For the thirteenth year in a row, Altman Weil, Inc. has surveyed Chief Legal Officers or CLOs on the issues of importance on the management and operation of their corporate law departments. These surveys capture current thinking of Chief Legal Officers and give lawyers in private practice a good indication of what corporate clients are think about and want from firms that do work for them.

Survey Findings

Corporate law departments report that they are re-negotiating outside counsel fees, shifting work to lower-priced law firms, increasing in-house capacity, opting for alternative service providers and using new technology — all to . . . [more]

Adam Smith, Esq. is on a roll. Or at least, Bruce MacEwen, author of the Adam Smith, Esq. blog is. His blog posts, “Growth is Dead” have been an on-going series looking at the changes to “BigLaw” since the economic problems of 2008.

Revenues of firms have significantly dropped since that time. One pressure is coming from clients with respect to pricing. From Part 1 of the blog:

Simply put, clients are pushing back as never before. Among other things, they are:

• serious, for the first time, about alternative fee arrangements, caps and blended rates, rate freezes, and so on

On Friday I was sitting working at the Toronto Reference Library (well, in the new Balzac’s coffee shop) when a fellow named David sat beside me and we started to chat. He had just been to a senior’s information event at the library, and had a bag full of reports and brochures. He shared what he had learned with me since “you will need this someday, too.” (Sooner than you think, David!)

I was surprised to see he had the Ontario Law Commission’s Older Adults Final Report which was released in April 2012. Back in August 2011, Michel-Adrien Sheppard told . . . [more]

The Library of Parliament has released two background papers respecting parliaments and gender: Gender-Sensitive Parliaments: 1. Advancements in the Workplace [PDF] and Gender-Sensitive Parliaments: 2. The Work of Legislators [PDF]. The papers adopt the Inter-Parliamentary Union (ITU) understanding of a gender-sensitive parliament as:

a parliament that responds to the needs and interests of both men and women in its structures, operations, methods and in its work. Gender-sensitive parliaments remove the barriers to women’s full participation and offer a positive example or model to society at large.

Part 1 of the report looks at gender sensitivity in the parliamentary workplace (how . . . [more]

In today’s difficult economic environment, it’s not unusual for lawyers to find themselves dealing with requests for representation from clients of limited means, or clients who want to keep their legal fees at a minimum. The economic issues these types of requests raise is but one consideration: Access to justice – which has become a prominent issue in Ontario lately – also figures in the equation.

Instead of turning away clients with limited budgets, lawyers often consider ways of providing limited scope or non-traditional legal services. From a malpractice exposure perspective, lawyers should appreciate that providing limited services can create . . . [more]

I enjoyed reading Philip Roth’s “Open Letter to Wikipedia,” published earlier this month in The New Yorker‘s Page Turner blog, from which flowed amendments to a Wikipedia entry.

In quick summary, as I understand events: Mr. Roth read a Wikipedia entry on his The Human Stain. He noticed “a serious misstatement” about the inspiration of the story. He petitioned Wikipedia for correction of the entry on his novel. Correction was not immediately granted. The New Yorker published Mr. Roth’s Open Letter. This letter recounted Wikipedia’s explanation that Mr. Roth, the author, “was not a credible source: . . . [more]

A few weeks ago LifeHacker posted the “Top 10 Simple Things Every Computer User Should Know How to Do” to its LifeHacker Top 10 collection.

I had this post on my list to post personally and for LAWPRO and practicePRO’s follower’s today, but decided I would give it a mention on SLAW as I think that the advice in it is just so critical to every computer user.

This is a must read post. The steps mentioned are simple to do and they will save your bacon in the event you experience one of the more common computer . . . [more]

Today the book The Community Bond: An Innovation in Social Finance by Tonya Surman launched along with its companion website http://communitybonds.ca.

Tonya Surman is CEO and Director of Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation, affectionately known in local circles as the CSI. The CSI opened its first location on Spadina north of Queen St. in 2004 as a work space for organizations with a social mission. They gradually took over increasing amounts of space in the Robertson Building, until they finally decided to open a second location.

They were able to raise all but $2 million to buy a . . . [more]

Slaw readers who enjoy a little legal philosophy might take a look at the OUP (Oxford University Press) Blog post by John Gardner, “When law is part of the problem“, in which he addresses one of the issues from his new book of essays, Law as a Leap of Faith. In the blog post Gardner, who is a Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, sketches his argument that we should adopt the “assymetrical interpretation of the rule of law,” which requires officialdom to observe the laws scrupulously while allowing citizens greater lattitutde in that respect. That is, the . . . [more]

The dawn of the 21st century has been called the decade of the drone. Unmanned aerial vehicles, remotely operated by pilots in the United States, rain Hellfire missiles on suspected insurgents in South Asia and the Middle East.

Now a small group of scholars is grappling with what some believe could be the next generation of weaponry: lethal autonomous robots. …

From the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education . . . [more]

There’s something of a slow motion bun fight going on at the high table of the US legal world. The spat started a long time ago. In fact, it’s origin is probably lost in the mists of time like the sources of animosity between the Houses of Slytherin and Gryffindor, having to do, as it does, with the correct way to extract meaning from a written document. No one could be wronger than the person on the other side of the interpretation divide, whatever it may be; and feelings run hotest when the document in question is a quasi-sacred document . . . [more]

Real estate, personal injury-plaintiff and family law are the top three areas in the “Profile of Legal Malpractice Claims: 2008-2011,” released today by the ABA Standing Committee on Lawyers’ Professional Liability. It is the first time that insurers reported a higher percentage of claims involving real estate than any other area of law in this survey, first conducted in 1985. In all five previous versions of the survey dating to 1985, personal injury-plaintiff matters were No. 1 in generating lawyer malpractice claims.

Eleven member insurers of the National Association of Bar-Related Insurance Companies (link:NABRICO) from the United States and nine . . . [more]