As we all know, administrative law nerds (their own expression) received a nice Holiday present on December 19 when the Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision in Vavilov. This important event in Canadian law isn’t just fun for the admin law crowd, it’s also an occasion for us, legal information geeks, to live in real time another game of “precedential game of thrones.”

I’ve been interested for a long time in finding signals that could indicate that a case is no longer good law (or at least no longer to be cited without caution). There are ways to spot . . . [more]

ABA RESOLUTION 105

The ABA House of Delegates adopted Resolution 105 at the 2018 ABA Midyear Meeting. The resolution supports the goal of reducing mental health and substance use disorders and improving the well-being of lawyers, judges and law students. It urges stakeholders within the legal profession to consider the recommendations set out in The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change. The pursuit of lawyer wellness has spread rapidly through law firms, bar associations, state bars and state supreme courts.

The National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being, assembled in August 2016 to “create a movement toward . . . [more]

Managing a law firm in this era of rapid change is a massive challenge. It’s hard to know the right thing to do. It feels like the ground is constantly shifting. Your firm’s lawyers are giving conflicting reports on the state of business while your clients keep demanding “more for less.” Many legal tech companies are stepping up to help with these challenges. Yet these companies often meet resistance from the very firms they are trying to help.

I’d like to introduce Sean Bernstein. Sean is a co-founder of MinuteBox, a next generation cloud-based minute book and corporate records . . . [more]

A couple of times in the past three years, we have looked at the use of free trade agreements to promote the reform or harmonization of the law on electronic commerce. The first article considered the general question of how these agreements are negotiated and suggested that they may not be the best vehicle for reforming technical commercial law. The people at the negotiating meetings tend to be economists, not lawyers, and negotiations may involve trading off provisions that are not readily severable without damage to the principles of the remaining law. A stronger role is needed for commercial and . . . [more]

2018 was a tough act to follow, but 2019 was, once again, a great year for CanLII, to say the least. More than ever, our successes are due to the relationships we have developed with organizations across the country that have embraced our vision for the future of free access to law. We are grateful they have agreed to share their content with us and hope to celebrate these relationships with this post, among other things.

Commentary

As regular readers of this blog will have appreciated by now, we’ve been multiplying announcements over the course of the year about new . . . [more]

The Federation of Law Societies of Canada on October 19, 2019 adopted changes to the model code of conduct, adding commentary on competence with technology.

There is no new standalone duty of technological competence, but rather the FLSC has provided new guidance on how the general duty of competence should be understood with regard to technology.

The new guidance is phrased as follows:

[4A] To maintain the required level of competence, a lawyer should develop an understanding of, and ability to use, technology relevant to the nature and area of the lawyer’s practice and responsibilities. A lawyer should understand

We always look forward to the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center’s Annual Legal Technology Survey Report on the use of technology in the legal profession. The summary of the “Marketing and Communication” portion of the 2019 survey was recently published. It was written by our good friend Allison Shields and contains some fascinating (and worrisome) statistics.

Respondents to the 2019 Survey segment covering websites and law firm marketing were mostly solos or from smaller firms, consisting of 27% solos, 29% lawyers in firms of 2-9 lawyers, 18% from firms of 10-49 lawyers, 11% from firms of between 100-499 . . . [more]

Imagine a library that tried to save money by relying on candles instead of electricity. Any dollars saved come at the expense of knowledge lost. Without adequate light, the contents of a library are as inaccessible as if the doors were closed.

In the world of legal information, light comes to the “library” through indices, key number systems, topic digests, abridgments, and more. Digitization, electronic access, multi-field search, hyperlinks and boolean logic add more light, but are still merely candles.

Candles are discrete tools designed to provide light only within a limited range of where the candle is placed. Compare . . . [more]

The legal profession could be improved a bit. Ok, it could be improved a lot. One might say it could use more “innovation.” Yet it seems like the harder one pushes for innovation, the harder others push back.

Despite acknowledgement that the nature of legal services will take time to change it feels we continually need, as Jae Um puts it, “a call for patience (and some perspective).” After the 2008 crash people mused, is this The End of Lawyers? Many saw 2008 as a call to action, driven by fear over the long-term relevancy of lawyers. . . . [more]

The Uniform Law Commission in the United States has now published the revised text and commentaries to the Uniform Electronic Wills Act adopted at its annual meeting in July 2019.

Here is the official description of the Uniform Act:

The Uniform Electronic Wills Act permits testators to execute an electronic will and allows probate courts to give electronic wills legal effect. Most documents that were traditionally printed on paper can now be created, transferred, signed, and recorded in electronic form.

Since 2000 the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and a similar federal law, E-SIGN, have provided that a transaction is

It was big news in late August when Microsoft said that users who enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for their accounts will end up blocking 99.9% of automated attacks. This doesn’t apply just to Microsoft accounts. It applies to any other account on any website or online service.

Today, virtually all service providers support multi-factor authentication, and in most cases, there is no charge. It can be something as simple as SMS-based one-time passwords or advanced biometrics solutions.

“Based on our studies, your account is more than 99.9% less likely to be compromised if you use MFA,” said Alex Weinert, Group . . . [more]

Social media are everywhere that the Internet is. As comprehensive methods of communication, they are naturally attractive to those with things to communicate: advertisers, proselytizers and politicians. This column examines the status of social media use by the latter class, and in particular, the degree to which they can control their use once they start.

We have looked previously (if briefly) at whether politicians’ use of social media turns their communications (in whatever form) into “official documents” for purposes of laws governing public records, like archival responsibility, privacy rules and subjection to access to information requests. There is a smattering . . . [more]