book and take it over to the office scanner.1 Will just an image do or does the client need the text as well? The staff tells you that the OCR2 really does not work well with the two column format used in law books.Well, hopefully almost every Oklahoma lawyer knows where to head online to find the requested information in a digital format — The Oklahoma Supreme Court Network, (OSCN) which is online at www.oscn.net.Probably every single one of us has clipped an article from a magazine or newspaper to save. Some are probably better than others at actually storing the articles to be retrieved later. I tend to find them later crumpled up in the bottom of desk drawers and the back of file cabinets myself. They sometimes provide a great walk down memory lane about what I considered interesting at earlier stages in my life, but often are not too useful as an information retrieval resource.Wouldn’t it be useful to have a giant filing cabinet with all of the articles one has ever clipped all neatly arranged and organized?3While it is easy to view the World Wide Web as mysterious bits of information that magically appear on your computer screen from parts unknown in response to a few mouse clicks or queries, the basics of the WWW are pretty simple. Your Web browser requests and receives pages from other computers and presents them for your viewing on your computer. These files are in a format called HTML4 or HyperText Markup Language.5 In some ways you are opening a document just like you do with your word processor and that means that you can save a document on your own computer just like with your word processor.Disclaimer: (Please read this and indicate your agreement by initialing in your Bar Journal before moving on.) This article is meant to instruct about what you can do with your computer. It is not about what you have the legal right to do. Oklahoma Statutes and court opinions are in the public domain. Copyrighted material is not. With copyrighted material on the WWW, the owners have placed it there for the sole purposes of allowing it to be transferred to my computer for viewing. It seems a bit illogical to say it is OK to view it today, but it cannot be saved for later viewing. But, as we know, the law and logic are not always partners and an intellectual property lawyer would have to venture an opinion here.6The nice thing about HTML files is that literally almost everyone with a computer can read them. Whatever you may think about the business practices of Microsoft, they resulted in almost every computer being Web-enabled right from factory.Once you learn how to save Web pages, there are endless possibilities, considering the amount of information online.
The First Baby Steps — ”Save As”
Let’s start with the basics. If you’ve never saved a Web page to your computer’s hard drive, try it the next time you are online (or right now for those of you with high-speed always-on Internet access.) Simply open a Web page and at the top click “File,” then click “Save As.” At the next screen (“Save in”) select the desktop as the file location instead of the folder listed and change the file name to something clever, like My First Saved Page.Now minimize your Web browser and look for the Internet Explorer or Netscape icon with your clever name on your Desktop. Click on it. Your Web browser will reappear displaying what looks like the same Web page. But there are likely two differences. First of all, in the address window at the top, it will no longer read www.something.something. Instead it reads C:\Windows\Desktop\Your clever name.htm. That is because you are now viewing a file saved on your computer’s hard drive. You could view this file while not even connected to the Internet because you have saved it to your computer. Secondly, you may note that certain elements of the page were not saved, and you have some X’s in boxes in this view. Usually these are non-essential elements. Also when you finish this exercise and get ready to delete the file from your Desktop, you will note a new folder on your Desktop with the same name. This contains graphic elements linked to the page and should be deleted when you delete the file as well.The “Save As” method is not the best or only way to save Web pages. But it is simple and easy.This is a way to save Oklahoma opinions and statutes as HTML files. Just view the applicable case page in OSCN and use this method to save it to your hard drive. This would be really useful if you wanted to save all of the leading cases that might impact a particular matter on the laptop you are taking to court for the trial for example.
Organization
Before we go into the other ways to save Web pages, let’s discuss organization and retrieval.After all, the crumpled press clipping in the bottom of my drawer was essentially useless if I needed to find it. Even if I managed to get into topical file folders, (a big “if”) it is still hard to organize. If I use general categories like “Probate” and “Criminal Law” for my folder labels, the folders soon become voluminous and time consuming to sort through. If I use very specific labels like “Civil - Negligence -Notice Issues,” I have to invest in a lot of folders and labels and also a lot of staff time to support the document bank organization. Most lawyers have dealt with this as they organize brief banks and form repositories on their hard drives.Well, this is one area where digital is definitely better than paper. You can create as many folders as you want without paying an extra penny, and you can search them much more quickly than pawing through piles of paper. One trick I’ve mentioned at many lawyer gatherings is to clean up the Windows Desktop by stashing everything in the closet. If you have a Desktop crowded with factory pre-installed items that are never or rarely used, take just a few minutes to really simplify your Desktop. Here’s how:
1) Right click (the other mouse button) on a blank space on your Desktop. 2) Select New, then Folder and click. 3) Type Closet to give that name to the new folder, and click elsewhere on the Desktop to finish. 4) Then look at your Desktop. Every item that you rarely use (or don’t know what it is) can be “dragged and dropped” into the closet removing it from view. A few items cannot be moved and Windows will alert you to that fact. 5) Now you have a much cleaner and more functional Desktop, and if you ever need any of these items you just click on the Closet Folder to locate them.
