In an effort to better understand sole and small-firm involvement in providing pro-bono legal services, the Ontario Bar Association is conducting a very short survey. Completing the survey should take no longer than two or three minutes and the information will be used in assisting the OBA’s Pro-Bono Task Force to determine what role the OB Amight play in the provision and delivery of such services.

Click here to take the survey. . . . [more]

B.C. is the home of innovation when it comes to law in this country, moving ahead with new ideas and new ways of providing its citizens with access to justice. We’ve talked about the foray into online dispute resolution and about the Ministry of Justice two-part White Paper on Justice Reform, to mention only two developments. And just yesterday Chief Justice Robert Bauman made a public statement predicting dire things for law and lawyers if significant changes aren’t made and made quickly, something rare for a sitting judge.

As significant is a quiet development we’ve not yet noticed on . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

LAWYERING IN AN AGE OF INTELLIGENT MACHINES
Marc Lauritsen
in Educating the Digital Lawyer, Marc Lauritsen & Oliver Goodenough Eds.
Cambridge, USA: Harvard Law School Program on the Legal Profession, 2010-2011

excerpt Chapter 2, pp. 7-10

§ 2.03 Implications for Legal Education

Law schools should offer courses in law practice automation and . . . [more]

Sophisticated, stylish and elegant. These qualities are highly regarded in the fashion industry and embody something or someone who is chic. However, these qualities are not exclusive to the world of fashion. Professional criticism that is sophisticated, stylish and elegant should be tolerated and even encouraged in the legal profession, paving the way for lawyers to provide their colleagues with chic critique.

Sophisticated: In the fashion industry, being sophisticated is about having worldly knowledge and experience of fashion, styles and trends. In a broader sense however, sophistication is simply about having sufficient knowledge and experience to make an informed remark . . . [more]

This article originally appeared in the December 2010 issue of LAWPRO Magazine. It refers to LAWPRO coverage for Ontario lawyers, but the dangers listed would likely apply to any lawyer’s errors and omissions coverage.

On occasion, lawyers have engaged in activities that have made them front-page news, subject to embarrassment and possibly lawsuits or discipline complaints. Not only can this kind of attention be bad for a lawyer’s reputation, it can also damage or even destroy client relationships.

That’s reason enough to be aware of and avoid activities that could lead to these types of outcomes. But there is . . . [more]

We began our respective legal practices within a year after finishing our articles; we both wanted to be able to express our personal ethics and practice law our way. We had to develop new skills, ranging from file organization to client management, grapple with unforeseen stressors, and learn to congratulate ourselves for victories big and small. Our biggest surprise was that neither law school nor former employers had ever taught us the things we needed most to run our business. So to that end, and in honour of Law Student Week at slaw, here are ten facts you may also . . . [more]

A not-new UK law was given regulatory effect this week and enables the British Library to archive the .uk web, just as it already receives legal deposit of UK print materials. The import of the new regulatory changes in effect April 6 is, I gather, that the archive can built by automated crawl, rather by permission for page-by-page grabs.

As the British Library explains, legal deposit of UK publications to identified libraries is, of course, a practice of long standing. The new regulations extend and entrench the program for UK digital materials:

Legal deposit has existed in English law

You have likely already been warned about the potential impact of your social media involvement on your professional reputation. Hopefully, you already know enough to carefully tailor access to your “personal” online persona, and you stay on top of untagging yourself in too-wild party photos and the like. But cleaning up your image online can only upgrade your social media presence from negative to neutral. If your future legal career will require any marketing at all (and almost all lawyers need to market themselves), you should consider whether you can gain an early advantage by building a professional online identity . . . [more]

Lawyers need to be of good character when they enter the profession but what does good character look like in lawyers already practising in the profession? To answer this, I will turn to Legally Blonde’s very own, Elle Woods, to demonstrate why I think Daniel Bibb[1], a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney who purposely lost a case to avoid a wrongful conviction, is an example of good character in the legal profession.

I watched Legally Blonde for the third (okay, thirteenth) time this weekend and something new occurred to me. Elle Woods is the lawyer we could all . . . [more]

For some years now Slaw has acted as a repository for the memos and precedent opinions of the Toronto Opinions Group (TOROG), an informal group of lawyers primarily practising with the Toronto offices of the larger Canadian law firms, with an interest in third party (or transaction) opinion practice.

Recently TOROG has updated two of the memos and has added a new one, providing a good opportunity for Slaw to remind readers of the existence of these very helpful documents.

Updated are the memos on “Third Party Opinions On Foreign Law Documents” and “Limited Partnership Opinion Paragraphs . . . [more]

A few comments with respect to access to justice caught my attention in the recent Manitoba Queen’s Bench (Family Division) decision in Price v. Laflamme, 2013 MBQB 25 (CanLII). In the course of providing reasons for a decision on costs at the conclusion of a lengthy trial, the trial judge noted that the conduct of the petitioner’s conduct in the matter effectively discouraged any possibility of resolution of the matter. He noted that:

Implicit in that conduct may have been a desire to exhaust the resources of the respondent/father in pursuing his position. No stone was left unturned. No examination