We’re halfway through 2014. How’s your practice strategy coming along?

If you’re feeling stuck, you might find inspiration in “The End of Competitive Advantage” by Columbia Business School’s Rita Gunther McGrath. McGrath’s framework makes a lot of sense for firms dealing with rapidly changing environments.

The new “playbook for strategy” outlined in McGrath’s latest research is premised on creating transient advantages versus exploiting business-as-usual to sustain historical performance. Her logic will resonate with anyone preparing firms for new realities:

“The presumption of stability creates all the wrong reflexes. It allows for inertia and power to build up

I have been working with some advisors on a project to map a process that we think could use some improving. An aspect of this is identifying waste.It is an interesting exercise to think about how you do something and identify where waste occurs.

Slawyers will appreciate the acronym DOWNTIME to think about waste in their organizations.

D defects (mistakes that mean something has to be done over)
O over-production (printing 30 handouts for 20 people)
W waiting (delays in the ability to move on to the next step)
N non-utilized talent (both over qualified and under utilized)
T transportation . . . [more]

A dozen years ago I wrote an article about regulating activity on the Internet (‘Solving Legal Issues in Electronic Government: Jurisdiction, Regulation, Governance‘, (2002), 1 Canadian Journal of Law and Technology No. 3 p. 1 ) in which I suggested that a number of successful regulatory strategies focused on intermediaries, as the principal targets of regulation might be hard to find or hard to persuade. Intermediaries often had the benefit (to the regulator) of being large, stable and solvent – and they often cared about their reputation for legality and good citizenship.

Since that time the interest of . . . [more]

The latest issue of Legal Information Management focuses on legal biography – sources thereof and methods of compiling. The wonderful articles raised some intriguing questions for me. How do you locate biographical information about non-prominent persons? What can we do to facilitate more biographies about legal scholars and lawyers whose ideas fall outside conventional legal thinking? Who was the first lesbian lawyer in the UK? You can write a legal biography of a book or building!

You can write biographies of judges, lawyers, law professors, law students, law librarians, publishers, courts, international organizations, associations. Sources for compiling and locating them . . . [more]

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.

Research

Defining Research Value
Shaunna Mireau

A Slaw.ca post by Lynn Foley last week provided the inspiration for today’s tip. Lynn asked Slawyers to consider what their clients perceive as value using the lens of the ACC Value Challenge. I ask Slaw Tips research readers to consider how the discrete piece of legal research they are doing adds value for the client. One of the most important skills a legal . . . [more]

While you can certainly debate whether ubiquitous internet access is a good or a bad thing, I suspect anyone with a weekly blog commitment to SLAW is looking forward to WestJet’s and Air Canada’s plans to roll out wifi on Canadian flights in the very near future. It is, I’ve learned, very near impossible to write a blog without an internet connection.

Yesterday I instead found myself sitting in seat 12E looking wistfully from my mute and helpless laptop to the pillowy white dunes just beyond the wings of flight WS697. “Cloud computing”, it struck me, was an oxymoron—that and . . . [more]

When work gets busy, many of us put certain non-mission-critical tasks on hold. But it’s important to remember that “on hold” should not be allowed to turn into “lost in the mists of time”. Lawyers must develop the discipline of regularly returning to and addressing the non-urgent details of their practice when opportunities present themselves.

You will know best what needs addressing in the course of your spring cleaning, but if you need some inspiration, here are our suggestions:

• Bill your files, and send reporting letters for matters that you’ve completed.
• Identify languishing files, and take the next step in

As reported by Robert Richards on the Legal Informatics Research Network, Roland Vogl and Michael Genesereth have released their spring 2014 lectures for the Legal Informatics course at Stanford Law School. The course intends to provide an “overview of how technology is used in today’s legal practice and how it will be changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly in the foreseeable future.”

The course is organized into three modules with eight video lectures ranging from an hour and a half to two hours in length:

1. Legal Document Management (including electronic legal research,

Lower courts in both Canada and the US have been deeply divided on the application of their respective Supreme Courts’ precedents on whether the police need a warrant to search the contents of a smart/cell phone seized during a lawful arrest. On June 25, 2014, the US Supreme Court unanimously settled US law in Riley v. California, No. 13-132. The court found that privacy interests at stake outweigh any legitimate governmental interest, absent any “exigent circumstances”.

The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution provides protection against unreasonable search. A common law exception to the protection under the Amendment . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty 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. Precedent 2. Canadian Securities Law 3. Western Canada Business Litigation Blog 4. SOQUIJ 5. ABlawg.ca

Precedent
Reinvent your style in 4 steps

Well, readers, the countdown is on: in one month, I’ll be back at at work, trading play dates and toys for contracts and coffee (oh, wait — . . . [more]

Legal Aid Ontario (LAO) is funding 10 hours for the negotiation and creation of separation agreements as of July 3, 2014. The move is intended to reduce the number of unrepresented parties in family law, as well as promote non-adversarial dispute resolution.

The advantage of this initiative is that it provides avenues to resolve family disputes without resorting to litigation, which is often the only way that many eligible for legal aid can receive funds. The downside may be that 10 hours may not be nearly enough to cover all the areas of assistance covered by the funding:

• obtaining and

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL: Afin de leur permettre de préparer adéquatement leur défense, des accusés obtiennent un allégement de leurs conditions de détention.

Intitulé : Béland c. Girard, 2014 QCCS 2822
Juridiction : Cour supérieure (C.S.), Québec, 200-01-182166-144
Décision de : Juge Louis Dionne
Date : 24 mars 2014

Résumé

PÉNAL (DROIT) — . . . [more]