Does your law library have a strategic plan? Is the plan available, aligned, and has it been shared? Is process measured against the plan? Is your plan in a document, embedded in your budget report, unwritten?

I have some work to do this January to assemble the strategy of my firm library into a working document that can be referenced by my team and by other members of the firm. While we have a strategy and we are executing it, it is less available than it should be.

Confidence in our library team is high, we had excellent response to . . . [more]

Last summer I wrote an article that was scheduled to be published in the Law Library Journal. The article, like Gaul, was divided into three parts. Each of the three was edgy. The first was a reflection on the end of scholarly bibliography as a mainstream intellectual activity. The second was an overheated rebuttal of a piece on the nature of Law Librarianship that the eminent Professor G. Edward White had written in the Green Bag a few years back. The third part consisted of me pontificating on the future of academic law librarianship in the United States. In that . . . [more]

In late December the Law Society of England & Wales issued a practice note setting out a number of guidelines for solicitors concerning social media.

The note, clearly aimed at tyros in the social media scene (which will likely include most lawyers, whether there or here, I’d guess), begins by asserting that social media offer the professional benefits of marketing, interaction with clients, networking, and public education, and present risks such as “the blurring of the boundaries” between professional and personal lives. As well, social media activity is seen as possibly testing the principles of integrity, independence, and maintaining public . . . [more]

Uncertainty… is a lawyer’s discomfort. When I sit down with clients and ask them to “project how many cases this business development initiative could produce,” they squirm in their seats. Then they say… “It depends on… I don’t know if… It’s hard to say.” It happens every time!

As lawyers, you are trained to find the certainty and the precedence. You want to know the answer before you ask the question. That is what makes you good lawyers. But, it is also what makes you lousy business development planners and strategists!

Strategizing requires that you: make educated guesses, take leaps . . . [more]

For some reason Yeat’s poem The Second Coming bubbled up in my mind when I read an article based on an interview with the incoming chairman of the UK bar, Michael Todd in the Law section of the London Times recently. These lines of the poem in particular –

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”

I don’t suppose Yeats was foreshadowing the turf war between barristers and solicitors much, or that he was particularly worried about it. But promoters . . . [more]

Over the last four days there has been a massive spike in bad cheque frauds targeting lawyers in across Canada (BC, Ontario and Quebec), the U.S. (NC, NY) and several other countries around the world (including Australia, Fiji, Italy, Scotland, Sweden, Turkey and the U.K.).

Almost 300 lawyers notified us that they received an initial contact message on one of these frauds. As LAWPRO would receive reports on a fraction of the attempted frauds, it would appear that thousands of lawyers have been targeted over the last four days. Several thousand lawyers have visited the AvoidAClaim blog for more information . . . [more]

The EU privacy directive (1995 version – I gather that it is being revised, though I don’t know on what timetable) provides that member countries may not release personal information outside the EU unless the recipients are bound by equivalent safeguards for privacy.

While the US has a ‘safe harbor’ agreement with the EU about criteria for judging when the protections are equivalent, Canada does not. On the other hand, we have a generally applicable privacy law (PIPEDA) and some provincial equivalents, plus personal health information laws in most provinces. Are they enough to permit the personal information to come . . . [more]

It’s that time of year when we hear about new electronic products on the horizon and things we could/should be doing with them: the tech show season.

Tomorrow the big Consumer Electronics Show starts in Las Vegas and runs until January 13. I’m always surprised at how many people in my online social network travel to this show each year. I shouldn’t be, I suppose, since it is the premier event for consumer electronics. To follow the action from afar (as I will) the hashtag on Twitter is #CES. You can also do as many others do, and follow . . . [more]

We are pleased indeed to announce that a number of new columnists are joining Slaw.

Paula Black is a legal business development and branding consultant and coach based in Miami, Florida, and has recently been recognized by Managing Partner Magazine as a leading legal marketing expert. She is also the author of three “Little Black Books” on legal marketing and a blog, In Black and White.

Catherine Sanders Reach  has recently become the Director, Law Practice Management and Technology for the Chicago Bar Association. Before that she was the Director at the American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Resource Center . . . [more]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offers a terrific suggestion for a New Year’s resolution that you might actually have a decent chance of keeping: enabling full disk encryption on all of your computers.

Full disk encryption means that if your computer’s hard drive falls into the wrong hands – because of theft, loss, or other causes – it remains unreadable until the correct “passphrase” is entered. If, for example, you lose your laptop full of sensitive client data while traveling, you can rest easy knowing that the data on your laptop is protected from prying eyes thanks to the . . . [more]

by Cheryl Canning*

I was recently engaged in a discussion about the importance of resiliency in the workplace. The topic intrigued me. I had never really thought of resiliency as something that would be a necessity in the workplace. In my mind it was more about the ability to cope with personal crises. Through a series of recent events however, I came to appreciate its importance in all aspects of life, and I have developed my own theory as to how to build up one’s resiliency. My theory has not been tested or proven through scientific study. It is . . . [more]

The conclusion of most of the occupy camps across North America this fall was largely peaceful, with some notable exceptions involving pepper spray and excess force. But the protesters for the most part were non-violent, and in my exposure in Toronto, largely respectful of the legal system.

Although skepticism abounded when police announcements were shared or news stories circulated, judicial decisions appeared to have much more impartiality and credibility to the protesters. If the courts can be used as an alternative to police excess and fiascoes like the G20, I interpret it as a small success for our judicial . . . [more]