Indiana lawyers: make sure to start tracking pro bono hours and gifts to legal-services groups

Indiana Rule of Professional Conduct 6.1 imposes a duty on each lawyer to provide “public interest legal service,” and comment 1 sets the goal at fifty hours a year.

In September, the Court added Rule of Professional Conduct 6.7 by this order. As part of our annual registration, we’ll be required to report “reportable pro bono legal services for the previous calendar year ending December 31.” We’ll also be required to report financial contributions to qualifying legal service organizations.

Today's Election Day. Is my brief due today or tomorrow?

If you have a brief due in an Indiana state court today, it's actually not due until tomorrow. It's Election Day, and Election Day is a legal holiday among Indiana's state offices.

For example, Indiana Appellate Rule 25(A) states that any "legal holiday as defined by state statute, or a day the Office of the Clerk is closed during regular business hours" is a nonbusiness day. And Rule 25(B) says the last day of a period stated in the rules is counted in the computation of days "unless it is a non-business day. If the last day is a non-business day, the period runs until the end of the next business day."

Indiana Code § 1-1-9-1(a) lists "legal holidays within the state of Indiana for all purposes." Among them is "Election Day, the day of any general, municipal, or primary election." (Note that next week brings another holiday, "Veterans Day, November 11." And the holiday will be on either Friday or Monday when it falls on a weekend.

Correct names of Indiana state courts don't include the word "county"

Names of Indiana’s state courts (e.g., Marion Circuit Court) don’t include the word county. Many lawyers, court staff members, and even judges and judicial candidates make this mistake. It’s the sort of thing I always correct but never mention. But it’s also something I learned to catch as a law clerk for the Indiana Supreme Court.

Roundup for August 11, 2015

Here are the posts to the Tatum's Tips Facebook feed, and blog since the last roundup.

Posts to the blog

Correct names of Indiana state courts don't include the word county.

Are briefs due on election day in Indiana?

Indiana lawyers: make sure to start tracking pro bono hours and gifts to legal-services groups. 

Changes to the Indiana Appellate Rules in January 2015.

Use a duplicate contact to simplify changing Outlook forwarding rules in transitions.

How is Judge Altice's replacement on the Marion Superior Court selected? 

Get your Table of Authorities to sort things right.

Stories from around the Internet posted to the Facebook page

 Federal judge imposes arbitrary definition of double-spacing on BP's lawyers, media goes wild. NPR coverage here. Guide on typography with advice on line-spacing here. The order is here.

How to adjust who triggers notifications in your Facebook toolbar. And more general help on notifications here.

The basics of good typography. (If you don't have time for Typography for Lawyers or perusing its companion "Practical Typography."

Test your document's readability. The article's here. Analysis of the accessibility of presidential speeches here. NPR story covering the analysis here.

Don't use headline-style headings. Instead, use sentence-style caps. Article here.

What is an en-dash? Article here.

Let's eliminate Courier from modern typography. Article here.

Add items to the right-click drop-down menu in Windows. Article here. More general set of directions to add shortcuts to the same menu here.

RSVP already says "please," so please RSVP is redundant, and snoots sneer at its unnecessary repetitiveness. Also, it's not a noun.  Slate article on "RSVP" here.

Federal appellate judges are often not assigned randomly. Article here.

Avoid legalese. Article here.

Avoid big words if you want to be taken as smart. Article here.

Use Quick Steps to speed up your Outlook organizing. Article here.

Use toward, not towards. Article here.

March fourth is National Grammar Day. Article here.

Change many file names at once with Ant Renamer. Software download here.

Stop using and/or. Article here.

Caselaw is one word. Article here.

Don't use corporatese. It's annoying and empty of meaning. Article here. ROUNDUP BONUS: Weird Al's excellent takedown of corporatese here.

Create an RSS feed for any Twitter handle. Article here. RSS feed for @incourts here (or copy and paste https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbx_pFhkDQ5C5QvNMG7mJ5AoUdSNfVLTkV2eDH4srGQUdi3tjg/exec?609044444420018176).

Use categories, not folders, to organize Outlook. Article here.

Use a single folder with categories to organize Outlook. Article here.

Use rules to automatically categorize incoming e-mail. Video here.

Use the Resend This Message command for repetitive messages. Article here.

When to italicize foreign terms; and always italicize a word when using it as a term. Article here.

Copy path of a file to the clipboard using SHIFT + Right-Click. Article here.

Don't compare a city to North Korea in a brief to the court. Order here. Subscribe to Short Circuit here.

 

Have a question about writing, software, navigating courts, or resources that are helpful in any of those? I am compulsive about finding answers, so let me know if you have a question about something that might relate to all this. Post a question at www.facebook.com/TatumsTips/.

 

Weekly Roundup for September 6, 2014

Here are the posts from this week to the Tatum's Tips Facebook feed, and blog.

Stories from around the Internet posted to the Facebook page

“Ruling” vs. “opinion” vs. “judgment,” etc. Article here.

What’s the difference between a court’s finding and a court’s holding? Article here.

Weekly roundup for August 30, 2014

Here are the posts from this week to the Tatum's Tips Facebook feed, and blog.

Posts to the blog

Stories from around the Internet posted to the Facebook page

• New tools to check usage. I just learned about The New York Times' new word tool called the Chronicle. It's like Google's NGram, but it only covers the Old Gray Lady. Type in a word to search its frequency in America's paper of record. Then type in another word to add it to the graph. The link shows one of my favorites to share with lawyers. Click "Clear graph" to start your own search
  http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=pled.pleaded Here's where I learned about it, which also describes a tool by Yelp that you can filter by location. Find Yelp Trends here.

