Around 30 years ago, the Macintosh said Hello, as shown in this impressive . It introduced us to user-friendly computing, including visual interfaces, multimedia and an early form of mobile computing as it was designed to be luggable. However, even its IBM mainframe joke to “never trust a computer you can’t lift” wasn’t about to convince you that this was really a human. Not so the recent where some of the judges were fooled by the computer into believing they were conversing with a 13-year old, rather than a computer. This follows on from Watson winning on Jeopardy, and Kasparov . . . [more]

My February post suggested that a “Social Lab” may be a way to tackle the “implementation gap” in justice reform. On June 1 and 2, an important step was taken towards using this approach in British Columbia as a strategy to improve the family justice system for children and families. The BC Law Foundation / Legal Services Society Research Fund funded a two-day workshop in Vancouver facilitated by Adam Kahane and Monica Pohlmann of Reos Partners. This post highlights the key learnings coming out of those two days.

What is a Social Lab?

The workshop provided both a deeper exploration . . . [more]

Incubators are in. They are popping up everywhere; Google the word and see. Most of your hits will have nothing to do with babies born too soon. There are even national associations of incubators. In these economic times an incubator is a thing that helps starting entrepreneurs further develop and scale up their idea. For a good definition, see here. Incubators started in the strictly for-profit world. With the rise of social entrepreneurship and the idea of impact investing, they have also moved into that area. I have been asking myself for the past year how we can benefit . . . [more]

The business of law is increasingly competitive and success requires us to challenge long held beliefs that could be hurting your practice. See how many of the following myths you’ve been holding on to and consider if you’re ready for a new perspective.

1. I know my clients well enough – Surveys and client interviews tell us differently. The gap between what a lawyer knows about the client and what the client reveals to a third party (best if it’s someone other than the client’s lawyer) varies, but the gap is ever-present. The gap in and of itself is not so

I’ve been dreaming again about the future of legal publishing. How might we arrange legal information if we were not constrained by the structure and format that we’ve all grown up with? We know what the core pieces are:

Primary law: remember all those bound volumes of statutes? Remember all the print law reports? Many law libraries still carry these, but they have now mostly been replaced by a variety of online resources. Of course, in this country, CanLII is the best example.

Secondary law: we are lucky to have a huge body of secondary law in Canada, . . . [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]

Either limit the regulatory monopoly or provide for the efficient and effective delivery of legal services for all legal problems

Access to justice and legal services is a central challenge both for society and for the legal profession. The extent to which members of the public are unserved, under-served or inefficiently served is a difficult issue for lawyers being both a challenge to existing practice and an opportunity for innovation.

As suggested in earlier columns, it seems to me that this access question raises central ethical questions. If there are some legal services which are not provided by lawyers[i] . . . [more]

This month I chose to write a brief book review of an extremely useful new book – Internet Legal Research on a Budget: Free and Low-cost Resources for Lawyers by Carole A Levitt and Judy K. Davis (2014, 321 pages, $89.95USD). Published by the Law Practice Division of the American Bar Association, the main focus of the book is on United States law. However several of the chapters, such as that on Foreign, International and Comparative Law, could be relevant for any legal practice. I am reviewing the print edition of the work and cite to it, but an ebook . . . [more]

On June 9 2014 the Law Society of Alberta suspended Kristine Robidoux for four months after she admitted to violating her duties of confidentiality and candour to her client, provincial Conservative party candidate and former journalist Arthur Kent. Robidoux was legal counsel to Kent’s election team in the 2008 Alberta provincial election. She was also Kent’s agent and the Conservative party’s quadrant chair for five of the electoral constituencies in Calgary. During that time Robidoux had e-mail correspondence with Don Martin, a journalist, in which she gave Martin information about problems with the Kent campaign and, in part based on . . . [more]

The Federal Court has a primary role in hearing intellectual property proceedings in Canada (See Where Should You Launch Your Intellectual Property Case?). Changes to the composition of the Federal Court, including the number of judges and prothonotaries, have a significant effect on the enforcement of intellectual property in Canada. Several changes are being made to the role of the prothonotaries as well new appointments for judges in the Federal Court.

These changes affect the Court’s ability to manage its workload. The Federal Court has a Practice Notice indicating that where possible, the Court will endeavour to have the . . . [more]

In September, 2008, the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) formally launched its “Value Challenge” initiative with a goal “to reconnect value and costs for legal services.” At the time, many in the legal media declared that this would be the beginning of the change in the way law firm’s act as a business. They predicted that we would soon see the mass implementation of alternative and fixed fee arrangements, lowering of costs and increased efficiency. We’re five years on and there has not been nearly the movement the ACC had hoped, especially in regards to Canadian firms.

And so, it . . . [more]