This past February I came out of the closet! A closet that many many people stay in and are afraid to step out of.

At the Mid-Winter Meeting of the CBA I was to report to Council. Instead I told them a story.

It was a story about a man becoming enraged when cut off while driving on a freeway who then chased after the person that cut them off and was stopped for excessive speeding. When the police officer came to the window of the vehicle the man was shaking. He was going fast enough that his vehicle could . . . [more]

Few would argue that the core of legal business development is… relationships. How you build them, nurture them and value them is the difference between lawyers who are serious about building a successful practice, and others who just give it lip service. Sure it’s easy to meet people but the question is… what do you do with that introduction? Inc. Magazine contributor Minda Zetlin looks inside the success of Mobile Deluxe, a tremendously successful gaming company, to examine founder Josh Hartwell’s secrets to becoming a master relationship builder. Zetlin explains…

How did Hartwell launch a successful mobile gaming company–with no . . . [more]

There are a number of articles about how libraries can be part of law firm-wide Knowledge Management projects and initiatives. Ted Tjaden has written a particularly good article on the subject: “The Evolution of Law-Related Knowledge Management in North America – Opportunities for Law Librarians”. However there is very little literature out there on how law libraries can use knowledge management processes within the library.

Private law libraries tend to be small, so they may not feel the need to have a formal KM program. That said, most law libraries are already practicing some sort of informal KM, . . . [more]

Recently, there has been a renewed discussion about Patent Assertion Entities, also known as non-practicing entitles (NPEs), or colloquially, patent trolls. In early June, President Obama announced new initiatives to combat what he called, Patent Assertion Entities, which “don’t actually produce anything themselves,” and instead develop a business model “to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”

The U.S. president made a number of recommendations to congress for legislative changes and announced executive actions to address these Patent Assertion Entities. The recommendations included legislative changes to permit judges to . . . [more]

Your reputation is how other people see you. What we do frames that perception so we should act professionally and positively. At the end of the day, we can’t make people think well of us. The Web expands the areas in which we need to watch for how we appear to others. It’s important for lawyers to regularly look at how they appear to the world on the Web. Just because you aren’t on the Web or in social media, doesn’t mean information about you isn’t.

This is a technology column so I’m not talking about search engine optimization, social . . . [more]

In theory, Canadians are pretty comfortable with the polluter pay principle, at least when it applies to other people. (We do not seem to feel the same way about carbon taxes.) In theory, the polluter-pay principle ensures that polluters, rather than the public or the immediate victims of pollution, bear the cost of repairing damage done to the natural environment.

As described by the Supreme Court of Canada in Imperial Oil Ltd. v. Quebec (Minister of the Environment):

In fact, that principle has become firmly entrenched in environmental law in Canada. It is found in almost all federal and

A driving force for the development of the internet was to provide certainty for internet service organizations on the liability exposure they may have for acts of third parties on their internet sites.

Given that many Canadian internet web sites do receive U.S. visitors and many also utilize a DMCA safe harbor provision, understanding the scope of protection that the safe harbor provides can be important to Canadians. The ongoing legal saga in Viacom International Inc., et al. v. YouTube, Inc., YouTube, LLC, and Google, Inc., 07 Civ. 2103 illuminates the scope of the DMCA safe harbor.

The DMCA . . . [more]

More back-seat drivers for the major legal publishers.

Robert Mackay’s recent post about how publishing is becoming an academic discipline highlights yet another source of analysis and commentary on the strategies being pursued with varying degrees of success by the legal publishers. To the growing list of blogs such as House of Butter and the Justitia Blawg, to name but two, has been now added the academic community.

This point was brought home to me by one of Robert’s students who recently completed an MA dissertation on corporate branding in the publishing industry. Her research included a survey of . . . [more]

The lack of uptake for citation management software programs, such as Zotero, EndNote, and RefWorks, by even tech savvy legal practitioners and scholars has puzzled me for some time. The absence of these programs or similar solutions is particularly surprising when one considers the large number of vendor supplied and internally customized labour saving solutions law firms implement in the interest of repeatedly saving small amounts of time and the institution wide licences many universities have implemented to encourage their use. As I started exploring the reasons for this absence, I found that there are many issues . . . [more]

One of the fears we often hear from business people and lawyers who are reluctant to put “final and binding” arbitration clauses in contracts is: “What if the arbitrator gets it wrong?”

The recent decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal in Creston Moly Corp. v. Sattva Capital Corp., 2012 BCCA 329 (CanLII) offers an object lesson in how the courts may still be too eager to review arbitration decisions and may even get the result “wrong” in situations where the arbitrator actually “got it right”.

The case involved a dispute over the payment of a finder’s fee in . . . [more]

Low interest rates are great if you are borrowing money, but not so great for an insurance company trying to make a profit. That might also be bad for you because it leads to higher rates. To understand why lower interest rates are bad for insurers, you need to know how these companies make a profit.

If you own a typical permanent life insurance policy (lifetime coverage) and did a straight present value calculation of the premiums you can expect to pay during your lifetime, the total will be less than the death benefit. If the insurer is not collecting . . . [more]

Law firms have a tendency to measure effectiveness of a marketing activity by whether “we got a file from it”. This is an inaccurate measure for several reasons, the most obvious of which is that few firms record how a file came to them.

If you’re going to invest time and resources in marketing initiatives, they should enhance at least one of the four Rs—reputation, revenue, referrals, and retention. Clients choose lawyers by their reputation, so reputation enhances revenue. Clients also choose lawyers on the recommendation of another advisor, so referrals enhance revenue and reputation enhances referrals. Clients leave lawyers . . . [more]