The traditional business development approaches for lawyers – expensive dinners, conferences, and rigid networking events – are not the only ways to build your book. In today’s rapidly evolving legal landscape, we have an opportunity to reimagine business development into something you will want to do rather than feel obliged to do.

The Authenticity Revolution in Business Development

The most significant shift in legal business development is moving away from “should-do” activities to “want-to-do” initiatives. This is not about following a prescribed set of actions. It is about creating a sustainable practice growth strategy that energizes you.

The most successful . . . [more]

I typically write about lawyer discipline, not judicial discipline. But to my surprise, there seems to have been virtually no attention to the important decision of the Ontario Divisional Court in Gibbon v Justices of the Peace Review Council in the year and a half since it was released.[1]

Gibbon was an Ontario Justice of the Peace who had attempted to influence Highway Traffic Act proceedings against her son, specifically by contacting the assigned prosecutor and by inviting the assigned Justice of the Peace to dinner.[2] While the panel of the Justices of the Peace Review Council was . . . [more]

The 2025 Edition of the “Report on the State of the US Legal Market,” from the Thomson Reuters Institute and the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law, is a pleasantly comfortable variation on this longstanding publication’s familiar theme of “Large American law firms make astonishing amounts of money but would still benefit from running even slightly like actual businesses.” Receiving a new version of this report and its consistent message every January is a welcome new year’s rite of passage.

One slightly more noteworthy aspect of this year’s edition is a section whose title asks: “Does . . . [more]

The most recent legal aid data from the Department of Justice Canada reports that total expenditures on legal aid reached a landmark in 2022-23 surpassing the $1 billion mark, standing at $1.14 billion.[1] This brings to mind the phrase famously attributed to the American Senator Everett Dirksen, although he later denied having said it but decided he would let it stand anyway because it sounded good; a billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. The importance of Dirksen’s remark is that it humourously captures the awesome scale of amounts of money in . . . [more]

If you’re looking for the definition of a word on Google, you can use the define: tag. For example, if you are looking for the definition of “affidavit”, you’d use the syntax define:affidavit which will bring up a brief definition along with its pronunciation. If you click on the “see more” arrow, google will bring up a brief etymology of the word as well as usage over time.

— Susannah Tredwell . . . [more]

The persecution of lawyers in Belarus is the focus of attention during the 15^th international Day of the Endangered Lawyer on 24 January 2025. This international day has been observed by lawyers around the world on the 24^th of January every year since 2010.

Each year the focus is on a country where lawyers and legal professionals are at particular risk. In 2025 the focus is on Belarus.

This year’s coalition of 31 lawyers’ organizations around the world has documented the dire situation of Belarusian lawyers and legal professionals in a 34-page report released today.

A concerted attack . . . [more]

2024 has been a tough year. I don’t know about you, but I needed to end the year with something good to cling to going into 2025. The Advent season spurred a lot of talk about hope, so I looked for things that provided a glimpse of hope for the future of access to justice in BC and beyond. We are tired and need encouragement to keep working.

The good news is that there is much to be hopeful about in the A2J space! Here are some links (Note 1) that crossed my desk in the last month showing recent . . . [more]

One of the earliest projects that was launched at the University of Victoria’s AI Risk and Regulation Lab was a mapping initiative that tracked both how artificial intelligence (AI) is regulated and litigated. To date, litigation tracking has primarily been focused on cases arising from the United States and internationally as until November 2024, there was virtually no domestic litigation to discuss. That changed recently when two lawsuits were filed in the month of November, signaling that Canada is now joining an international surge of AI-related legal disputes. In this column I will briefly review the two recently launched cases . . . [more]

Regular readers of this column (thank you) will recognize copyright reform is a common interest of mine, especially as such reform might lead to greater public access to research. Still, I only took up the copyright torch after a very loose consensus – among researchers, publishers, librarians and funders – around open access’ scientific value began to emerge. Such consensus has been called the iron law of copyright reform. Could such reform address, I dared to hope, reduce such impediments to open access as publishers dragging their heels, while holding on to subscription arrangements, even as they introduced rampant price . . . [more]

Imagine being offered a career-defining opportunity—one that could catapult your skills and confidence to the next level. Now, imagine turning it down, not because you lack potential, but because you fear falling short. This scenario is more common than you think, and the difference between seizing such opportunities and walking away often comes down to mindset. Are you operating from a fixed mindset, where abilities feel set in stone, or a growth mindset, where every challenge is a stepping stone to improvement?

Here is what this looks like in legal practice: Samantha is comfortable behind the scenes, the partners are . . . [more]

[Une version française suit]

On January 13, 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada issued its landmark decision in Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island, 2000 SCC 1 (CanLII), [2000] 1 SCR 3, a case significant for its impact on minority language educational rights in Canada. This decision was also the Court’s first to adopt the Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law, a pivotal innovation introduced in 1999 by the Canadian Citation Committee. Neutral citations have since become a cornerstone of Canadian legal practice, providing a standardized, vendor-neutral method for referring to judicial decisions, as reported many times here . . . [more]

Justice must be fair and impartial, but also must be seen to be fair and impartial – and inclusive tribunal processes are a big contribution to the sense of fairness that all participants in a tribunal proceeding are entitled to receive. Language – and people’s perception of that language – is an important gateway to fairness (and perceptions of fairness). Karen Yin has a website that focuses on the language of equity and has also recently published a book that serves as a useful guide to the use of what she terms “conscious language”: The Conscious Style Guide: A Flexible . . . [more]