The federal government has announced proposed regulations that will allow banks to opt out of a national customer ombudsman service in favour of private ADR services that they will choose and pay for.

This seems like a bad idea.

If banks can simply shop around for another ADR service provider whenever they are unhappy with the decisions of the current provider, how can consumers and small businesses have any confidence in the integrity and impartiality of decisions?

The Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments (OBSI) currently has more than 600 participating firms including banks, credit unions, trust and loan companies, . . . [more]

Now this could be seen as a pretty strange question for one to ask . . . if it weren’t for the fact that so few law firms seem to have effectively answered this question.

Twice a year I have the privilege of conducting a one-day master class for new practice group leaders, usually held at the University of Chicago and hosted by the Ark Group. Over the years I have now conducted about a dozen of these sessions and in all cases the participants comprise firms of over 100 attorneys in size including the likes of Jones Day, . . . [more]

In 2011, the typical corporate email user received about 105 email messages a day (source: The Radicati Group), many of them on a handheld device. So if you’re trying to reach a busy person who’s likely checking email in between meetings, your best shot is to write a good subject line for your email message.

Think about what causes you to open an email message. As you scan your inbox, you probably check whose name is in the ‘From’ line and then you read the subject line. If you don’t know the sender, the subject line is all that . . . [more]

Legal research is often the bane of a criminal lawyers’ existence. Whenever I glance at the mountain of paperwork that forms the spine of a civil case I give a reassuring nod of my head secure in my early career decision to abandon corporate commercial litigation for the more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants lifestyle of a criminal barrister.

And yet, arriving in court without a meticulously researched legal position is less fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants and more akin to showing up before the bench without any trousers at all.

Sentencing law in particular raises a unique challenge for the busy criminal practitioner. While textbooks can provide . . . [more]

INTRODUCTION 

There are many similarities between Canadian and American trade-mark practice, such as the overall steps in the application process. However, sometimes Canadian lawyers and clients make erroneous assumptions about US trade-mark laws that can have a significant impact on a trade-mark portfolio. Likewise, some US lawyers and clients incorrectly assume more similarity between US and Canadian laws than actually exists. This article gives an overview of some of the similarities and differences between Canadian and US trade-mark practice so brand owners can structure their affairs accordingly when managing a cross-border trade-mark portfolio.

SOME SIMILARITIES

1. “First to File” 

In . . . [more]

Fact, Fiction, and Case Citations

The time is approaching for work to begin on the new edition of the Canadian Guide to Legal Citation. The next edition could prove to be a breakthrough edition if the editors choose to end the fiction that print law reports still matter in legal research.

Just as the current edition took a major step forward by elimination of the heretofore sacrosanct, but totally useless period, in legal citation, the editors of the Guide to Canadian Legal Research are able to introduce reality into the practice of citing court decisions by a few simple . . . [more]

Out of touch in Hawaii

It was late October, 1992, and I was in Honolulu. I had been fortunate enough that year to have had the means to attend the annual meeting of Westpac, the western Pacific chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries. And so, on Saturday, October 24, I was at one of the social events of the conference, a luau, when I heard the news that the Toronto Blue Jays had won the World Series. It was easy to get that news, because several of the attendees had brought radios with them to the . . . [more]

I am a big believer in lawn chair thinking. The expansive, blue sky imagining that can take place on summer holiday sitting by the lake, by the pool, or simply somewhere nice. For a moment a space is opened up in life and there is time to contemplate.

I also greatly appreciate the thinking that takes place under the conscious surface of the mind when we are otherwise occupied with other tasks and which announces itself with a “eureka” splash and at other times with a gentle slide into awareness “ahh”.

Margaret Wheatley, a leading writer and thinker about . . . [more]

The UK summer of sport was to be my topic this month, but Michel-Adrien has done a far better job than me recently in SLAW, so I take this opportunity instead to shamelessly promote three resources our staff provide for the use of the global legal community. The services are indexes to legal information which may be difficult to locate in other ways. The first is an index to the title, author and subject of legal dissertations written around the late 19^th / early 20^th centuries, which we call our Foreign Dissertations Database.

The second is an . . . [more]

Marketing is hard work, especially when you are constantly trying to get new clients in the door. One way that lawyers can get “new” business is by concentrating on their existing and former clients. People like to work with people they know, like and trust. It takes time to reach that point. Your existing and former clients have used your services in the past, or are using them now. They already know you. A level of trust has been established. It will be much easier to get additional work from those clients than it will be to get work from . . . [more]

[Sean Dwyer assisted in the preparation of this column.]

Like many others, we have, on this blog and elsewhere, claimed that online dispute resolution (ODR) platforms and processes constitute an extremely useful tool for conflict resolution. This being said, it is unfortunately possible to assert that a majority of attempts to create a system for ODR have fallen short of expectations, making our assertions seem somewhat difficult to defend. However, we remain convinced that the fault doesn’t lie with the technology or the concept, but rather that ODR’s failure is in large part due to the absence of obligation . . . [more]

The on-going debate on whether women lawyers can hold demanding jobs, especially at senior levels while also raising children, has exploded with this month’s article in The Atlantic magazine, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”. 

This well-written, lengthy article by a lawyer and professor at Princeton who gave up her dream job working with Hilary Clinton at the State Department in Washington, DC to return to Boston to be more present with her teenage sons, has sparked debates from the New York Times to the Globe and Mail. The Atlantic reports the article has broken readership records . . . [more]