Is the World as We Know it Coming to an End?

Each year, the Law Society of Upper Canada has an awards ceremony at which very worthy lawyers and paralegals are honoured. Hearing about the contributions and professional lives of the award recipients is inspiring and underscores the value of our professions to the society that we serve.

There was a whimsical theme in some of the speeches this year. By way of good-natured self-deprecation, one recipient described receiving the call from the Treasurer telling him that he had been awarded the Law Society Medal. He said that his first . . . [more]

“Know when to fold ‘em. Know when to walk away.”
(Lyrics by Kenny Rogers)

We are not all meant to work together. There, I’ve said it. Some of us just work more productively together than others. Anyone in the professional services field for any reasonable length of time, can attest to a client relationship that just didn’t work. There are a myriad of reasons: You were on a different wave length, didn’t communicate well, didn’t understand each other, couldn’t work efficiently, or had different expectations of each of other … and so on.

There comes a time – at least . . . [more]

Summer is just beginning and I have a little extra time to follow up on some of my earlier columns. As usual I am focusing on open access resources for the frugal learner and researcher. I wrote about massive open online courses (MOOCs) two years ago and have been taking these free courses ever since.

My favorites so far have been the University of California at Berkeley’s Science of Happiness and Harvard University’s Poetry in America series. I most recently completed Poetry in America: Emily Dickinson. Both of these courses are offered by edx and I recommend them as . . . [more]

Recently my daughter gave me a book by Naomi S. Baron titled Words on Screen – The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (2015 Oxford). Naomi Baron is Professor of Linguistics at American University in Washington, D.C.

In the U.S.A in 2013, 30% of the books sold were eBooks – page 207.

Professor Baron states “for romance, erotic fiction and mysteries or thrillers, eBooks were strongly preferred over print”. Page 232.

Baron argues that careful reading and careful thinking are the hallmark of higher education, and that such reading and thinking is better done in print. Baron states “the . . . [more]

In conducting the public function of granting Patents, CIPO’s actions are often called into question in private disputes, as well as by individual applicants. Although the “high stakes” of patent litigation may often create novel arguments to invalidate a particular patent, broader policy consequences ultimately arise as to how to temper CIPO’s independent administrative functions with the ability of third parties to raise administrative noncompliance as a ground of patent invalidity. The court’s predilection to review, at the request of individual applicants, administrative type decisions regarding fees, may be contrasted with judicial reluctance to revisit CIPO’s actions once a patent . . . [more]

In six preceding articles I have described the idea behind becoming a very highly valued five-tools project manager, ready to manage each of the five progress factors:

• Manage the project, starting with the project charter.
• Manage the client, starting with the Conditions of Satisfaction.
• Manage time, starting with the Off Switch.
• Manage money, starting with budgets.
• Manage the team, starting with assigning tasks accurately.

The fifth tool deals with the most important asset on your team. It’s an asset that goes home at night, an asset that defines the biggest difference between project success and failure.

And it’s the asset . . . [more]

This past spring, I designed and taught an upper-­year course at the Allard (i.e. UBC) School of Law called “Access to Justice and the Modern Litigant.” For three hours each Thursday afternoon, my students and I discussed the deepening crisis in access to justice for working and middle-­class Canadians. We explored the philosophical foundations of the common law, traced the evolution of the concept of equal access to justice, and considered different sociological analyses of how ordinary Canadians interact with the civil justice systems built to serve them. We also reviewed the history of public legal services in Canada, and . . . [more]

I thoroughly enjoyed attending this year’s CALL conference in Moncton. It was especially interesting to see and hear about some of the new products and services developed by the English legal publishers.

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (“ICLR”) is a non-profit that publishes the official law reports for England. For reported decisions, they include links not only to the cases cited, but also to cases cited in the argument.

Justis is an English publisher of unreported judgments; their product Justcite has a fantastic new feature that shows the treatment of cases: a circular visualization of the . . . [more]

Justice Sopinka famously said (in 1989) that judges are not monks (although he should also have said nuns) and can have a role to play in their communities. He was writing in the (mostly) pre-internet era, where social interaction within communities was largely hidden from public view. With the prevalence of the internet, community involvement of judges and adjudicators has become more transparent. Two recent court decisions help to illustrate different views on how adjudicators can engage in their community — both in-person and virtually — and may help to focus a public discussion on reasonable limits to social media . . . [more]

More changes are coming to intellectual property legislation as part of the latest federal budget announcements. Changes have been announced for the Patent Act, the Trade-marks Act, the Copyright Act and the Industrial Design Act.

These changes follow an overhaul of the intellectual property legislation last year (see previous article) to make Canada’s legislation more consistent with international treaties. The implementing regulations from last year’s changes are still being developed with implementation not expected until late 2016.

The latest changes were announced in the Budget in April 2015 and the specific proposed amendments included in . . . [more]

Experiential legal education has been the subject of numerous papers, conferences, and innovative curriculum changes in the United States in the past decade. In October 2012 the first National Symposium on Experiential Education in Law was held at Northeastern University in Boston. I attended that symposium, and came away inspired by the topics and discussions.

In June 2014 the Second National Symposium on Experiential Education in Law took place at Elon University in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Alliance for Experiential Learning in Law and Elon University School of Law hosted the symposium. To my regret, I was unable to attend . . . [more]

Weak passwords are out. Strong passwords are in but may not be enough to protect you. When you use dual or two factor authentication, you add a hurdle to those attempting to get unauthorized access to your law practice information. It doesn’t involve your finger or your face, which are password replacements and not necessarily better. Instead, you supplement your username and password with a one-time code.

You already use two factor authentication in other parts of your life. Probably the most common is the PIN and cash card. You have to have both the card, inserted in . . . [more]