Reflecting on 2016, in many ways a turbulent and distressing year, I was reminded of the centenaries that it marked. Notable ones for me were the momentous Easter Rising in Ireland, the wasteful Battle of the Somme, the birth of my late father and the establishment of Tolley Publishing.

Its parent, Lexis Nexis UK has posted on Tolley’s web site a “100 Years of Tolley Infographic” and has published a book to celebrate its centenary, entitled, thanks to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, “Plucking the Goose”. The title, apparently not some kind of smutty euphemism or double entendre, serves to . . . [more]

So by now the parties are in full swing, the eggnog is flowing, and most of your law firm partners have already taken off for the holidays, while insisting that associates and staff work until the last minute before the statutory closing.

One thing that may NOT yet have ground to a halt, though, is the Dreaded Holiday Card process.

Have you ever wondered how law firm holiday cards get to be so generic? Or how many emails the Marketing Department gets begging for a more creative card this year? Or how many versions they go through, losing creativity at . . . [more]

Freakonomics, is one of my favourite series of books, blogs and audio podcasts. As the authors proclaim, they look at “the hidden side of everything.”

So imagine my delight when I found a recent podcast that examined how decisions by adjudicators (baseball umpires, judges and bank loan officers) can be affected by totally random factors such as the the order in which they are made and time of day.

The problem is, people don’t really understand randomness. They understand that, if you flip a coin, the odds of landing heads or tails are 50/50. This means that, out of . . . [more]

Will Amazon start delivering packages before you order them? They’re getting close.

Will your autonomous vehicle know your destination before you tell it? Probably, if you are sticking to a routine.

Will legal research databases give you what you need before even you know what that is? Don’t bet against it.

In Tim Knight’s recent Slaw post on the black box of artificial intelligence, he talked about the importance of understanding the “how” of the underlying algorithms as we become more reliant on both their results and their predictive capabilities. Unsaid but implied in Tim’s post was that, yes, these . . . [more]

In a recent Slaw blog, Malcolm Mercer thoughtfully explores how information asymmetry between legal service providers and consumers may impact access to justice. He suggests that creative solutions are necessary in order to provide the public with better information about the quality of lawyers and the legal services that they provide.

Mercer makes a good point: if the public feels that it can’t accurately assess the quality of legal services, there is a risk that people won’t retain lawyers or, at the very least, people may feel compelled to hire those practitioners who charge lower rates even if they . . . [more]

Since its inception, the Cyberjustice Laboratory has studied every element and step of the legal process to see if and when technology could be used to facilitate, enhance, or even streamline procedures and, therefore, make the system more accessible and efficient. We are well aware that efficiency is often misconstrued as a “bad word” within the context of the legal system since (especially in criminal proceedings) cutting corners to speed up the process could have disastrous effects. However, managing resources and staff in a more efficient manner, while positively affecting delays, has little to do with the integrity of the . . . [more]

What role should empathy have in a system of laws? What does an empathetic legal system look like?

In a recent article on the Robin Camp case, Brenda Cossman raised concerns about the Canadian Judicial Council Inquiry Committee recommendation that Justice Camp be removed from the bench. She raised, in particular, the concern that removing rather than educating Justice Camp facilitates a growing “post-empathy” culture:

I worry even more about the impulse to punish in light of the recent rise of a powerful backlash against any and all equality-seeking groups. We have moved into a new postempathy era, where more

Miranda is stressed out and fighting fires on all her files. A slew of sudden departures and maternity leaves have left her as the lone associate in a busy corporate practice. She has more work than she can handle and is behind on it all despite working long days and taking no holidays. Yet when a partner comes by to ask for her assistance on a large transaction that is heating up, she finds herself agreeing even though she knows something is going to give.

Are you like Miranda?

• When asked for help is your first and immediate answer Yes

In November 2015, the Prime Minister mandated several Cabinet Ministers to review four of Canada’s environmental laws and processes: the Fisheries Act, Navigation Protection Act, the National Energy Board, and federal environmental assessment processes. The four reviews are ongoing now and will be completed in early 2017.

The West Coast Environmental Law Association has established an on-line hub where individuals and groups can access key information about the reviews, background resources and guidance about how to get involved. This includes our briefs and submissions on Fisheries Act and Navigation Protection Act reform, as well as recommendations about next generation . . . [more]

Matt Mullenweg is yet another tech billionaire college dropout. He may be less famous than Mark Zuckerberg, but the blogging platform he founded, WordPress, powers 25% of the web, including Slaw.

In a recent podcast, Mullenweg explained that most of the hot topics in technology that the tech press bombards us with at any given time are too early in their hype cycle, and that a better source of inspiration for tech projects is to look at what technologies were considered hot 5 years ago.

So I went back to 2011 and found a post entitled “2011: The . . . [more]

The concept of a legal profession should have a strong social welfare aspect to it such that its distant goal is to make a community’s legal health as important to it as its medical health, and its lawyers as important to it as its doctors. Technology can do that. Unfortunately it is becoming a more distant and unattainable goal because our law societies are moving us in the wrong direction.

All efforts are aimed at helping the population learn to live with the problem of unaffordable legal services, but there are none to solve the problem. Law society benchers . . . [more]

In my previous column, Building and Maintaining a Precedents Collection – Part 1: Getting Started, I reviewed the benefits and challenges of creating such a collection and noted several threshold issues. In this column, I will address certain elements that you will need to keep in mind as you attack this problem.

Contract maturity model. Kingsley Martin, in a three-part series of blog postings on the Thomson Reuters site (see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), develops the concept of a “contract maturity model,” based on Richard Susskind’s analysis in his book The End . . . [more]