I was reading at a fairly innocuous post on Lawyers.com today, titled "The Advantages of Selling Your Own Home", and noted the DIY nature of the topic. The coverage was fair; comparing the pluses and minuses of selling your own home, and few would likely find it controversial. I can see how many realtors would even tolerate it, as it describes a small section of the marketplace; and the numbers don't lie — few people clearly have the time or savvy to sell their own home.

However, I would say this: if this was my site, I wouldn't . . . [more]

Yesterday I had the pleasure of addressing the annual gathering of the Federation of Law Reform Agencies of Canada on the topic of using social media in the context of legal research. I have shared the presentation using slideshare for those who are interested. Patricia Hughes, Director of the Law Commission of Ontario shared some tweets via #FOLRAC as well.

Simon posted last year about QR Codes on lawyers' business cards. Building on that, I put a QR Code on presentation title slides. The code links to my social media channels so that people who have questions about my . . . [more]

This is certainly one of the more ambitious public legal education initiatives in Canada.

The third season of the television series "Le Droit de Savoir" (The right to know) began on Quebec cable TV on September 18th on the Canal savoir channel (with repeats on the Télé-Québec public educational network in the summer of 2013).

The French-language series is a co-production of the Quebec Bar Association. Lawyers already write the deals for TV and film projects. So, why not just jump into producing the material itself?

Episodes in the coming season will feature reports on topics such as aboriginal law, maritime law, the . . . [more]

A few things struck me this week. First, Jordan Furlong’s great piece, “Back when we used lawyers.” Then the opening of Burberry’s new flagship store in London, England (thanks to my colleague Antony Smith at LawSync for pointing it out to me and suggesting a digital connection to law).

Jordan’s premise is, as the title suggests, that change is constant and that in the lifetime of our parents (and even some of us) how things were done and by whom, when theywere kids, has dramatically changed. What is “normal” for legal services now or in the past will . . . [more]

First, an important proviso. Numbers don't actually matter.

And yet we all obsess over metrics, especially law firms trying to determine some form of ROI for entering the social media space. Largely by default and in part by design, the leading site emerging for tracking social media influence is Klout. Other sites include PeerIndex and Kred.

CEO and Klout Founder Joe Fernandez  told Forbes,

Klout is basically your social credit score. Consumers should care because it affects the way employers, companies and everyone looks at your ability to spread information as a critical part of the attention

. . . [more]

Earlier this week, Tech Vibes reported that as worldwide Twitter subscribership crossed the half-billion mark, Canadian accounts were shown to account for 2% of that total, placing Canada at 8th spot among all countries in total Twitter subscriber numbers. Canadians, of course, were also among the early adopters of Facebook and routinely top the rankings of ComScore and similar reports for such things as time spent online, so our collective Twitter presence is not actually all that surprising.

The surprise comes courtesy of some recently completed but not-yet-released research conducted by CanLII. Over a 6 week period in June . . . [more]

Here's a small matter, tiny in fact:

I'm collating some material from various Canadian law firm websites, and as part of the project I need to record the firm name along with the material I'm referencing. I imagine I'm not alone in doing this sort of thing: whether it's a phone number, a lawyer's name, or something the firm's proud of and has published, it's pretty common to grab it with select-copy-paste, and sensible too to select-copy-paste the firm name into the note as well. Yes, I could type McCarthy Tétrault, but I'm as stingy with my keystrokes as the . . . [more]

I've seen other summer reading lists lately and thought it would be fun to put together my own list of books currently or recently on my nightstand. There's quite a range here–management/leadership type titles, geek girl titles, and some challenging fiction. I'm not really one for light reading! And, there's probably no way I can get through all of these in the summer, but I can certainly try. And of course in putting this list together I found even more new books, so I better get reading.

What is on your summer reading list?

Here is the list (with no . . . [more]

I have been following an interesting blog and twitter feed (@LawSync) prepared by LawSync out of Sheffield Hallam University. LawSync has put the “wow” back into law school and is a project of that university’s Department of Law, Criminology, and Community Justice. According to its website:

The name of this project reflects our desire to see a better synchronisation between law as an academic discipline and professional practice, the expectations both of legal professionals and users of legal services, and regulatory influences. Law schools, law students, and legal professionals need to keep in sync with market needs and

. . . [more]

Hell hath no fury like a scorned Internet, as Charles Carreon is finding out the hard way.

First, Carreon sued online comic the Oatmeal on behalf of his client FunnyJunk.com over a blog post published a year ago wherein the Oatmeal's founder, Matt Inman, criticized FunnyJunk for hosting copies of his comic without proper attribution. Carreon and his client accused Inman of defamation and demanded $20,000 in damages.

Inman's response was, predictably, to publicly mock Carreon and FunnyJunk in a blog post detailing the ludicrousness of Carreon's accusations and. Furthermore, Inman responds to the demand of $20,000 in damages by . . . [more]

There is so much talk these days about the business of law: rainmaking, marketing, business development, etc. All of this in pursuit of landing “clients”. Truth be told, it is actually quite easy to land a client. Many lawyers find to their surprise months or even years later that some casual encounter is actually deemed to constitute a “solicitor-client relationship” or at least the makings of one.

This has huge ramifications for a lawyer in terms of the law of conflicts of interest, the ethical duty of confidentiality and the client’s substantive right of solicitor-client privilege. It can also be . . . [more]

The vast majority of web searches continue to be conducted through Google, estimated at about 66.4% of all searches in early 2012. Google is understandably concerned about losing its market dominance. In December 2011, Microsoft's upstart search engine Bing surpassed Yahoo and become the second most used search engine worldwide.

The only way Google can retain its lead is by continuing to provide the most relevant information to users, so it constantly rewrites its code, as with the new Penguin update that I mentioned here. Although Wikpedia has over 365 million readers and is ranked one of the top . . . [more]