It’s a fundamental marketing decision for many law firms: How much content should we publish outside our website? For many years, the answer always seemed to be: none. Firms tried to serve and address every audience and every interest in one location. The predictable result was an incredibly cluttered website, both in its message and in its presentation.

The law firm website was never intended to be a single-subject, single-audience, publishing powerhouse. Fortunately, many firms have realized this and have wised up. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the rapid transfer of “commentary” from firm websites, pushing that content . . . [more]

Cloud-based Practice Management Systems (PMS) roll on as an increasingly alluring option for law firms. Packages such as CLIO and Rocket Matter have attracted serious investment this year, while adding features standard in their more mature desktop rivals, such as document merge. Other PMS available in the marketplace are also surprisingly powerful. ActionStep, for example, started life as a workflow engine, but has grown into a full-feature PMS.

For those in smaller firms who are reluctant to let “strangers” manage their server, I remind them that I would certainly prefer to occasionally lose access to my data, than to . . . [more]

It’s not hard to find those who argue that the end is nigh for legal and professional information publishing. The security and strength of “need to know” and “have to have” information appears to have diminished, with content seeming to be down to “prince” or an even more lowly status in the monarchical hierarchy. Those who argue in those directions do so effectively, showing how the Internet, changing profitability and competitive models and the shift in favour of workflow solutions render the publishing component no longer core. Informed commentators see the current fortunes of the main professional publishers, . . . [more]

In Tunisia they are working to build the law of the future. Law that does not oppress, that is fair and not applied capriciously, and that is applied even-handedly. The challenges are enormous because the law most people in Tunisia know is not like that.

I was in Sousse, the third largest city in Tunisia, and was being driven up a hill, down an asphalt road that looked slightly nicer than the one we just got off, and not just because it was lined with lights that looked as though they had been taken straight from a centre ville Paris . . . [more]

[ français / English ]

Pour toutes sortes de raisons, il est temps d’une grande refonte de la présence Web d’Éducaloi. En effet, nous travaillons depuis plusieurs mois à refondre le site Web d’Éducaloi tout en travaillant également à refaire l’image de marque de notre organisme qui existe depuis l’an 2000. La mise à jour de notre image de marque vise à s’assurer que le grand public et le milieu juridique comprennent mieux qui nous sommes et ce que nous faisons. Aussi, elle vise à augmenter la notoriété d’Éducaloi dans la population québécoise. Ces deux grands chantiers se font en . . . [more]

The future of loose-leaf legal publications is a recurring theme here on Slaw. Ruth Bird, Susannah Tredwell, and I have each written about this topic over the last couple of years. So the tweets from the recent CALL conference proclaiming “Death to Loose-leaf” really caught my attention.

The tweets expressed the need for different formats and the hope for different content (commentary only), different format (bound instead of loose-leaf, or online with links to primary law). One alternative identified was commentary only plus research training for users in updating legislation and case law. Unbundling commentary out of loose-leaf . . . [more]

A client called me the other day to ask for help with an event he’s planning to attend. He wanted something to hand out to attendees and could I whip up something about the firm?

Whenever I get such a request, it takes me back to the earliest days of legal marketing and our “brochure bunny” days. Lawyers leaned heavily on brochures to win business or resolve a wide variety of marketing needs. Marketers then were tacticians and the production of materials was the gerbil wheel of the day. There was little, if any, discussion about strategy or planning.

One-off . . . [more]

Much has been written about apologies and how they can be effective in resolving conflict. However, two recent events spurred me to tackle this important topic once again and identify lessons that apply to conflict resolution.

First, I listened to a terrific of the CBC radio program “Under the Influence” with Terry O’Reilly. He is a master storyteller and devoted this episode of his terrific series to corporate apologies used by corporations strategically as part of a public relations plan to redeem themselves in the eyes of their public. He described four specific situations in which corporations (Johnson & Johnson, . . . [more]

Last week I was asked why my library wasn’t physically smaller.

“Isn’t everything online?” No. “Did we really need all these old books?” Yes. “Wouldn’t it be more convenient for lawyers to be able to access library materials regardless of their physical location?” Definitely.

Although we are moving towards the reality of a digital library, we have not arrived there yet.

What is available?
The most considerable barrier to the fully digital library is that many legal resources do not exist online. Legal publishers have digitized and made available online many Canadian primary legal resources such as case law and . . . [more]

Persons who design and arrange the shelving of items in a supermarket or in a cafeteria or books in a library can affect the choices people make. Such persons are choice architects and they have the opportunity of nudging people to make choices that may be good for them. The position of items can affect the choices that people make.

Whenever choices are made by individuals there is an opportunity for choice architects to affect individual decisions. For example, in organ donation some nations have a very high participation rate by requiring a negative choice on drivers’ licences. That is, . . . [more]

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]