I often get asked “what kind of marketing should we do?” Or I’m asked to “just provide us with a bunch of great marketing ideas”. No time spent determining what the firm wants to look like in the future. No proper assessment of where they are today. No indication of what success would look like. And no commitment to doing what will be suggested. Just “fix me”. It’s a bit like a disgruntled teenager saying “make me popular, but don’t ask me to change anything about my looks, personality or actions”. I can do that. Give me several million dollars . . . [more]

Canadian law societies operate under a public interest mandate. This premise is often presented without much fanfare or introspection – as a fait accompli, as a matter of common sense, as something always there and always having been there. And, to be sure, there is a way that this framing makes eminent sense. It’s a legal reality as reflected in legislation governing law societies. And, on a more conceptual level, if not for a concern for the public interest, why regulate lawyers at all?

However, once we peel back even a few layers of the onion skin, it quickly . . . [more]

The creation and maintenance of a state is an ongoing exercise in force. Without the force the state will not continue. There are many societies throughout history that existed quite well without one, and recently I’ve been thinking about how each of experiences the force of the state differently, now that virtually all people live in them. I recently read that no group of hunters and gatherers or pastoralists has ever willingly transitioned to settled life, because it makes them easier to control and tax [1], and there is a vivid description of the violence and political machinations required to . . . [more]

“Today, we look for information. In the future, information will look for us,” says Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang, Ph.D. and president of Baidu, one of China’s largest Internet companies and a leader in global artificial intelligence (AI).

AI systems have generated much speculation and it has many lawyers, including myself, wondering if lawyers could be replaced by robots. Personally, I thought the headlines that say lawyers would be replaced by computers was a bit exaggerated. Take persuasion and negotiation, or formulating legal arguments in court, or assessing the credibitility of a witness for example. I find it hard to believe that . . . [more]

CBA Wellness hosted its 14^th annual Wellness workshop this past weekend in Winnipeg. The workshop is designed to provide training and resources to lawyer assistance program representatives from across the country. This year, the CBA Wellness Board of Directors decided to expand the scope of the workshop and include an outreach session for local lawyers as part of its ongoing effort to engage the legal community in wellness issues. The outreach session was titled Addictions, Recovery, Reckonings and featured Michael Bryant, an Ontario lawyer and former Attorney General for Ontario. Michael’s story is compelling; he detailed his personal struggle . . . [more]

The access to justice discourse is increasingly focused on modernization. This involves drawing on technology as well as new methods to guide the development of justice system improvements. The user experience (UX) figures prominently in modernization efforts. It underscores what Usability.gov – the leading authority on UX best practices for both the public and private sector – describes as, “a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations.”

As a generation, Millennials are squarely at the modernization and user-experience intersection. Their comfort with change and technology is disrupting industries by reshaping work . . . [more]

In highly regulated fields and industries, participants are often under a statutory obligation to cooperate with the auditors, inspectors and peace officers who investigate contraventions of the applicable regulatory regime, typically comprised of an Act, Regulations and sometimes the terms of a licence. This coerced cooperation comes in many forms: from retaining and turning over records and documents, to permitting access for physical inspection, to answering probing questions. More often than not inspections occur without warning, and happen quickly before the individual or entity subject to inspection is fully able to take stock of the situation. While this element . . . [more]

I usually write a column about a foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) aspect of legal information, but I’m taking a little break to discuss a general aspect of legal information – law librarian “self-care”. I don’t really like that term, so let’s call it something else. A legal information professional has to stay healthy, to maintain good mental and physical health for themselves, and also to be able to provide the best service possible at work in the present and in the future. Sometimes this is called “work-life balance”. I’m going to call it “tiny care” after @jonnysun’s . . . [more]

In my work with the Canadian Bar Association’s Access to Justice Committee and the Association for Canadian Clinical Legal Education, I have observed three major research opportunities for law faculties that are not being given the attention I feel they demand. These opportunities involve “big picture” issues in our Canadian legal system, and I believe law faculties (with some exceptions) do not focus enough on them. Here they are:

1. Access to justice

This is the biggest legal issue of our generation. Our democracy is based on the rule of law, and if our citizens cannot get access to the . . . [more]

The Patented Medicines Prices Review Board (“Board”) recently concluded a 7 year saga regarding its evaluation of the price for Soliris – Alexion’s admittedly breakthrough drug for rare blood disorders. This is the first Board decision dealing with an orphan drug. The Decision aptly illustrates that using the traditional statutory/regulatory framework for patented medicines pricing to evaluate Soliris (which has gained notoriety as the world’s most expensive drug) may be like fitting a square peg into a round hole. The Soliris story provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the quasi-judicial price regulating body. Notable highlights include: the . . . [more]

You may recall that the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) has recently adopted a Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records. An overview report made at the time is here. The text of the Model Law, along with a Guide to its Enactment, are here. Some previous attention to this project has been paid on Slaw here (2011), here (2012) and here (2016).

Transferable records

Transferable records are those that carry property rights with them, so one can transfer the property by transferring the document. Examples include negotiable instruments such as warehouse receipts, bills of lading . . . [more]

The current series of legal kerfuffles in scholarly publishing involves property and access rights in an industry that is, for all intents and purposes, moving toward universal open access. Let’s begin with recent moves by Elsevier, the largest of scholarly publishing corporations with over 2,000 journals, and the American Chemical Society, among the richest of the non-profit societies. These two entities have recently been awarded damages of $15 million (June 2017) and $4.8 million (September 2017) respectively by the U.S. courts, in light of Sci-Hub database, (which I have addressed earlier) providing free access to the better part of . . . [more]