Chances are, you use a pointing device with your computer today. It could be a touchscreen. It could be a built-in trackpad. It might be a trackball. It could even be that original of the species, the humble mouse. Your keyboard? That’s only for creating text, of course. Who needs it to execute commands? You do — if you value faster computing. Keyboard shortcuts, both built-in and custom-created, give seasoned keyboard jockeys a step or two up on their shortcut-deprived colleagues.

When I was practicing law at a large firm, the associate annual review period was always an interesting time around the office. This may not be true at all firms, and perhaps there’s more frequent communication happening these days, but in my experience, things were always so busy that it was rare that candid, comprehensive feedback was provided outside of annual reviews. I remember quite a few times when I saw fellow associates walk dazed and dejected back to their offices following an unfavorable review. They weren’t performing up to expectations, they were told, and they felt blindsided by the news. The thing is, it was often news only to them. The rest of us could see it coming from a mile away.

A number of years ago, a good friend shared what he considers the "magic business development pill." It's simple. There are only two ingredients: 1) Make your conversation all about the client or potential client) and keep it about them; and 2) Show up with great frequency. According to my friend, keep repeating these steps and everything will work out.

There’s no denying it: Lawyers have the highest behavioral impairment rate of any profession. Research has shown it, and it is spotlighted in the media, as in a recent New York Times feature on a lawyer who tragically spiraled into addiction behind closed doors. The same innate drive and problem-solving skills that make a good lawyer also enable some to present as “high-functioning,” while they successfully conceal addiction for as long as decades. Meanwhile, as with any chronic, progressive disease, it worsens until the lawyer’s behavior and capabilities deteriorate. The good news is once the problems are acknowledged, our community can join together to help remedy them.

Local map rankings are a big deal for law firms. If you’re an attorney with an unstaffed virtual office, share the same building with a law firm in the same practice area, or even have a competitor within walking distance, listen up. This one’s for you. Everyone wants to rank better in Google's Local Maps because the traffic converts at an extremely high rate. And, naturally, law firms want to know how they can get more map visibility. Unfortunately, it’s not a clear-cut science.

As a lawyer and businessperson, you have two jobs in one. Some of us, including me, add the job of professional speaker to our already teeming calendars. Maybe you've considered taking on some speaking gigs yourself. What's a typical day in the life of a lawyer-speaker? The best way to explain it is to share the typical course of events for speaking at a conference, using my recent experience with Content Marketing World.

If you're like most lawyers, you recycle text from other documents a lot. But cutting-and-pasting is a frequent source of formatting disasters in Microsoft Word. Instead of always using CTRL-V to paste, take an extra split second to preview your paste result so you can move on with your editing faster. Here's a quick video tip.

Some words sound like they mean one thing when they actually mean something very different. Using one of these false friends incorrectly could cause you a problem. But It Sounded Right … The term “false friends” traditionally refers to words in a foreign language that sound like English words. If you want a drinking glass in France, don’t ask the server for “glace;” you might get a glass, but it will be filled with ice, the translation of “glace.” You really will be embarrassed if you use the Spanish “embarazada” to mean embarrassed because it actually means “pregnant.”

In the following, I hope to convince deeply professional, widely respected, well-educated, multi-degreed grown-ups to doodle. Doodling may be the very last activity you'd look to for improving your productivity, uncorking your creative genii and deepening your listening skills. You are already — just three long sentences into this post — rolling your eyes so hard your hat fell off. But stay with me. There’s science. There’s history. There are famous people.

You’ll have heard by now that the robots are coming for you. First, they’ll take your job. Then, your home and family. Next, your car. And, just when you think it’s over, that’s when they swipe your favorite coffee mug. The robot thing gets a lot of media coverage but, in terms of what lawyers concern themselves with, it’s not so much that a robotic replica will one day be doing your job as a lawyer; it’s more like intelligent devices and systems will slowly eat away certain aspects of your job until there’s too little left on the bone for you to make a viable living. In the interim, there are some things you, as an attorney, can do to forestall the coming robot apocalypse.