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]

Although ODR is gathering much support among consumer associations, governments, and private enterprise, lawyers and members of the judiciary seem to be the most outspoken critics of the use of technology to help litigants reach an otherwise unassisted settlement. If cynics like to point to the fact that those in the legal community might simply be afraid to lose their monopoly on brokering settlements and, therefore, their jobs, we believe that this isn’t the case, but rather that their reservations are linked to an unfounded fear that ODR might contribute to the erosion of the rule of law.

For example, . . . [more]

The so-called “spanking law” has been challenged and upheld as . . . [more]

Co-authored by Anh Huynh, the Competitive Intelligence Manager at Davis LLP

To recap from Part 1, you are asked by a lawyer to get everything about a company. We have pretty much decided that this approach is not the most effective. The requestor will simply have too much information and will not know how to proceed. See Part 1 of this article, to get the reasoning for such a statement.

On the other hand, given the same scenario (a lawyer asks: “Find out everything you can on company x), what would you do if you were a CI pro? . . . [more]

Online display ads (a.k.a. “banner ads”) have been seen for most of their short existence as a kind of marketing table scrap of the modern age, an unloved byproduct created alongside the explosive growth of websites. It took about a day (circa 1997 or so) for the initial novelty to wear off of seeing something whirring or flashing on the corner of your screen while you were trying to read an article, after which banner ads simply became part of the online landscape that we grudgingly learned to live with. Their value in the marketplace limped along accordingly. Frequently, publications . . . [more]

Most lawyers and law firms know what they should be doing to maintain a secure computing environment in order to comply with ethics rules regarding confidentiality, as well as data breach notification laws. This list includes maintaining firewalls and up-to-date anti-virus and anti-malware, maintaining vigilance when opening attachments and surfing the Internet, using strong and different passwords for each important login, scrutinizing the security protocols of cloud providers, maintaining adequate backup files, and keeping operating systems patched. However, there are still reports almost daily of companies – and even law firms – experience breaches. What else can be done to . . . [more]

Call me Carl.

For a week in August, I played the role of law student intern to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. My kids were thrilled because it meant they could call me Carl – just like the student intern to Major Monagram on the Disney XD cartoon Phineas and Ferb. While I was not blessed with a theme song like my namesake, I did get a great experience and possibly an early peek on New York state’s latest advance in the promotion of access to justice.

It was only weeks after my experience . . . [more]

If you ask many lawyers why they went to law school, the answer is often “Because I got in.” In other words, armed with a shiny bachelor’s degree in English Lit, Physics or Anthropology, they need another professional designation to make them employable. I was one of those grads many decades ago with a passion for medieval history. I knew, that sadly, I was likely the only person interested in the life of Charles The Bold.

Bachelor degrees, especially in the Arts, equip us well to be successful law students. My history degree taught me excellent research and writing skills . . . [more]

Last week, the National Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, chaired by Justice Tom Cromwell, released for public consultation two of four reports from its working groups. The work of the Action Committee is guided by a vision of Canadian society where:

• Justice services are accessible, responsive and citizen focused;
• Services are integrated across justice, health, social and education sector;
• The justice system supports the health, economic and social well-being of all participants;
• The public is active and engaged with, understands and has confidence in the justice system and has the knowledge and attitudes needed