• Direct addresses and commas. Just looked this up to see if it was "Thank you, Judy!" or "Thank you Judy!" It's the first one. (The Chicago Manual of Style 6.38) Story here.

• Tagging on Facebook. I was having trouble tagging The Chicago Manual of Style in my last post, so I looked up how to force Facebook to find a tag rather than just letting it automatically suggest a tag. Use the @ symbol. (I did that in this post too. Since the book's name starts with two very common words, Facebook won't recognize it without it.) http://www.ehow.com/how_8386293_tag-facebook.html

• Schedule Facebook posts. I often look technical things up in the middle of posting to this page. (I found my last two posts and this one, all within five minutes.) To avoid cluttering things, I wanted to schedule them. I had to look that up too. Turns out, it's really easy. Here's how. https://www.facebook.com/help/389849807718635

• National Bow Tie Day. August 28 was National Bow Tie Day. Here's a video I think does a good job presenting the trickiest step. And here's a pro (though a bit traditional) tip: "A gentleman never wears a button-down collar with a bow tie." John Bridges, *How to Be a Gentleman: A Contemporary Guide to Common Courtesy* 37 (Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press 1998) Get the second edition here: http://www.amazon.com/How-Gentleman-Revised.../dp/B00CVDMEP8# I'm not sure where this rule comes from. If you do, let me know!

• Ensure/Insure/Assure. On request. The short answer is "insure" is limited to the financial product we buy to limit our liability. "Assure" is to make a promise. "Ensure" is to make certain that something will happen.
  We insure cars, houses, and boats and against hail, earthquakes, and malpractice suits; we ensure that we'll post on a topic; we assure someone who was anxious about the difference between two words that there will soon be a post on the subject.
  From *Garner's Modern American Usage* (3rd ed.): "if the verb is in the active voice, a predicate beginning with 'that' should be introduced by the verb 'ensure'." p. 71 Here's Grammar Girl on the subject.

Weekly roundup for August 23, 2014

Here are the posts from this week to the Tatum's Tips Facebook feed, and blog.

Posts to the blog

• Governor's administering oath to Rush was ceremonial, not official

• Create a drop-down menu in Word with a "blank" choice

Stories from around the Internet posted to the Facebook page

• Why You Should Never, Ever Use Two Spaces After a Period. Story here.

• English might not have become quite so popular, if a 17th-century poet had his way. Story here.

• What Happens When You Hide Everything on Facebook? Story here.

• How to Copy a File's Path to the Clipboard. Story here.

• Schedule posts - Blogger help. Story here.

Create a drop-down menu in Word with a "blank" choice

I wanted to create a drop-down menu for my letter template in Word below my signature with Enclosure as an option because I had caught myself forgetting to delete that word on a letter or two without one. (Oops!) I wanted the menu to include Enclosure, Enclosures, and a blank entry for those letters that don't have one. I used the drop-down selection in the Developer tab of Word 2010.

You can't create an actually blank entry in the Properties menu, though. So I found here that I could create one with just a single space. But when I tried that, when I selected the blank option, Word puts Choose an item in as a placeholder, and that gets printed.

So if you want to be able to select a blank entry on a drop-down menu, create two blank entries.

Governor's administering oath to Rush was ceremonial, not official

Loretta H. Rush has become Chief Justice of Indiana. She's the fifth justice to serve in that capacity since a 1970 amendment made it a permanent office. Before that, justices had rotated into the role.

In one of the stories covering her swearing-in ceremony, I learned that the Indiana Code doesn't give a governor the power to swear in a chief justice. Apparently, every chief justice has been ceremonially sworn in by the sitting governor. (See the video here at 1:43) Of course, the news coverage didn't provide a section, so I just had to look it up. Very soon into my journey, I realized why the young journalists didn't say any more. It's no simple task.

The long and short of it is that there are many, many places authorizing people to "administer oaths" and a handful of places saying something like a specific person "shall administer the oath of office." Nowhere in any of those is the governor mentioned. But where did then-Chief Justice Dickson's power to administer now-Chief Justice Rush's oath of office come from? Even that answer isn't straightforward.

Don't vote on minutes—It's a waste of time!

Every organization I've ever been a part of has meetings. And inevitably there are minutes for those meetings. And for some reason we feel like we should vote on them, which means we ask for a motion, and a second, and then the vote. It turns out that this not only feels like a waste of time, it is a waste of time.

Format text in a reply with the click of the mouse

In an earlier post, I explained how to make new messages look the way you want in Outlook. This post shows how to accomplish similar goals in replies and forwards.

Word: Update all fields

I found a simple macro to update all fields with a single click.

Adjusting Outlook's default new message with styles, templates, and signatures

I had a heck of a time figuring out how to ensure Outlook always started with a format I liked. It turns out this is more complicated than anyone would imagine. But once I explain it, you should be able to make your changes in about ten minutes. You'll be able to click new message and just start typing without making any formatting adjustments. (Sorry this is so long and has no pictures. If I didn't have a day job, I would add screenshots.)

Add your Twitter feed to your Blogger home page

I found a couple outdated pages describing how to add a Twitter feed to my Blogger page. Since they're outdated, I thought I'd share what I found:

Make Outlook highlight important e-mail

My favorite productivity guru, Michael Linenberger, has a great post on setting up Outlook to de-emphasize or highlight e-mail messages as they appear in your inbox.

Plain Language Help from the Feds

Thanks to Grammar Girl, I discovered the U.S. government's website on plain language: www.plainlanguage.gov. It has all sorts of good advice from overused words to look out for to how to make writing more readable.