When Prime Minister Stephen Harper asks the Governor General to prorogue Parliament before its scheduled return on September 16, 2013, and will mark the end of the 41st Parliament; consequently several pieces of legislation will die on the order paper in either the House of Commons or the Senate.

One of the fascinations of electronic communications is how they make many traditional questions of law new again. What is the nature of consent? Can one make an agreement with a machine (a computer)? How permanently must information be recorded before it can be considered ‘writing’? What is an original document? (Can one version of identical assemblies of bits usefully be called an original?) Where do instantaneous online transactions occur? And what is a signature?

Everybody knows that signatures are important. Children learn at an early age that signing something makes it special. We all sign a variety of documents . . . [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.

Electronic Signatures in Law, 3rd Edition
Stephen Mason
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Excerpts chosen by the author: pp.229-231; 318-322

[Footnotes converted to endnotes and renumbered.]

Statute of Frauds

The question arose in the English case of J Pereira Fernandes SA v. Mehta[1] whether the name forming part of an e-mail address . . . [more]

The summer’s blue moon has come and gone, the evenings are decidedly chilly (here), and sunrise wakes me at an ever more humane hour.

And another sign of autumn’s impending arrival: Planning the fine points of our first-year Legal Research and Writing course occupies a large share of mental space.

Clearly others are also pondering LRW ideas at the moment. The season and a bit of serendipity brought to my screen an interesting question from Dean Kim Brooks of Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie:

Thinking about revisions to LRW – anything you wish you'd learned in first year LRW?

. . . [more]

The regular feature, Wednesday: What’s Hot on CanLII, is unavailable today. We hope to provide you with the data tomorrow — even though it’s Thursday. . . . [more]

So a lawyer gets an email / letter saying:

Congratulations, based on our extensive research and review you have been named as a top ranked / elite / awesome lawyer in your practice area and will appear in our print / online publication. You can obtain / enhance your listing by completing form X / sending a profile and the (non-trivial) sum of $X.

The questions are:

• Do these publications do any more than feed our egos?
• Do buyers of legal services actually look at these print or online publications to find a lawyer?
• If so, do they trust the

. . . [more]

Should you find yourself with a surplus of clients, the following tips may be of some assistance.

1. Speak only in legalese. Make a point of using Latin terms and providing complex answers to simple questions from clients. Above all, avoid plain language and clarity in your communications.
2. Keep your clients in the dark. Don’t send regular updates or otherwise inform them of what you are doing on their behalf.
3. Never focus your attention on what your clients are saying to you. Take calls, read emails on your Blackberry and check your watch during face-to-face client meetings.
4. Raise your rates without

. . . [more]

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” wrote Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. But there is plenty in a name, as J.K. Rowling discovered when her authorship of a pseudonymous mystery novel was revealed (sales shot up dramatically). Of course, her name is attached to a good reputation. Socrates said you should regard “your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of – for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, . . . [more]

A vodka martini is the libation of choice for the James Bond of film – famously shaken, not stirred. The actor may change but Bond’s drink remains the same: the viewer understands that he likes its taste, he likes its style, its strength; that he has a comfort level with it that will not change.

When it comes to many lawyers’ seeming lack of engagement with the issues facing the future of the legal profession, it has been suggested that, like the Bond of film (though, it must be said, not the literary character) lawyers with a certain amount of . . . [more]

I am a woman. I am a mother. I am a law librarian. I am a leader. Except for the leader, and law librarian bits, I rarely think about what the other two “I am” statements have to do with my job. Attendance at the Monday morning Plenary session at the CBA Legal Conference 2013 where Arin Reeves of Nextions presented “The Next IQ: The Next Level of Diversity & Inclusion for the 21st Century” caused me to reflect on being a woman and a mother in the context of my career.

I have rarely felt diminished, oppressed or that . . . [more]

Some publicity has been given to a recent Texas judgment that held that Bitcoins were a form of money, and thus a scheme by which investors hoped to increase their holdings of bitcoins was subject to securities regulations.

Is there any doubt that a similar holding would be made in Canada?

It was not necessary to find that bitcoins were a form of money in order for the investment to be a security. I recall from law school days securities that promised gains from chinchillas, for example.

The holding that bitcoins were money was needed in that particular case because . . . [more]

Matthew Butterick, whose book Typography for Lawyers we talked about back in 2008, has launched a new e-book, Butterick’s Practical Typography. Drawing heavily on his print book, this site takes you through the essentials of typography and importantly is itself a demonstration of good design and use of type in a web context.

The book is freely available, though Butterick has a number of suggestions as to how you might recompense him for his effort.

If you’re vaguely interested in how your documents appear to others — and which lawyer would not be? — but are hesitant to . . . [more]