You can use this same technique to set up an electronic filing cabinet with many folders. Just right click and name, repeating as many times as you have a need for folders. This can be done on the Windows Desktop or within another folder. Several lawyers have folders named “Clients” on their Desktop and all of the clients have their own folder within that folder. Many of you already have such a system for client word processing documents or scanned images relating to client files. You may have started saving client-related e-mails there as well. There’s really no reason not to have different types of files relating to a client’s matter in the same folder.For a personal filing cabinet, one would want to have folders that relate to your interests. This hopefully differs widely between home and work. A lawyer’s office computer might have folders for clipping relating to substantive law areas, articles about important clients, possible journal articles and the like. But at home one might want to capture and retain totally different material.Web clipping folders on the home computer might include names like Recipes, Vacation & Travel, Child Activities, Sports and so forth.7 This is where the individual’s personality and interests make a big difference. An avid hunter might have several hunting-related folders while the occasional hunter just might lump all hunting under sports.If you will use long file names when you save these HTML files, you can then open up the recipes folder and look through the list. So a file name like “Low Calorie Chicken Tacos.htm” is easier to understand later than the suggested names like “Fred’s Recipe Roundup.htm” or “McAlester News-Capital & Democrat.htm” because you originally read it on that publication. Many often put dates within the long file name.Once you have so many saved pages you cannot quickly sort through them by name, you can use one of a number of text search capabilities to search the text and find the ones you want. The basic one is opened by clicking the Start button in the lower left hand corner of your screen. After Start, select Find, (or Search) then Files or Folders then fill in the “containing text” box. The exact commands may differ slightly depending on your version of Windows. But this is the way you can search all of your collected recipes for the ones containing chicken, for example.The point is to spend some time thinking about categories and folders before you save many Web pages and understand that you will add new folders as you go along. Some will opt for dozens of folders and others will make do with four or five.
Other Options — Right Click “Save Target As “ On pages that make extensive use of frames or other techniques, the “Save As” option often will not work well or at all. These sites are database driven rather than just having pure text and graphics Web pages. So you may save JavaScript Directions rather than the text you wanted. Here’s a trick that sometimes works when “Save As” does not give you the results you want.
1) Find a link to the page you want. (Often you can just click the Back button on your browser to return to the page that sent you there.) 2) Right click on the link to the page and Select “Save Target As” from the menu.3) Choose the location and rename as you would with the prior method.We have to note that not too long ago the above method was the preferred way to save cases and statutes from OSCN. Now it does not work at all, but the initial “Save As” method described works fine.You should be aware that using this method does not produce the same results as “Save As.” There is no separate folder of Web elements captured using this method. Therefore there will usually be more missing items from the page as it is viewed.This means if you are intending to later distribute the Web page to others, it is often better to capture the page using this method. That way you can open it and see exactly what they would receive and whether any critical elements are missing. There are rarely any critical elements missing, but you do need to know if there are.Sometimes computer tasks are more simple to do than to explain. This is one such time. Just go to a Web page, right click on a few links and try “Save Target As” a few times. It is easy.Now that we have covered the two easy methods, let’s move on to the best.
E-mailing a Web Page
There are many uses for saving Web pages and serving as your own clipping service. We’ve talked about the basics. Meanwhile many readers have been thinking to themselves that we are going to a lot of trouble here when there is a quick way to do this that they have known for years.You can e-mail a Web page quickly by going to the Web page in your browser and clicking File, then Send and Page by e-mail. This will open up an e-mail with the page inserted in it as an HTML file. Many people just use this feature to send links to online resources to others via e-mail, but it can be used to send the whole page. The link is probably best in most cases, but the client who wants a copy of an opinion or statute probably wants a file attachment to save or print, particularly when traveling. The link will not work when not connected to the Internet, but the file will.Interestingly, this method provides better results than any we have mentioned previously. So if you were unhappy with the results from the previous methods and really wanted to build a collection of cases and statutes in your practice area to have on your laptop in court with you, you might want to e-mail the cases to yourself and then copy and rename the resulting file attachments. Frankly, our cases and statutes from OSCN look good whatever method you use to save them and that is why we have painstakingly outlined each of the above methods.There are other methods to do online “clipping” such as checking the box in your Favorites or Bookmarks to make the content available off-line. There are several drawbacks to this method, but it works well for some.Adobe Acrobat 5.0 (list price $250, street price slightly lower)8 has a feature that captures Web pages and converts them to PDF format while maintaining all of the links for off-line viewing. This is obviously a superb solution for many lawyers who need Adobe Acrobat for producing PDF documents anyway.Many programs have been written to accomplish this. C|Net’s Download.com lists over 50 utilities to use for the capture of Web pages to your PC. Some are free. Others are “try it before you buy it” shareware.
What the Real Teckies Like
So hopefully by now every reader is wondering which of these methods they should use for their future Web clipping. At least those who do not already have Adobe Acrobat should be asking. Well, I queried several people at ABA TECHSHOWTM and read some online reviews. The consensus among those who had an opinion is that the free utility SurfSaver merits serious consideration.. This product saves the Web pages into a searchable filing cabinet. It is easy to download and install and is available online at www.asksam.com.SurfSaver is supported by advertising, but so far the ads have not been too obtrusive. You can buy the $29.95 Pro version without the advertising which has a few more features, but most people I talked with are using the free version.So there you have it. Several different methods to start your own on-line clipping service have been covered. Not all will be right for you. But if you have read this entire article you now have a pretty good understanding of how this all works.Some of you may just decide to download and install SurfSaver and skip all of the other options. But a good understanding of the fundamentals is always helpful in learning to work with new concepts. At least that’s what they told me when I was still learning ancient English history during the second or third week of Real Property I.
Tip of the Month Copying from the WWW into Briefs and Other DocumentsMany times lawyers use copy (keystroke Control + C) and paste (keystroke Control + V) to transfer block quotes from digital research sources into documents. This generally works well, but often when copying quotable material from the Internet, individuals find that a lot of formatting material is copied over as well. That means the result may be a different font or often blue and/or underlined text.
Use the commands to paste
without formatting to avoid this. Just coy the text as you
always have, but after marking the place in the document where
you want the text inserted, use a right click and select "past
without font/attribute." Another way to do the same
thing is click on Edit in the top menu bar and then select "Paste
Special" and then "Unformatted Text." None of these
commands are available unless you have already copied something
to your clipboard first.
Originally published in the Oklahoma
Bar Journal April 6, 2002 - Vol. 73; No.11
