How do you assess how you are really doing? You need to look at much more than just billable hours. The key is cash flow management: You must understand what monies are coming into your practice, and where money is flowing out. Most modern law office accounting systems can give you reports that will give you a much better understanding of the cash flow of your practice. On a monthly basis, you should review the following ten reports from your accounting system:

#1 – Overall and projected monthly billings: What are your overall monthly billings, measured against your projected billings? . . . [more]

Today the Google Doodle celebrates Eadweard Muybridge, the British photographer who:

is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip. He went on to make many studies of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not break down as separate movements.
Wikipedia

So head on over to Google and put the horse through its paces. . . . [more]

“[To compete with Bloomberg Law’s BNA coverage and now Lexis’ Law360 coverage, Thomson Reuters] will have to do better than its [current legal news website, newsletters, and blogs] to ratchet up the synergy between legal current awareness and legal research.”
Hodnicki, It’s Official, LexisNexis Has Acquired Law360 (March 20, 2012).

To believe the Crowd, the legal publishing giants are in a race, chasing after all the undulating streams of current legal reporting and writing either through acquisition or search enhancements. I suppose it is vital for them to be focused in this way, as current conventional wisdom is . . . [more]

The OBA Civil Litigation section is putting on a session bearing this title on 30 April. Here is how the topic is being described:

The legal marketplace is changing. Lawyers and law firms face increasing pressure to control costs in litigation and must adapt to provide superior results for a lower price. Learn about the trends, tools and techniques that will help you meet client expectations, deliver extra value, minimize overhead and maximize your bottom line.

Topics to be covered are : unbundling, outsourcing, advocacy referral and methods of using technology to do more with less. New ethical quagmires and . . . [more]

Would the public tolerate giving judges discretion in the sentencing of murderers?

Are online child pornography offenders likely to commit offences involving sexual contact with children?

Are job training programs for people leaving prison useful?

These — and another four — interesting questions get addressed summarily in the current issue [PDF] of Criminological Highlights, a publication of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. Although criminal law is a specialty practised by relatively few lawyers, given the present federal government’s interest in crime, it might not be a bad idea if more of us educated ourselves . . . [more]

The world has always had innovators and inventors. According to Wikipedia the oldest known tools used by humans are 2.5 to 2.6 million years old. In the late 1800’s Benz and then Daimler produced vehicles with an engine. Henry Ford manufactured cars in the United States and his fortunes really took off when he started producing black Model T’s on an assembly line. General Motors started offering colour choice and an annual model change, which forced Ford to change. And so on. From earliest times there have always been those who have had new, interesting, innovative ideas. Where do those . . . [more]

The inaugural UCLA Cyber Crimes Moot concluded today, with participants from across the U.S. and an international judging panel. Yes, my participation in the preliminary and final rounds of the event is what qualified the event as internationally judged. The winners this year were from GW School of Law, and their coach was none other than Orin Kerr.

The competition focused on a fact pattern based on the 2010 case of United States v. Warshak, dealing with the unconstitutional search and seizure of e-mails under the Stored Communications Act, and whether they should be excluded as evidence . . . [more]

The Law Society of Upper Canada publishes Practice Management Guidelines that include advice on the use of technology. Section 5.8.4 of the Guidelines say that the following practice is “not compatible with the public interest, the best interests of the profession or the administration of justice”:

advertisement of professional services using electronic media where the advertisement is directly and indiscriminately distributed to a substantial number of newsgroups or electronic email addresses.

This is clearly aimed at spam. However, a recent overview of technology and legal ethics* said that lawyers should also consider

whether the circulation of links via mechanisms such

There are five nationwide holidays in this country: Canada Day (July 1), Labour Day (1st Monday in September), Christmas Day (December 25), New Year’s Day (January 1)—and Good Friday, today (which is two days prior to Easter, which in turn falls, roughly speaking, on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the 21st of March).

There will likely be no new entries on Slaw today.

See you all on Monday—which is not a statutory holiday in any province or territory and not a holiday within the Canada Labour Code . . . though many federal government offices will . . . [more]

Again this year, the always exciting 60 Sites in 60 Minutes plenary session concluded ABA TECHSHOW 2012. Presenters Natalie Kelly, Dan Pinnington, Catherine Sanders Reach and TECHSHOW Chair Reid Trautz shared variety of serious and funs sites with the packed room. It was a lot of fun to do 60 Sites. For those who could not make it, here is a full list of the sites we presented:

Sites to help you do your job

• ABA Preview of Supreme Court Cases: Everything you want or need to know about what is happening at the Supreme Court, past,

David posted yesterday about Google’s project glass. Sounds pretty cool, and I’ll probably try it at some point. However, I do have to wonder what optometrists think when they see this? Most of us already face excessive amounts of screen time in our working lives. Will we now face never-ending screen time? And what’s the impact of constantly forcing our eyes to re-adjust their focal distance?

I did some sleuthing and I found very little in terms of outraged optometrists. Perhaps it’s too early. There were a couple of blog posts, and I also found this fox news story . . . [more]