I visited my local Service Ontario office recently to do something the government requires of me every five years: renew my driver’s license. Fifteen minutes, a few signatures and a couple of photographs later, the deed was done, and I received my new license by registered mail a couple of weeks afterward. Couldn’t have been easier.

I did have to prove a number of things before I could get my new license, mind you. I had to bring in my passport and birth certificate, attest in good faith that I was a citizen of Canada, that sort of thing. Interestingly . . . [more]

Voice recognition has been getting lots of press recently, thanks to the release of the Siri software with the latest Apple iPhones. It has been a mainstay of discussions around legal technology for more than a decade and yet continues to be a point of uncertainty for lawyers. In particular, how do they use voice recognition in their practices. Ben Schorr discussed some of the challenges of using voice recognition earlier this year. I also received a question at a recent seminar about voice recognition so I thought I would take another look at it.

Speech to Text Conversion Software . . . [more]

I stumbled into this career and it has been a blast! I did not plan to specialize in foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarianship. I just wanted to be the world’s greatest general legal reference librarian (ah, youth!). But, here I am, enjoying doing work I never imagined.

Because I’ve been in the profession for a while, I get asked from time to time – how does one become an FCIL librarian? Here’s what I would have done to research career opportunities as an FCIL librarian (besides reviewing job postings to see what current employers are expecting from FCIL . . . [more]

What is the Cultural Commons?

The cultural commons is a vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past. A commons is a kind of property in which more than one person has rights. A commons is a social regime for managing a collectively owned resource.

In writing about art and ideas, Lewis Hyde, in his book titled, Common as Air (2010) states at page 214 “art and ideas, unlike land and houses, belong by nature to a cultural commons, open to all”.

In Imperial China, 900 to 1800, to copy the work . . . [more]

In my last column, I reviewed the uses of seals in transactional documents and the means by which seals could be created in electronic communications. Here I will deal with seals on public or official documents, when they are issued in or converted to electronic form. Contracts to which the Crown happens to be a party are of course transactional documents so fall within the previous topic.

Functional analysis

Public sector seals are placed on documents for a different purpose than the seals on transactional documents. They are not used to show that the state takes the subject matter . . . [more]

A few months ago we had a minor flood in the library. It wasn’t catastrophic, in large part due to the observant eyes of a lawyer browsing our tax section. Nonetheless it was a reminder of how important it is for libraries, regardless of size, to have a disaster recovery plan. In addition to our firm-wide business recovery plan, we now have a specialized library disaster plan.

Key tips for the disaster plan include:

• Keep the plan simple. Guy Robertson, a specialist in disaster planning, recommends that the plan be small and portable; wallet-sized is ideal.
• Clearly delineate responsibilities of

The retention of women in private practice continues to be a challenge. Although women now form the majority of graduates from law school, they leave the profession at much higher rates than men. The BC Law Society reports that 36 per cent of women leave the profession in their first five years in practice compared to 22 per cent of men.

Over the years, many women lawyers have tried to convince law firms to adopt broader alternate work arrangements or entry requirements into partnership but have found law firms very difficult to change. When change has not happened as quickly . . . [more]

There was a time, not too long ago, when some in legal and professional publishing would refer to their sector as offering “a license to print money”. The highest quality publishers were renowned for the wonderful reputations of their products and services, their market knowledge and intimacy, their relationships and engagement with their customers and, even though prices were high, compared to other forms of information publishing, they were trusted and supported by their markets. Obviously, customer service was always pretty terrible but that was a quaint characteristic which was recognised and accommodated, partly on grounds that true value . . . [more]

Creating an annual roundup of legal web technology predictions was never on my personal “to do” list. Rather, it was an accidental offering started here at Slaw a few years ago. Now, much like repeated broadcasts of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” it’s somehow become a holiday tradition.

Some of these predictions pick up on current trends, and extend my own perspective of how that trend might play out in the legal market. Others ideas are clearly more “blue sky,” my honest attempts at swinging for the fences (or more accurately, my emulations of the Mighty Casey). Either way, this is . . . [more]

Access to justice issues in the Canadian civil justice system are often framed around affordability, geography, and the quality of service provision. Affordability is most often linked to the high costs of privately provided legal services and the underfunding of legal aid. Geography has recently been shown to be relevant in major studies in Alberta and Ontario, one by the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, the other by the Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project. Both emphasized that lawyers and paralegals are overwhelming concentrated in large urban centres. The quality of public service provision has been an issue in the case . . . [more]

This scenario will be familiar to any marketing staffer in a large law firm: the phone rings and it’s someone asking why you haven’t sent them the firm logo for their program. You have no idea what they’re talking about, but apparently your firm is sponsoring their upcoming event and if you want your contribution acknowledged, they need your logo ASAP.

After wasting your morning trying to track down who initiated this sponsorship, you discover that it was booked three months ago by a partner in the firm. Many of the benefits in the sponsorship package have passed, except for . . . [more]

The days run by so swiftly it seems like the world is spinning faster and time has compressed. Everyone I speak to feels this same rush as summer disappears into winter in the blink of an eye. So much to do and so little time to do it, has become a theme of our collective days. One way I tackled the challenge was to literally employ an extra set of hands. I hired a virtual assistant, Mary-Lou, and that decision changed my life for the better.

What’s a virtual assistant?

A virtual assistant is an administrative professional and business owner . . . [more]