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

We’ve been seeing a lot Gerry Oginski lately. He is a practicing lawyer but is also a frequent lecturer on lawyer videos and he has recently written Secrets of Lawyer Video Marketing in the Age of YouTube. We were curious to read the book because we know something about videos and have our own Sensei YouTube channel with dozens of videos.

Clearly, anyone who is a video novice would benefit from reading Gerry’s book, but we found things in his book that we didn’t know. If you are a lawyer who has not yet embarked on lawyer videos, you . . . [more]

Juliet is a new partner with a corporate finance and securities practice. Over the past seven years she has honed her legal skills and has developed the trust of her partners and clients. She is a perfectionist at heart and has a killer eye for detail. She will do whatever it takes to get the deal done and still regularly pulls all nighters.

She has tried working with juniors but the delegation hasn’t worked well. The work product she gets back is not up to her standards and it seems like it takes more time to fix the mistakes than . . . [more]

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been concerned about, and relatively unforgiving in my dislike of, the idea of law blogs, specifically lawyer-generated blogs, as a bellwether for legal publishing. Some have taken me to task, at least partially, for it. Nevertheless, I’ve remain annoyed by the chorus of social media marketers exalting the virtues of blog content (and social media streams) as a means of differentiating one from the herd. And no one has been more vocal about this than Kevin O’Keefe, the founder of the LexBlog network, which “partners with clients to develop custom social media . . . [more]

We all agree that the publishing world is at a crossroads, and that it faces multiple challenges. The challenges come not only from the increase in digital formats, the preferences of a majority of Amazon customers for e-books over real books, or the decline in (real) newspaper purchasing. It also comes from people who have so many alternative forms of entertainment and activities that they no longer read much anymore.

For legal publishers there are added difficulties. After growing on the profits of a captive market through the publication of serial resources such as law reports and looseleaf titles, both . . . [more]

In part 1 of this series of articles, I set out my view that the world of career planning for young law school graduates has changed significantly and asserted that a change was thus also needed in how we planned for our careers. The changed advocated for is one from the relatively static career planning process of aptitude identification and planning to a more dynamic approach that borrows from the disciplines of strategic and risk management. Finally, in order to expand on this point I discussed three core principles including that work has changed, that the work participants are . . . [more]

The worldwide patent litigation between Apple Corporation and Samsung Electronics is a perfect illustration of the “lose-lose” nature of high-stakes IP litigation.

While the headlines have focused on the $1 billion U.S. jury award Apple won at the end of August, in the long run Apple may turn out to have been a loser in this struggle as well.

Some brief history.

Apple and Samsung are long-time business partners. Samsung holds many patents on touch screen technology. It supplied screens for the iPod and iPhone. Samsung still makes the touch screen for Apple’s iPad tablet computers. It won the contract . . . [more]