Stop marketing. Stop all the events, sponsorships and advertising. Stop updating your website, the firm blog and lawyer bios. Stop all the busy work that is often necessary in legal marketing.

If you don’t, you (and your lawyers) are at risk of not making adequate time to zero in on critical business development activities that bring in new work. The marketing function exists to build your reputation, raise your profile, establish credibility and generate interest. It will also help to identify where relationships stand and perhaps even the needs of your clients and prospects. And this is where marketing passes . . . [more]

I’m always surprised when people or businesses delude themselves into thinking they can be the best at everything, that they can excel at whatever they do and don’t need help from others, even if others are the experts. Perhaps it’s part of the “believe in yourself” culture that focuses exclusively on self rather than on teamwork or, more likely on greed, the idea being that profits can never be shared. More generously, maybe, in part, it’s because of human nature, fear and the practical experience that it’s difficult to make money when having to share the pot among too many . . . [more]

Lawyers who work on international matters may face the challenge of taking their client information across borders. In fact, any lawyer using a laptop may find herself balancing productivity with the risk of unintentional access to client data while on the road. One way to avoid this is to use a clean laptop. The concept has been mentioned on Slaw before (see here and here, for example) but how do you create a clean laptop?

One method that is mentioned is to use a second laptop, one that is installed (or re-imaged) with a clean operating system on . . . [more]

You only get one chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes. A recent study has confirmed that first impressions are persistent and can be difficult to overcome. The opening statement of the adjudicator and of the parties at the beginning of a hearing is that first impression and will often set the tone for the entire proceeding.

In crafting any communication, the first question to answer is, “who is your audience?” In many cases there are primary and secondary audiences. For an adjudicator, the primary audience is the parties to the dispute. The secondary audience for the . . . [more]

Is that the sound of your life being eaten away by the trojan called work, infiltrating our personal time via portable devices? Or is it the sound of forgotten files? Hopefully, it is you conveniently dealing with work on your terms.

Lawyers have had a long list of tools to help with getting things done. One of the first was the ToDo button, the brainchild of Peter Hart of Legalware with his Project Modeler in 1986. Inspired by this, it became the trade marked Do button in another Practice Management System (PMS).

Now there is no shortage of ToDo tools . . . [more]

On July 12, 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a ruling on Alberta (Education) v. Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright) that, on the surface at least, appears to be a game-changer for the educational contribution of “fair dealing” in Canada’s Copyright Act. While in practical terms, the ruling will do no more than cause the Copyright Board to reconsider a case in which it had ruled that a teacher copying short excerpts to use with her class did not constitute fair use. This is actually a pretty standard interpretation of fair dealing, if not a particularly favorable . . . [more]

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the zeitgeist of legal web marketing the last couple years, you know that producing and publishing content is the best possible way to grow your online reputation. But “content, content, content” is so much easier said than done. Firms need specific strategies for building an internal publishing culture. Here, I’ve assembled a list of ten tips to do this.

1. Think inside the firm, but make it smaller

If your firm is bigger than say, a dozen people, the idea of coordinating publishing across the board is pretty daunting and not . . . [more]

The 10^th anniversary of the entry into force of treaty that set up the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a good moment to look back and ahead. There are now 15 cases from 7 situations before the court. Three are so-called self-referrals – Uganda, DRC, and the Central African Republic – and two cases came via the Security Council: Darfur and Libya. The Prosecutor, with leave from the judges, used his own powers to examine the situation in Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire. These are great achievements for an institution that is only 10 years old. There is also criticism. . . . [more]

A decision last year of the Federal Court of Appeal stated a clear rule about the relationship between the patent office and patent agents: once a patent issues, most aspects of the patent application process are beyond challenge (Weatherford Canada Ltd. v. Corlac Inc., 2011 FCA 228):

[150] To be clear, the concept of abandonment in paragraph 73(1)(a) operates during the prosecution of the application for a patent. Its operation is extinguished once the patent issues.

As a result of the decision, parties challenging the validity of an issued Canadian patent may no longer point to . . . [more]

I thought electronic discussion groups or listservs were pretty much dead back in August 15, 2005 when I retired my “Law Lists” guide. Sure, a few good email lists were still thriving, but so many more had disappeared or become virtually useless. I became interested again in the state of listservs when Greg Lambert questioned their 21st century relevance in his June 2009 AALL Spectrum article: Where Do Listservs Fit in a Social Media World? The networking tool of the 90s is starting to show its age. Greg concluded that we shouldn’t retire listservs yet because, while they have . . . [more]

Gary Rodrigues’ recent column Reality Check: Fact, Fiction, and Case Citations, sparked an interesting discussion about the use of case citations: whether using the neutral citation in a secondary source is enough; which parallel citations should be included in case tables; whether we need to cite print reporters at all; and so on.

As long as I’ve been working in the world of legal publishing, we’ve taken for granted that we should include in every publication a table of cases with as many parallel citations as we could rustle up. Our tables of cases still include citations to as . . . [more]