Hardly a day goes by that I am not asked to sign a document and return it. Most of these documents come to me via email as attachments. In some cases it is a nice fillable PDF form, but often it is a Microsoft Word document with a series of underscores made to look like form fields to indicate where I am to place my signature and provide other information. To keep this “form” in Microsoft Word and fill it in I would spend a lot of time reformatting the document as one cannot actually fill in the fields, but . . . [more]

Recently the NY Times reported in an article titled “Wall St. Shock: Take a Day off, Even a Sunday” that Bank of America Merrill Lynch has issued an internal memo to its junior analysts and associates that they should try to spend four weekend days away from the office each month as part of an effort to improve working conditions. JPMorgan Chase plans to increase its staff of junior bankers by ten percent to help spread out the workload to ensure that its young employees have one “protected weekend” set aside each month. No such “relief” is planned . . . [more]

In The Lincoln Lawyer, lawyer-hero Mickey Haller learns from his father that “there is no client as scary as an innocent man”. In an interview, author Michael Connelly explained that for the lawyer defending an innocent man there can only be one acceptable outcome: Not guilty. “There can be no middle ground. No deal. No plea bargain.” According to Connelly, this places enormous pressure on the lawyer because if the lawyer fails and the client is convicted and goes to prison, the lawyer “has to live with their own guilt in knowing that an innocent man is in . . . [more]

The day is not far off when the providers of free legal information services will be able to match the services provided by Lexis, Westlaw and Wolters Kluwer.

There was a time when I would have said that this was not possible. My belief was based on the idea that the free services would always be playing catch up to a moving target, as the major legal publishers continued to enhance their products with high quality content and product innovation.

The scenario that makes the seemingly impossible possible is the “attack” on all things “Editorial” in the major legal publishing . . . [more]

The purposes for which lawyers engage on social media include: boosting visibility, increasing engagement, marketing your services, providing valuable content to your audience, building connections with other lawyers and potential clients, gathering and sharing information about the law and practice. To be a successful social media user, you’ll need to provide content that is valuable, use the right headlines and ‘shareable’ words, include images, vary your post style, and undertake other activities to boost your engagement. But timing your posts properly is another important element of your overall social media strategy.

Ideally, you’ll want to schedule content to post . . . [more]

Trilogies seem to be all the rage these days. Did a book a fraction of the length of The Lord of The Rings trilogy really need to be bisected into a bloated three-part epic about a band of short-statured heroes on a quest to slay a dragon? Probably not but it will be at least another year before we see the end of the newly expanded Hobbit theatrical release. So what to do with this, the fourth in my annual Crime & Punishment retrospective? A prologue seems out of place…does anyone really want to hear my predictions for criminal justice . . . [more]

The Supreme Court recently addressed the approach to assessment of copyright infringement in the case of Cinar Corporation v. Robinson, 2013 SCC 73 (CanLII) and thereby provided some important guidance to courts facing similar difficult determinations. 

As a basic principle the public domain provides the rich soil from which new works can be created. The Court reaffirmed that the role of copyright provides “a balance between promoting the public interest in the encouragement and dissemination of works of the arts and intellect and obtaining a just reward for the creator” and that copyright does not provide a monopoly over . . . [more]

The traditional marketing mix – product (service), price, place, and promotion – is evolving as the mix is grows in complexity. Marketing is no longer static as online marketing continues to challenge traditional marketing. Conversations are happening through various channels and for this reason marketing needs to be more fluid than ever.

Some key trends influencing the legal marketing mix:

• Word of mouth: There was a time when networking at the country club or local chamber of commerce event could connect you with prospects and those prospects could quickly investigate your reputation This still works but also consider that social

Arbitrator independence and fairness are the cornerstones of arbitration. They seem to be coming under greater scrutiny, both in Canada and abroad.

There are many sources of bias in any adjudication system, whether it is court or arbitration. (This may be a topic for another column, but see for example arbitrator Edna Sussman’s paper, “Arbitrator Decision Making: Unconscious Psychological Influences and What You Can Do About Them,” December 20, 2013, American Review of International Arbitration, Vol., No. 3, 2013 available online here.)

The accepted test for arbitrator bias in Canada was established by the Supreme Court of . . . [more]

Unless you’ve been hibernating, you know that support for Windows XP SP3 will end on April 8, 2014. This means that Microsoft will not be providing any security updates after that date. Should you care and quickly run out and purchase an upgraded operating system? Many critics are claiming that Microsoft is stopping support in order to increase sales of the more current operating system software. Others are predicting that the sky will fall as hackers are just waiting to release their latest malware right after April 8^th. We believe that there will be attempts to compromise Windows . . . [more]

During a recent presentation on developments in knowledge management, I found myself at a loss about what generalized recommendations for technological solutions to give, because I have observed ongoing and growing divides among organizations in their adoption of technology. These divides combine with differing organizational goals to create an environment where that there are fewer applications that are sufficiently generalizable to be recommended to a group, which aren’t already in widespread use. Word processors, web browsers, library systems, file management systems, and others are easy to recommend to most organizations of a certain type and size, and there was a . . . [more]

Background

Over recent years, there has been much ink spilled about “Alternative Billing Arrangements”. Generally we focus our attention on the mechanics of common structures, such as volume based discounting, contingency arrangements, flat fee billing, success fees or secondments. Intuitively, this approach seems logical and mirrors how such initiatives are often jointly approached by inhouse and external counsel teams, but it is flawed. As a result, we unknowingly restrict ourselves from unlocking the full benefits of such endeavours, and in turn, the use of alternative legal service delivery models has not reached critical mass.

The Challenge

The challenge for inhouse . . . [more]