We have been watching the ascent of social media in legal marketing for a few years now. Law blogs, once considered a frivolity suitable only for the technogeek outliers at the fringe of the law firm, are now recognized as legitimate business development vehicles at many, if not most, firms. Likewise, other social media channels including Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube and to some extent Facebook, have all been moving (at varying paces) along a recognizable continuum inside the law firm environment that looks a bit like this:

Derision >> skepticism >> grudging curiosity >> cautious adoption >> widespread use

As social . . . [more]

You’ve built your evidentiary PowerPoint. It’s ready to take to court. It’s chock full of interesting and persuasive images, maps, diagrams documents etc. needed to prove your case. What’s next?

Previous columns covered the basics of creating an evidentiary PowerPoint (PPT). In this column I’ll begin to cover considerations for using a PPT in court.

The PowerPoint as an Exhibit

A crucial first step is to decide is how the PowerPoint will be filed as an exhibit.

Like any object or photo used in court the PowerPoint (PPT), once referred to by a witness or displayed in court, must be . . . [more]

The possibility of losing any portion of your benefit due to your insurer’s insolvency has probably never crossed your mind. Why should it? After all, we live in a country with a carefully regulated and stable financial services industry. As a result, I think it’s unlikely that your insurer will become insolvent. However, there is a risk, albeit a very small one, and it has happened three times.

In 1992, Les Coopérants became the first Canadian insurance company to become insolvent. This was followed by Sovereign Life in 1993 and Confederation Life in 1994. This affected over 1.1 million Canadian . . . [more]

[W]e’re writing these things that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made.
Kevin Slavin, How algorithms shape our world, TEDGlobal (July 2011)

I finished my last post speculating that the business of law will be changed by programmers in the same way one might boil a frog. That is, it will happen slowly under the guise of software support for all of the decision making you have to do every day, and you’ll accept that support, incrementally, because you are a . . . [more]

I was part of the Apple IIe generation – we installed them in the school I worked at in the 1980’s. They seemed great, but somehow the DOS computers that started to creep in seemed to allow us to do more in the background, and the techies decided that this was the way to go. I learned some Unix along the way, and that helped me create some smart databases in 1990 in my library, but I soon joined the crowds. My first computer purchase was a Windows PCc, and for more than 20 years I stuck with PCs. I . . . [more]

Back in August 2010, Ontario joined the ranks of Provinces who took advantage of amendments to the Criminal Code permitting the creation of reduced suspension terms with ignition of Interlock programs for impaired drivers. When I last wrote about this topic many of the day-to-day details of the program were unclear. With the program having just celebrated its first anniversary, the time is ripe for a short retrospective on how far we’ve come.

First, the basics. The Criminal Code sets out a mandatory twelve month licence suspension for anyone convicted of impaired driving offences. Prior to the enactment of the . . . [more]

To answer the question, we interviewed our friend and colleague Matt Kesner, the CIO of Fenwick & West LLP, a West Coast law firm representing high tech and bio-tech clients. Matt has “walked the walk” when it comes to security and protecting data.

Is the data at a law firm really different or are there “special” considerations when dealing with security within a law firm? Matt suggested that there are a lot of tensions at play within a law firm. There’s always the tension between IT and end-users. The end-users are more difficult to tame and are more independent than . . . [more]

I witness this same scenario play itself out, time after time, and we never seem to learn.

Imagine this: The practice group leader or managing partner has their attention drawn to the fact that one of our beloved partners is underperforming. This leader knew that the particular partner was underperforming. It didn’t come as a shock. But they were content to let the situation drift without resolution, rather than have to confront the ugly reality of the circumstances. But today we have the facts thrust before us and now something must be done.

Our devoted leader, unaccustomed to having to . . . [more]

Everyone is talking about how to stay connected on-line and how social media is changing the way we do business. And you know what? It is. Just think of the hundreds of thousands of tweets and fans there were of Pippa Middleton’s bum at the Royal Wedding.

That said, one to one communication is still key. And meeting people face to face has never been as important as it is this day and age.

So with that in mind, here are few tips to remember the next time you step out from behind your desk.

• Have business cards with you.

On July 29th, 2011, the U.S. federal appeals court reaffirmed, in effect, the right to patent genes, if in limited cases. The court’s ruling overturned a lower court decision that voided a patent held by Myriad Genetics on BRCA1 and BRCA2, two human genes used in determining the risk that women face with breast and ovarian cancer. Much hinges on the outcome of such patent challenges, given the thousands of genes that have been patented in the United States and elsewhere.

The appeals court accepted that the chemical structure of DNA, once removed from a cell was “markedly different” from . . . [more]

Haiti is located in the West Indies, on the island of Hispaniola, between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. Its official languages are French and Haitian Créole. It shares a border with the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. It lies near Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the state of Florida in the U.S. It has a rich cultural heritage. However, researching Haiti’s law can be frustrating. Haiti is in the Caribbean, but works on Caribbean law mostly focus on English-speaking, Commonwealth Caribbean countries. Works on West Indian law tend to focus on the British West Indies. And works on Latin American . . . [more]

[ français / English ]

Trop de gens se désolent du manque de conscience citoyenne de certains de nos jeunes, du manque d’implication de nos concitoyens dans les affaires publiques, de la lassitude et de l’incompréhension généralisée face au fonctionnement de nos institutions. Il me semble que nous faisons face à un problème croissant de citoyens qui ne comprennent pas notre système et son fonctionnement.

Cependant, et trop souvent dans le travail que nous faisons chez Éducaloi, certains membres du public voient d’un mauvais œil que nous recevons des fonds des gouvernements dans notre travail… Comme si le fait que . . . [more]