CHANGE. Few like it, and least of all lawyers. It’s important to have a firm culture built on good work but equally important is to build a firm culture around business development. If business development is at the core of how everyone thinks and goes hand-in-hand with excellent work, the financial health of your firm will be more stable. 

But… it’s easier said than done. Your team will resist change… we all do. Samuel Bacharach, a professor of labor management at Cornell, writes for Inc. Magazine… 4 Reasons Your Employees Resist Change–And How to Overcome Them. Bacharach suggests that . . . [more]

If writing is hard — and it is — then legal writing is both easier and more difficult still. Easier, perhaps, because it is stylized: everything from briefs to judgments and legislation is carefully cropped of individuality and approximated to yesterday’s example — understandably, because “It’s not about you, writer” and it is about avoiding risk.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

More difficult, because, well, because life must break through from time to time if legal writers are not to fall on their quills or die of acute accidie. It’s far from easy to give . . . [more]

Conspiracy in restraint of trade

466. (1) A conspiracy in restraint of trade is an agreement between two or more persons to do or to procure to be done any unlawful act in restraint of trade.

Trade union, exception

(2) The purposes of a trade union are not, by reason only that they are in restraint of trade, unlawful within the meaning of subsection (1).

[Criminal Code RSC 1985, c C-46]

This was a law that was slow in coming. In 1872 the Toronto Trades Assembly supported the Toronto Typographical Union’s strike for a 54 hour work week.

George Brown,

. . . [more]

This article is by Nora Rock, corporate writer and policy analyst at LAWPRO.

Punctuality is a virtue much pooh-poohed by a certain kind of lawyer – the kind who views her time as so exquisitely valuable that she must operate in a perpetual state of adrenaline-fueled urgency. Meeting starts at 9:00? If it’s only 8:56, there’s ample time to make an important phone call to get instructions from a different client (and ample time, during the meeting, to surreptitiously type notes about that call into her tablet). If the call runs late and she arrives at the meeting at 9:10, . . . [more]

After years of considerable criticism from the international community, Saudi Arabia has finally passed an anti-domestic violence bill. On August 26, 2013 the Saudi cabinet passed a 17-article protection from abuse law, which would provide up to one year in prison and $13,300 fine for those guilty of committing psychological or physical abuse.

The issue of domestic violence in Saudi Arabia is not limited to nationals, but also affects the significant migrant worker population located there. Numerous cases of abuse towards maids and domestic works have attracted international scrutiny.

Although many critics have attributed these lack of protections to the . . . [more]

Constitutionnel : Les revendeurs de billets de spectacle n'ont pas démontré que la Loi visant à interdire la revente de billets de spectacle à un prix supérieur au prix autorisé par le producteur ne relève pas de la compétence du Québec.