Last month, the Barreau du Québec came out with a report entitled “Les avocats de pratique privée en 2021” or The private practice lawyer in 2021 (the document is available in French here). Practicing lawyers from large, medium and small law firms were consulted in the preparation of this study.

We learn that in Quebec alone, approximately 113 000 people are associated with the legal profession, either as lawyers, paralegals, notaries, stenographers, bailiffs, etc., making this report relevant for a number of people.

This one hundred plus page document provides an interesting overview of the legal private practice as . . . [more]

Most of us have participated in or been invited to a golf tournament in our careers. Often these are over-the-top affairs with great meals, fantastic prizes and cost a huge amount of money. Over the years there has been a change in the landscape so more and more tournaments have added a charitable component but still offer great meals, fantastic prizes, and still cost a huge amount of money — yet now the competitors help pay for it.

Golf tournaments come in all shapes and sizes. From the bare bones — half day shotgun tournament followed by dinner — to . . . [more]

In this ten-minute video, best-selling author Seth Godin talks about a fundamental shift in today’s business world that includes marketing, social media and a move toward openness. He says: “You are going to have to change if you want to be there too.”

Yahoo! Futurist: Seth Godin

Some food for thought. A quick summary:

1. Marketing needs to be responsible for the product.
2. You need to measure interaction.
3. The only asset that gets built online is permission to talk to people.

I wonder about the first point and how it can be applied to a law firm? I almost think . . . [more]

It used to be that packet ships would carry the post across the ocean, always running the risk that they might founder and take messages — and lives — with them. Now we only have to worry about routers and servers, and rarely if ever are living beings harmed should one of these electronic packet pushers go down. But they do go down. And now, as then, it’s not always easy to figure out whether the break in communication is systemic or more personal.

Recently, for example, Netflix encountered serious problems with streaming that lasted, on and off, for a . . . [more]

The Ontario Court of Appeal just uploaded a speech by Chief Justice Winkler on labour arbitration and conflict resolution, although it was initially presented at Queen’s University on November 30, 2010.

Justice Winkler’s views on labour law reform have been of considerable interest, especially considering his holding in Fraser v. Ontario, overturned this year by the Supreme Court of Canada.

In this speech, Justice Winkler provides four recommendations for labour law reform:

1. Shorten grievance procedures
2. Conduct discovery and productions within grievances, and not arbitration
3. Select arbitrators who are more immediately available
4. Conduct hearings with proportionality

As Adeyemi Alfred-Adekeye learned, you don’t mess with Cisco Systems Inc. And as Cisco learned, albeit a little late, you don’t mess with the Canadian judiciary.

The tangled story, told in full in the latest judgment [PDF] and glossed in the ars technica article, goes like this in brief: . . . [more]

We’ve all heard about Web 3.0, the semantic web which will be machine-readable, meaning that the substance of our communications will be the ground of action for programs.

Well here’s a shocker for those of us who have not connected the dots. You will read the web, and your browser will also read the web, but in addition websites, browsers, and other software will read you. What they learn in the process will affect the sorts of content that is made available to you.

We already see this in rudimentary forms when Amazon make suggestions to you, or when a . . . [more]

R v. Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd., 2011 SCC 42 is necessary reading for all Canadian lawyers giving advice about any aspect of private law obligations.

This case fits very nicely into our discussion about the need to avoid ambiguity in statements about law. It also shows how often ambiguity in the language actually used is too often associated with the writer(s)’ apparent confusion relating to the meaning of the concepts discussed.

Maybe the Court meant to make some of the assertions that the text of the reasons literally makes. And maybe they “misspoke” themselves.

Time will tell. 

But, in . . . [more]

We here in Canada hark with yearning for the likes of Pandora or Spotify. (I exaggerate slightly.) And we likely will for a while, because the Canadian arms of the big music copyright owners can’t seem to strike a deal with the internet. Which, some might think, only leads to circumnavigation.

One such music-purveying “wide sailor” has made available a bunch of Illustrated Mixtapes that you might enjoy. Gigawatt, a designer, has created sets of mixtape albumns designed to offer you listening pleasure throughout the various stages of your day. Thus, each of the five (soon to be six) . . . [more]

Here’s a story pointing out that the phone ‘hacking’ that has caused so many headlines (and resignations) lately in the United Kingdom was possible because of a simple default setting on mobile phones sold in the UK, that no one took the trouble to fix and that no regulator was prepared to take responsibility for. It’s a fascinating sad story:

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-hacking-loopholes-remain-consumers-deserve-better/?elq_mid=15051&elq_cid=995446

As I understand the story, all phones provided by particular providers had the same default password for checking messages, so that if you called somebody and they didn’t answer, you could use the standard password to access their messages . . . [more]

OpenGovernment.org is a new, free site providing online access to information about proposed legislation in U.S. states. Funded by the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) and now covering six U.S. states, OpenGovernment.org — which launched in January 2011 — enables citizens and organizations to learn about and track pending state legislation, the activities and votes of state legislators, issues that are the subject of proposed legislation, and campaign contributions to state legislators.

In July I spoke with David Moore and Carl Tashian — respectively PPF’s Executive Director and Director of Technology, and the developers of OpenGovernment.org — . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles that contributors at Slaw are reading and that you might find interesting. These tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.