Do you and your firm have a succession plan? Or maybe this sounds familiar: “I’ve been meaning to think about it, but it always gets pushed to the side by the everyday demands of the practice.”

I met a partner from a small firm that said nearly everyone in the firm was approaching retirement in the next nine years. When I asked what their succession plan looked like, his response was typical… “Quite frankly we haven’t given it a thought.” I followed up with… “Will you close the doors when the last partner retires?” He shrugged his shoulders indicating that . . . [more]

Mobile devices provide lawyers with increased opportunities to unwittingly share confidential or private client information. One of the more common scenarios is when a lawyer or law firm staff has left the office and is using a wireless network connection. It is common to focus our hand-wringing on coffee shop wireless networks, but a home network or one in an airport, public library, courthouse, or opposing counsel’s office poses the same issues.

You can secure your activity outside the office by using a virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt your activity. If your practice is entirely cloud-based, working through an . . . [more]

This year’s Open Access Week (Oct 22-28, 2012) offers much to celebrate, whether with Directory of Open Access Journals, surpassing 8,000 journals or ROARMAP now listing close to 250 open access mandates among universities, departments and institutes. The mega-journals, from Public Library of Science, with PLoS One, the Nature Publishing Group, with Scientific Reports, or the Royal Society, with Open Biology, link open access to the first new principle of digital scholarly communication, namely, that there is room in any given journal for all of its peer-reviewed-and-approved articles, and the world is richer by the appearance . . . [more]

“Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives, I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace.” – Author Unknown.

If your legal practice or life are anything like mine, you have too many things you need to do and too little time to get them done. I often wake in the morning and think of what I need to get done at work that day. Frequently, at the end of the day I realize that I only accomplished a portion of what . . . [more]

New requirements are coming for lawyers wanting to become patent and trademark agents. Registered patent and trademark agents are able to represent applicants before the Canadian Intellectual Property Office.

Proposed amendments to the governing regulations were recently published in the Canada Gazette (“Rules Amending the Patent Rules”, “Regulations Amending the Trade-marks Regulations”) for comment. I expect the final amendments to be very similar to these proposed changes and will likely come into force in the next several months. Earlier versions of these changes were published by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) several years ago.

Many of . . . [more]

Sometimes you need to know how an act (or a specific section of an act) read at an earlier point in time. It may be to confirm that the relevant portions of the legislation have not changed, to determine how a contract should be interpreted, or for some other reason.

Finding a point-in-time version of an act can be a challenge. Fortunately a number of electronic services offer point-in-time versions of legislation, although few of these services go back more than ten years. There are three main sources for point-in-time legislation: government websites, Quicklaw and CanLII.

The federal government provides . . . [more]

The Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations (SOR/93-133) provides the framework for most of Canada’s patent litigation. The Patent Act and the PM (NOC) Regulations seek to balance “effective patent enforcement” over new and innovative drugs with the “timely market entry” of lower priced generic versions once the patents have expired. The PM (NOC) Regulations provide innovators of pharmaceutical patents (‘innovator’) with an ability to list their patents on a Patent List. A generic drug maker who wishes to obtain consent from Health Canada to market a drug based on the same active ingredient (called a Notice of Compliance or . . . [more]

As 2012 draws to a close you will likely be invited to a number of holiday celebrations with your clients and co-workers. Many important business relationships have been formed around the buffet table or the bar. Unfortunately if you go to enough parties, and you’re bound to see a few good reputations crumble.

Holiday parties offer a great opportunity to mingle and network but you need a game plan and plenty of common sense. The type of party will determine your game plan. If it is an internal party, are there people in the firm you want to get to . . . [more]

Last week, I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours digging through old Debates of the Senate so that I could pinpoint references I had made in my current thesis to material I read 30 or 40 years ago. One of the points for which my browsing these old debates brought to mind was that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has what I will call a “pre-history” that is very little known.

(I generally dislike the term “pre-history” because I’ve mainly encountered it in the context of Indigenous experience before the coming of the white man. . . . [more]

According to Martindale-Hubbell’s latest Canadian research, at least 20% of law firms’ total revenue comes from referrals (http://www.martindale-hubbell.ca/lawyer-to-lawyer-canada). One in ten of the 70 firms surveyed earned 50% of their revenue from referrals. With this order of magnitude, you would think that nurturing referral relationships would be pretty high on any firm’s marketing agenda. However, 14% of respondents don’t even track their referral sources.

I found this particularly interesting, having just completed some research on referrals myself. I found, as did Martindale-Hubbell, that the key quality referring professionals are looking for is a mixture of competence, expertise, and . . . [more]

Probably not the rhetorical question that most of you want to hear

In my publication Law Librarians News I do try and source as many legal information related jobs as i can find and note them in the newsletter.

Recruiters don’t pay LLN to do so. Rather I like to keep an informal ongoing record of what jobs are available in the legal information / management / publishing sphere as a way of highlighting the way roles are perceived, advertised and change over time.

August 2012 like any other August of the last decade was dead as the proverbial dodo . . . [more]

I had an interesting experience that reinforced something that I knew but forgot to apply and consequently allowed a situation to drift sideways.

Here’s the scenario. You have an elected Board of a dozen partners who are faced with making an important decision. They have known for some months that this matter was on the table and have had some informal discussions amongst themselves and even amongst other partners in the firm. Each came to the table declaring to the others that they were unbiased and remained open to making their decision in the best interests of the firm.

The . . . [more]