The plain English movement has been going on for a long time. The first law reports in England, The Year Books (1260 to 1535), were all in the French language. Legal texts were published in England in the French language in the 16th century. But French was not the language of the people and it took a long time to get the courts to use English rather than French or Latin.

“After 1704 all reports are in English” – see The Language of the Law by David Mellinkoff, page 130.

David Mellinkoff’s book, published in 1963, is credited with starting . . . [more]

Lawyers rely on an invisible infrastructure to power their law firms. Once those wires leave your computer and hit the wall, you cede control to others. Even if you haven’t shifted any part of your practice to the cloud, you may have file or e-mail servers inside your firm that are managed by others. We can use status dashboards and related information to warn us when things have gone awry in our digital world.

Your Apps Status

A tremor runs through cyberspace when Google Mail goes offline and social networks light up with virtual handwringing. Your first awareness may be . . . [more]

This month marks the 42nd anniversary of the publication of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book. For Slaw readers younger than I, Abbie Hoffman was a political and social activist, a leader of the 1960s counterculture and youth revolution movements. With Jerry Rubin and others, he was a founding member of the Yippies (Youth International Party) and one of the defendants in the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial for incitement to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. (Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie were the Democratic nominees for that year’s presidential race; Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew won the election.) 

Steal . . . [more]

The arrival of a group of Cree youth from Whapmagoostui, the northernmost Cree village on Hudson Bay at the end of a 1,500 km walk (and the many friends they picked up along the way) after a two month trek through the northern bush should remind us that the spirit of Idle No More (INM) has not died. It has simply gone off the grid. The young people left Whapmagoostui (aka Great Whale) on January 16 and were expected in Ottawa on March 25. The first long leg of their journey – from Whapmagoostui to Chisassibi was on snowshoes and . . . [more]

It was a toss up this time whether to write about the media controversy around Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s cancellation of telecommuting and the subsequent criticism that she has betrayed women in the workforce, or to jump into the hot debate around Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book “Lean In” on how women can overcome internal barriers that can keep women out of leadership positions. 

However, after downloading the Sandberg book the day it was released and reading it in two days, the topic for this column became an easy choice. The many, many book reviews, columns and blogs debating . . . [more]

As winter turns to spring and hockey gives way to baseball and soccer, I can’t help but think about the role of referees and umpires and wonder why we don’t use them more for commercial dispute resolution.

Every competitive sport needs a referee or umpire. Even in recreational leagues, players know there will be disputed plays, broken rules and conflicts.

Business is highly competitive. Technology projects, in particular, need on-the-spot umpires who can make calls quickly and settle conflicts efficiently.

Contracts for large, complex projects typically require disputes to be escalated to senior executives or a project steering committee before . . . [more]

In December, fellow Slaw marketing columnist Doug Jasinski wrote a great post about LinkedIn’s new makeover. His post walked you through the Skills and Endorsements feature (that LinkedIn is placing a lot of emphasis on), and the new look for LinkedIn Company Pages, with their new large image-based banner and prominent status update box.

But there have been even more changes to LinkedIn’s platform that may have gone unnoticed, particularly in the legal community. These changes are making LinkedIn more interactive, and more akin to other, more ‘social’ networks.

Sharing Options

In the past, publishing Updates to LinkedIn was largely . . . [more]

Firms are navigating a tough financial climate, suppressed growth rates, and declining demand. Previous downturns have been transitory, as the industry has been able to recover within a few years. However this time the landscape has changed and the legal sector is not expected to return to previous levels of growth for a long time. Whatever kind of economist-speak you prefer, there’s no getting around the fact that now is a scary time to be a firm leader. Whether you choose to call it the digital age, the knowledge economy, or even “the New Normal,” it seems clear that we . . . [more]

The Canadian legal profession has never been shy to rationalize and justify its role in society. The public relations campaign launched by the Ontario Bar Association in February is just the latest in a long history of institutional advertising efforts tracing as far back as the 1930s when the Saskatchewan Law Society placed a series of advertisements in a farm weekly.

A new urgency, however, now colours our collective efforts. What it means (and will mean) to be a lawyer has perhaps never been more uncertain. In other jurisdictions, new and disruptive business structures are radically changing once taken-for-granted “rules . . . [more]

I came into the legal profession in the early 1990’s, just as the age of the “national” law firms was dawning. The big downtown Vancouver firms of my formative years – all independents – were soon swept up in a maelstrom of merger mania with their equivalents in Toronto and Montreal. When the dust settled a few years later, we had the basic framework of the large law firm landscape that has prevailed in this country for the better part of the past two decades. In the ensuing years the nationals built out their networks with offices in Calgary, Ottawa . . . [more]

As I’ve been mentioning in Law Librarians News it really is rather dull at the moment in the world of legal publishing — from the outside anyway. 

You will all know Lexis have dumped Matthew Bender and that’s really the only big story of the last month. Both Lexis and Westlaw have done their usual slew of Joint Ventures, Mergers and Buyouts in the world of legal technology to boost ever decreasing revenues and as late as mid March press departments at both companies were in silent mode as the number crunchers and management run around furiously creating end of . . . [more]