This topic was inspired by Lyonette Louis-Jacques’ post on Homebrewing Laws Worldwide. Shortly after reading her post, I found an article about a Wisconsin law in effect in the 1930’s that required restaurants to serve a small amount of butter and cheese at every meal. This law was probably meant to support dairy farmers recovering from the Great Depression and was only in effect for two years. Since I am a part-time Wisconsin Cheesehead, I set out to do some research on the law of cheese and cheese making. Prior research had confirmed that cheese and beer are . . . [more]

As lawyers, we are trained to be adversaries, but more and more we are also trained to work collaboratively. Litigation is expensive and time consuming. Alternative dispute resolution is almost always a preferred method of dealing with a dispute, and in that vein, we have all read the book “Getting to Yes” by Roger Fisher and William Ury. The book promises a:

proven strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict – whether it involves parents and children, neighbors, bosses and employees, customers or corporations, tenants or diplomats.

There is good reason this book is almost . . . [more]

Increasingly law librarians are asked not just for help with legal research but also with business research. One of the most frequent requests is to find information on a company. There are some fantastic paid databases that you can use for this kind of research, but not all legal professionals have access to these resources. Fortunately, there are also a number of free online resources that can used to research Canadian companies.

Step 1: Determine what information are you looking for

The first thing to determine is why are you looking for company information? Are you looking for this information . . . [more]

Apparently, the brain is the least understood by the medical community of all the human body parts.

Some doctors say that a healthy brain is partly dependent upon physical exercise and a proper amount of sleep. Apparently good things happen to our brains when we are sleeping. John Ratey of the Harvard Medical School and author of the book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (2013) states: “Exercise is the single best thing you can do for your brain in terms of mood, memory, and learning”.

A healthy brain includes the conscious and the unconscious. Unconscious . . . [more]

With so many new gTLDs (“generic Top Level Domains”) coming online this year, I thought it might be worth exploring their value and potential use in law firm marketing. 

The simplest example of a gTLD, of course, is .COM, which makes up about 50% of all domains registered. In the past, most prospective owners found themselves wishing for a .COM, and given a lack of options, were willing to settle for a .ORG or .NET. In Canada, we might also take the alternative of our country code domain (.CA), if it was applicable to restrict or focus our desired audience. . . . [more]

Do you ever wonder about how all that tech that you’re using every day really works? What powers all those social networks that seem so important? Is that website really magic? How does Dropbox work anyway? Building and managing all this tech was once the arena of specialists, developers, programmers, system administrators and such. This is no longer true.

Thanks to advances in technology it’s possible for you to hold a fully functional Internet server in the palm of your hand. Add in a handful of open source software and you’re well on your way to understanding just how all . . . [more]

We all remember the three years we spent in law school. If one of your parents attended law school, their experience likely wasn’t very different from yours. It would likely hold true for a grandparent too.

The structure of legal education in Canada has not changed significantly for over 50 years. You attend class for three years, you article for about a year, you write the bar exams, and then you are called to the bar.

Law school courses have not changed much either. The basic courses are the same, with some new courses added from time to time. Teaching . . . [more]

Professor David Post’s 2009 book , In Search of Jefferson’s Moose, is one of my favorites. Professor Post juxtaposes ideas about creativity and risk-taking as embodied both in the thinking of Thomas Jefferson and in the development of the Internet. It sounds like an odd pairing but it works. Post tells the reader at the beginning that the book represents ideas he has juggled throughout his career, so he writes freely. Reading it brought home to me important truths about the Internet. Post’s thesis is that the band of engineers who created the end-to-end freeway that is the Internet, . . . [more]

Without your clients you don’t have a firm and yet, according to the findings of the recent Canadian Lawyer Corporate Counsel Survey, most clients (80.4% of those who responded) aren’t being asked for feedback from their main law firm in a structured and meaningful way.

So let’s agree that every firm needs to implement some form of a client feedback program. Depending on your firm goals, size, resources and budget your program will look different. It should have elements of the type of formal program to which Canadian Lawyer alludes, but a robust client feedback program has to be . . . [more]

While many might have given up on AI in law due to its special challenges, interest is stirring nearby. IBM’s Watson ingestion of millions of journal pages, medical evidence and patient records, means that it is allegedly better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors. Meanwhile Google has been buying up the world’s top machine learning experts and their companies, with the latest being UK-based DeepThink. It is in part explained by the fact that Google’s engineering director Ray Kurzweil is a relentless inventor and an artificial intelligence pioneer. While Google helps make us smarter now, Kurzweil believes that AI will . . . [more]

As I’ve detailed in my book The Off Switch, Microsoft Outlook provides modern ways not just to communicate but to interrupt our work flow and make life harder.

For example, the new-mail sounds and desktop alerts (the blue “toasts” or translucent ghosties that pop up on a new message) may do more harm than good because they interrupt your thought processes.

So turn them off. (Go to Mail Options, which is under Options near the bottom of the File menu.)

Figure 1

People say to me, “But I need to be responsive to clients.”

Yes, you do, but interrupting . . . [more]

I recently attended another drinks party, again to celebrate, or rather mark, the forced departure of a former colleague after his many years of working for a major professional publisher. There was neither bitterness nor acrimony on his part, just an acceptance of that being the way it is. You work with them until you become surplus to requirement, too old (however young) and/or too expensive (however underpaid) and then you are out. The problem is that there are years of work still capable of being done and bills still to pay. In this way, another aspiring and hopeful . . . [more]