Once upon a time there were two law firms, both founded in the same year. As they struggled to build their clientele, they both realized that they needed to build an image as well. At a partners’ meeting, Law Firm A debated the image issue at great length, accompanied by rhetoric that would make a seasoned juror weep. Eventually one-third of the partners decided they didn’t want any part of the discussion, another third was vehemently opposed to anything but the most conservative image, and that left a few mavericks bound and determined to “take this firm into the 21 . . . [more]

The most recent legal aid data are now available in tabular form on Cansim rather than in the familiar publication , Legal Aid in Canada: Resource and Caseload Statistics, which has been discontinued. Keeping track of trend and change in legal aid has never been more important. Legal aid is by far the largest part of the access to justice landscape in Canada. Even with constraints of the current fiscal realities, or perhaps because of them, legal aid systems have the infrastructure, the expertise and the resources to contribute significantly to expanding access to justice in Canada.

The good news . . . [more]

In Canada parties should understand that rights in marks can arise through use of the mark in commerce even without registration. This complicates clearance of marks and is a reason for doing clearance searches to identify any prior users before the adoption of a mark.

What happens when a user of a mark for one category of goods begins to use that mark in another category of goods – in which a second party has a registered mark. Can those uses survive, continue and co-exist when such conduct occurs over a long period of time?

Canada’s Federal Court addressed this . . . [more]

Canada’s law societies have long had a reputation for being slow, if not resistant, to change. I’ll leave it to others to argue the extent to which this has been, in the past, a fair characterization. Looking at current initiatives like the Nova Scotia’s Barristers’ Society’s Transforming Regulation consultation and the work of the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Working Group on Alternative Business structures, it is apparent that right now there is significant “big picture” thinking going on at Canadian law societies about how to innovate and modernize lawyer regulation.

It remains to be seen, of course, if . . . [more]

How do we understand bad things done to women by men? Through the few men who do them (#Notallmen)? Through misogyny in our culture as a whole? Through the experience of all women living with the risk that such bad things can happen (#Yesallwomen)? The ferocity of recent internet debate on this topic clouds the possibility that harm done by men to women should be understood as about all these things: the men who inflict it, the society in which it occurs and the lives of the women who live with the possibility of that threat.

In this column I . . . [more]

In one of our earliest blogs, we suggested that, if we want Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) to flourish, it should somehow be incorporated into the judicial process. This is not to say that private ODR mechanisms are doomed to fail, but rather that, as many unsuccessful ODR experiments have demonstrated, the incentives to take part in private ODR mechanisms are often lacking, especially with regard to consumer contracts. Other than places like eBay, where refusal to take part in the platform’s dispute resolution process results in exclusion from the community, there is no real reason for merchants to take . . . [more]

Mary starts each day by choosing her top three priorities. Inevitably, by noon at least one of those priorities has been swept aside in favour of something more urgent coming in.

This is just a small example of what our lives are like these days. Change is upon us continuously. Changes in technology, in the marketplace, in our clients’ businesses, and at our firms, call for us to develop our ability to respond creatively to our environment.

Improvisation is about performing in the moment. It is about being fully responsive to the world around us. We see the opportunities and . . . [more]

To be an effective networker, you need to find good contacts and then develop relationships with those contacts. Many lawyers have extensive contacts lists, but they don’t manage their contacts or use their lists to their full advantage.

One tool to help you find and manage your contacts and build relationships is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a business networking site that has made a number of major changes in the past year or so, including changes to LinkedIn Groups, the introduction of Showcase Pages as sub-pages for LinkedIn Company Pages, and changes to LinkedIn Profiles. But Contacts are . . . [more]

When it comes to protecting species at risk, and fulfilling mandatory obligations under the Species at Risk Act (SARA), it seems the Federal Government must be goaded into action by litigation brought by conservation groups. Two recent cases highlight government foot-dragging in developing plans to protect species that are at urgent risk, due in part to a lack of “organizational capacity” (i.e. staff cuts). The government will rarely disclose whether a protection plan is even in the works.

The Federal Government did, however, find the time and resources to swiftly downgrade the status of the North Pacific Humpback Whale from . . . [more]

As a Bencher of the Law Society of BC, I voted against the accreditation of TWU Law. I was on the losing side of a 20-7 vote. The next day, my wife and I left for a road trip through the American South.

We started in Chicago, marveled at its architecture for a few days and then took an overnight train to Memphis. From there, we drove down the eastern bank of the Mississippi through the “cradle of the civil war” and over Cajun swamps to our final destination of New Orleans. We drove through the rural sun-baked squalor of . . . [more]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any education related publication in the 21^st century must at some point cover the topic of MOOCs. So let’s get it out of the way, shall we?

As a known supporter of open content and technology, as well as someone who works in education, I like to pretend that people are dying to ask me, “Sarah, are MOOCs going to save law schools?”

My answer? No. No they are not.

Okay, I guess I could flesh this answer out a bit, and not just because I should have about 800 more words . . . [more]

Clay Shirky, way back in 2008, had a hypothesis: that it isn’t a case of too much information; it’s that we haven’t yet got the filters to help us manage that overload.

And we have to assume that the amount of information we’re already getting will continue to grow. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But, if we are to deal with that firehose aimed at our brains, we need to get smarter; because if we don’t we’re just going to get wetter.

When looking for recommendations of where to eat in a new city, for example, . . . [more]