How do you best deliver bad news?

A recent article in Salon describes the difficulty some doctors have in delivering bad news to their patients. No news a lawyer or project manager delivers will ever match what doctors occasionally have to impart, so how hard can it be, right?

Of course, it can still be extremely difficult to deliver unglad tidings.

The opening couplet of Doug’s Divorce by the brilliant band Uncle Bonsai puts the dilemma thus: “Do you like to pull the Band-Aid quick or slow? / Do you like to be the first or last to know?”

Quick . . . [more]

The Copyright Board of Canada and the various tariffs that it certifies rarely attract media attention. But a tariff recently certified received coverage by most major media outlets. That tariff, mandating payments for playing recorded music in weddings and other events for the years 2008-2012, will be collected by Re:Sound, a private organization representing record companies and performing musicians. If the events include dancing, the fee is double. This unusual media attention, often describing the fees as a “wedding tax” or “dancing tax”, is not surprising because it reflects how undemocratic some aspects of Canada’s copyright system have become. . . . [more]

A perennial challenge for lawyers is managing client communication. E-mail remains a cornerstone of lawyer interaction with clients and colleagues but it requires constant tending. You can use cloud-based tools to help you to automate some of your e-mail management. When a new e-mail hits your inbox, slap a label on it and archive a copy of the e-mail to your online file storage service.

One way this is possible is with a service that has already been mentioned on Slaw called If That Then This (IFTTT). In the Year of Coding, it seems a fitting name for a . . . [more]

Listening to law librarians at their recent annual meetings, it is apparent that online services are now seen in the same light as loose-leaf services. Both are sources of increasing consumer frustration that is triggering the cancellation of services that were once seen as essential to the practice of law.

The fall from grace

In their prime, online services and loose-leaf services were each seen as the panacea for all that was wrong in the world of legal research. Given the inflated expectations as to what each format could deliver, a fall from grace was inevitable.

It is hard to . . . [more]

(and by Meredith James)

With Bill C-38, the omnibus Budget Implementation Act, Bill C-38, the Conservative government will bring sweeping changes to Canada’s environmental landscape. To make approvals easier for oil sands projects and related pipelines, the Fisheries Act will be particularly affected. Major changes will dramatically narrow what a reduced corps of fisheries officers will attempt to protect. However, while there will likely be even fewer prosecutions, penalties for those that convicted will soar.

According to the federal government, the purpose of these changes in is “to focus …on the protection of fish that support commercial, recreational . . . [more]

This is another in a series of columns about developing a law library collection development policy for the new, digital information environment. In my last two columns, I discussed journals. In this column, I’ll consider legislative materials as a subset of government documents generally, their role in legal research, their place in a contemporary law library collection, controversies surrounding print vs digital formats, and possible policies for collecting them.

A discussion of the role of government documents has recently taken on immediate significance in light of last month’s press release from Publications Canada that the decision has been made to . . . [more]

As I write this, deadlines for submission to various legal ranking directories are fast approaching. This one is a survey where you rank lawyers in your field. That one is an interview where you’re asked who (after you, of course) is the best in your field. Another asks to whom you would refer a client if you couldn’t act for that client. Their timetables, criteria, and requirements are all different. Lawyers find the submission process laborious, unproductive, and frustrating. However, they are even more frustrated when they see their competitors’ names ranked above their own names (or worse, not seeing . . . [more]

An almost overwhelming amount of information is generated and stored in disparate places in our digital world. Email, documents, tweets, posts, status updates, reports, and other data flow through our computers, tablets and smartphones. Cataloging and retrieving this information is a challenge. Fortunately there are a variety of tools that make simultaneously searching through these data mines a little easier.

At Your Command

Operating system search tools, including MS Window 7 and Apple’s OS X Lion Spotlight, allow users to search files and emails locally and on external drives. They both can also be extended to search Web sources, . . . [more]

In my last posting, I presented a two unusual management metrics, specifically challenging readers to look at the amount of management “time spent exploring new opportunities” and to examine how many “new revenue ideas were launched” by the firm in the past year. In this second column, I want to explore with you some of the other metrics that may make sense for you to consider examining:

Metric #3: Defining Distinctive Attributes That Clients Value

One of the most difficult questions that we all face, that is sometimes articulated but always on a prospect’s mind is: “Why should I . . . [more]

According to dictionary.com, communication is “the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs.” That sounds pretty simple, but wait, can a word with that many syllables and so many modes of connectivity really be that simple? In the library world we know that if communication were easy, straightforward and not prone to misinterpretation, a lot of our time would be saved. Library school was all about the “reference interview”, and if I’ve learned anything since then, it is that the art of understanding and deconstructing someone else’s question is one of the most difficult . . . [more]

My involvement in law publishing spanning now over 15 years, it was difficult to resist a title like “How West Law Was Made: the Company, its Products, and its Promotions” (Ross E. Davies, Charleston Law Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 231-282, Winter 2012; George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 12-34. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2034499). Who in this industry is so distracted by their daily toil so as to neglect reading a paper promising to share such an important piece of wisdom? How indeed was West Law made? Maybe some know, but I didn’t. So when I . . . [more]

I met with my client after supper on a Friday in the vestibule of a church. It was near my place and, it being a pleasant spring evening, I walked there, pushing my then-infant daughter in her stroller. He was a regular at this particular church, and Fridays were reserved for family social events. His young children were also at the church – a rare and special occasion, authorized in this instance by the family court. The child welfare officer was due to return shortly so we chatted only briefly before he signed over his $2700 tax return and rejoined . . . [more]