Being interviewed for a news item or feature story on your area of expertise is a great way to build a professional reputation. It looks good in a Google search. It associates your esteem with that of the publication. And you can refer to the coverage in marketing materials without sounding self-aggrandizing.

But what if you’re misquoted?

As reporters rush to meet deadlines and editorial departments dwindle, your erudite articulation might come across as an arcane patois.

Communications expert Marsha D’Angelo has some advice on options to set the record straight. D’Angelo has worked with an impressive list of clients . . . [more]

Robert MacKay, the philosopher publisher from New Fetter Lane, recently posted yet another thoughtful piece on a matter of interest to legal publishers and their customers under the title The Customer is Sometimes Right (April 29, 2014).

This time, Robert addresses the subject of the dynamic that exists, or rather should exist, between the publisher and the customer in the development and re-development of major legal information products. Specifically he comments on “the methodologies used to define and understand user needs by way of direct customer contact”.

As Robert says, the next product or service that will astound us will . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Cruz v. McPherson, 2014 ONSC 4841

[30] Based on the information contained in the marketing brochure, the Cruzs’ Statement of Claim alleges that there is a partnership between Summit Legal (a corporation) and Fireman Wolfe LLP. The Statement of Claim, however, does not allege – nor could it allege – that there is a partnership comprised of a corporation (Summit Legal), . . . [more]

According to Mr. Mehedi he was scammed. He paid $3,742 to a company to provide career development services and assist him in finding a job. Prior to paying the fees, Mr. Mehedi asserts that he was promised that the company would find him a job as a project manager with a salary of $70,000. That job never materialized.

Mr. Mehedi sued the company and its principals. He lost at trial. The trial judge found the defendants to be credible and concluded that there was no basis for finding that any of the defendants made any promises or commitments to Mr. . . . [more]

I still love advertising. Even with its diminishing popularity, particularly in print form, creating beautiful ads that pack punch for clients makes me happy. We’ve had clients frame our ads, float them around the firm, send home clippings of their announcement ad, and we’ve had several posted to social media sites just for fun. What’s not to love?

My suspicion is that there is more care going into law firm advertising. That’s only an empirical observation, but I do believe there are fewer lawyer-produced (or directed) ads getting published lately. Just as you can spot a contract that was torn . . . [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.

Technology

Handy Checklist Will Help Prevent Unauthorized Access to Your Gmail Account
Dan Pinnington

In just the last few weeks, I have talked to two lawyers dealing with hacked email accounts. In the past year or so, I have seen frauds perpetrated where a hacker hacked into a client’s email account and waited until the opportune time (just as a real estate deal closed) to send instructions to the lawyer . . . [more]

Are we getting closer to machines in the practice of law? In his blog post “Meet your new lawyer, IBM Watson,” Ron Friedmann describes a meeting between IBM senior management and top-tier law firm CIOs at last week’s ILTA conference. He says:

It sounds like IBM intends Legal Watson to replace junior associates or at least perform much of their work (see also The Future of Law, American Lawyer, Aug 2014). Legal Watson’s success depends on the answers to three questions:

1. What information – and how much – does Watson need to ingest and, to the extent necessary,

Written policies that clearly establish guidelines and requirements governing the acceptable use of firm technology can help reduce cyber exposures and give staff clear direction on what they are permitted and not permitted to do with law firm technology resources.

Use these resources and sample policies to create polices for your firm (These resources supplement the information in the Cybercrime and Law Firms issue of LAWPRO Magazine): The model policies are also available in Word and RTF formats.

• Model Technology Usage Policy: This general policy discusses the appropriate firm computing and information resources.
• Model Electronic Document Handling Policy:

In the June issue of Technical Services Law Librarian Karen Wahl talks about Kristen M. Hallows‘ article called “It’s All Enumerative: Reconsidering Library of Congress Classification in U.S. Law Libraries” published in the Winter issue of the Law Library Journal.

In her review Wahl says:

The major thesis is that a subject classification scheme, rather than a jurisdictional classification scheme, may better support the needs of users because it will collocate related materials better, leading to better browsability for the patrons. It implies that the hyper-specificity of LCC makes this more difficult for a smaller law

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. Lee Akazaki  2. U of A Faculty Law Blog 3. Labour Pains  4. Blogue du CRL  5. Legal Feeds

Lee Akazaki
Why can’t a lawyer be more like a share capital corporation? A reflection on the CBA Legal Futures Final Report

Henry Higgins, in My Fair Lady, famously sang, . . . [more]

Background

It would be a safe bet to assume that almost every in-house lawyer and CFO in the country expresses concern about managing external legal spend. A material amount of effort is spent with external legal service providers about managing rising legal costs. However, typically this focuses solely on the current rate structure being offered. This is only one part of a well defined legal services delivery platform. In addition to articulating the current fee structure, an intentional approach to fee reviews is necessary to effectively manage the effect of “rate creep” (the year over year increase of fees without . . . [more]

Juana Summers of NPR detailed this week the use of sentence diagramming, a grammar technique once widely used in America,

Burns Florey and other experts trace the origin of diagramming sentences back to 1877 and two professors at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. In their book, Higher Lessons in English,Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg made the case that students would learn better how to structure sentences if they could see them drawn as graphic structures.

After Reed and Kellogg published their book, the practice of diagramming sentences had something of a Golden Age in American schools.

The practice fell into disuse . . . [more]