Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on technology, research and practice.

Technology

Go for a Fresh Start With a Device Reboot
Dan Pinnington

Smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers are more reliable and stable than ever before. Most of us take this for granted and we leave our devices turned on 24/7. However, that . . .

Research

New Articling Students – Legal Reseach Methods Cafe
Shaunna Mireau

Most law firms have an orientation program for articling students. I am certain that . . . [more]

Law firms have a tendency to measure effectiveness of a marketing activity by whether “we got a file from it”. This is an inaccurate measure for several reasons, the most obvious of which is that few firms record how a file came to them.

If you’re going to invest time and resources in marketing initiatives, they should enhance at least one of the four Rs—reputation, revenue, referrals, and retention. Clients choose lawyers by their reputation, so reputation enhances revenue. Clients also choose lawyers on the recommendation of another advisor, so referrals enhance revenue and reputation enhances referrals. Clients leave lawyers . . . [more]

There is a lot of interesting talk these days about tapping in to the wisdom of the crowd. Among the most surprising examples is Crowdmed.com which was designed to find diagnoses for illnesses that have eluded physicians. It reports “astonishing” results.

There are no liability risks on the individual “medical detectives” (not required to be physicians) who submit diagnostic suggestions: they are anonymous and submissions are pooled and combined into diagnostic suggestions to be discussed with the patient’s physician.

A quick internet search did not reveal anything similar for law. Let me try drawing on the collective wisdom of SLAW . . . [more]

It now seems clear that any and all electronic communications are grist for the NSA’s mills. Only a fool would imagine that something expressed directly and plainly by phone, email, or SMS would remain private between sender and receiver. Of course, most of what we say to each other these ways is utterly trivial and inconsequential as far as the spy agencies are concerned, which doesn’t mean, of course, that we are happy or even content to have our private communications, however mundane, so casually and routinely raked through. 

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to go: we can, as . . . [more]

Every so often, a case about a lawyer removed from a matter or reprimanded for acting while in an “obvious” conflict of interest pops up in the media. These cases make all of us (or at least they should) shake our heads in dismay: Surely everybody knows how to avoid a conflict – don’t they?

LAWPRO claims experience makes it clear that lawyers don’t always accurately identify conflicts… or that sometimes they decide to be wilfully blind. Consider the following a brief primer on how to tune-up your conflict of interest avoidance systems.

There are three typical scenarios that lead . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from forty-one recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. David Doorey’s Law of Work  2. Youth and Work  3. Ontario Condo Law Blog  4. Slater Vecchio Connected  5. Wise Law Blog

David Doorey’s Law of Work
Why Do Workers Support Policies To Weaken Labour Rights?
My colleague here at the School of HRM at York, Tony Fang, found . . . [more]

In Wright v. Wright [2013] EWCA Civ 234, the English Court of Appeal suggested that it may be time to review the rule articulated nearly a decade ago in Halsey v Milton Keynes General NHS Trust [2004] EWCA Civ 576 to the effect that a court cannot order unwilling parties to participate in mediation.

The dispute in Wright involved two unrepresented businessmen who had a falling out after years of successful collaboration. The litigation had been hard-fought and protracted. The court observed that the case involved “a breakdown of trust and friendship” and observed that “mediation is the obvious . . . [more]

In October 2007 Robert Dziekanski was stuck in a Vancouver airport for 10 hours. An immigrant from Poland, Dziekanski did not speak English and started to get agitated, even throwing furniture.

The police used a taser on Dziekanski within seconds of their arrival, resulting in his death. The incident was captured on video by others in the airport, and raised questions nationwide over the use of police force. This lead to the Braidwood Inquiry, which concluded that tasers can cause death in people with heart irregularities.

The officers claimed that Dziekanski had acted violently, requiring the use of the . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Sentencing and mental illness / Automobile insurance / Judges’ reasons for decision / Exemplary damages for breach of contract / Insurance contract and limitation of actions :

R. v. S.J.B. 2013 ABCA 153
Criminal Law – Sentencing – Considerations on imposing sentence – Mental illness or disorder
The accused (Ms. B, 34 years old), . . . [more]

I’ve recently returned from a trip to the Antipodes — my first. It was thoroughly enjoyable, despite a few minor obstacles, such as surviving a 14-hour flight and a 24-hour travel day, driving on the left, evading roos on the road at twilight, confronting electricity outlets that all looked like miniature cartoons of The Scream, and doing without my smartphone because of the insanely high cost of data roaming.

Oh, and struggling a bit to understand the locals.

That started on the Air New Zealand flight to Auckland, when, with ears that needed to pop, I swore I heard a . . . [more]

In my previous article I discussed the different ways in which Change can affect us – and whether it is welcomed or it is being endured has a great deal to do with that. We know Change is inevitable and constant, so our best strategy is to prepare ourselves, in body and mind, to run the marathon that it presents.

Whether you’re running with Change or away from it, it’s going to be a long haul. An SLA article from 2002, “Coping with Change in the Workplace,”[1] sets out a few basic strategies to make the constant transitioning a little . . . [more]

Earlier today, Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, presented her office’s annual report on the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) for 2012. Last month, she was making her case for reforming and strengthening the Act to better protect Canadians’ privacy in the digital age.

All of these activities will not surprise anyone.

What is less well known is that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner also funds a whole series of research initiatives. Recently, it published a compendium of results from many of these projects:

From tapping our smart phones to transfer funds, to