My experience to date with legal knowledge engineering has consisted of using decision trees to automate legal documents in a field known as document assembly. I have never done hard coding or played with expert system shells. Indeed, there are not many of them to play with. The only ones I am aware of are those developed by Neota Logic (formerly Jnana) and RuleBurst (since acquired by Oracle).

So it was interesting to meet Dr. Pamela Gray, a legal knowledge engineer from Charles Sturt University, and her son Xenogene Gray, a computational physicist. Together they have developed a legal . . . [more]

It’s arguably the most important thing on your law firm’s website, the whole reason why it exists. Yet it’s usually parked in some distant corner of the site, and a challenge for visitors to find quickly and use easily.

What is it? It’s your “Contact Us” functionality.

A prospective client, having reviewed a firm’s website in detail, often decides to reach out and speak with one of the firm’s lawyers. This contact is typically established using one of three methods:

1. Phone us
2. Email us
3. Fill out and submit this online contact form. 

Many firms use all three contact methods, while . . . [more]

The study of law is very intriguing, for someone like me who came to it via the back route. Since I work in a law firm library, and haven’t been to law school, I am very aware of my limitations when it comes to legal research. I like to think that makes me more observant and diligent. One of the things I’ve observed is the way the law overlaps. A few years ago, I was helping an associate sort out where he’d find the answers to a question involving dangerous driving. He ended up needing three separate pieces of legislation: . . . [more]

PR? What does it mean? I search around and wonder if it’s Public Relations or Press Relations (or rather media relations). But the two, although not unrelated, are not the same and that makes me think if, in that environment, there is more art than science applied; perhaps more faith and belief than evidence. In fairness, those within that trade seek to communicate their purposes and objectives, e.g., at the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations website, where, usefully and unsurprisingly, they offer a “jargon buster”.

Mostly, whether it’s one interpretation or another doesn’t bother me. The use of PR . . . [more]

We talk about connecting to the Internet, a pipe through which travels all of the information flowing into or out of the law practice. It is not that simple, though, and that oversimplification can mean that you overlook possible holes that might make your client or law practice information vulnerable to access by others.

Any Port in a Storm

The reason the pipe analogy works is that, while in transit, your information really is flowing amid lots of other information. But the place that it ends up – or starts from – is determined in part by what the request . . . [more]

Canada – either the Government or the Parliament of the day – has issued public apologies for its treatment of various groups, primarily ethnic communities for the mistreatment they endured in the hands of previous Governments: Japanese Canadians during WWII; Italian and Ukrainian Canadians during WWI.

Certainly the most dramatic apology was the one offered to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada for the mistreatment of their children over many decades through the residential schools run by various churches under contract with the federal government. Some other time I would like to argue that Parliament needs also to apologize for the . . . [more]

Is the practice of law predominantly a business or a profession? The debate is an old one. When Governor General David Johnston spoke of the practice of law at the recent Canadian Legal Conference in Halifax, he described it as much more than a profit-driven business. He portrayed a noble profession with duties to the client, to justice and to the public interest. He saw a social contract as existing between lawyers and society:

“There are three principal elements to any profession’s social contract. First, the profession is characterized by specialized knowledge that is taught formally and obtained by experience . . . [more]

A newly minted partner that I know, was hit with the realization that while she has a robust group of clients, she can no longer look to her firm to send her work as they did when she was an associate. Lisa knows that developing new business is now completely up to her. She also now has a responsibility to make sure that associates in her medium-sized firm are given sufficient work that they too are profitable.

When Lisa looks at her marketing plan, it includes all the right activities. She regularly contacts existing and old clients. She gives client . . . [more]

I have this dream—a nightmare really—like one of those dreams where you’re trapped in an embarrassing or compromising position. In this dream, I walk into my law firm’s library and the shelves and books are gone. Instead, I see rows of keyboards and gleaming cathode ray tubes. The computers have staged a coup d’état.

Scott Stolley, The Corruption of Legal Research, For the Defense (Apr. 2004).

The promise and scope of Big Data is that within all that data lies the answer to just about everything.

Vivek Ranadivé, Chairman and CEO, Tibco, from Crunching Big Data: more than a

Everybody wants something for free. It’s human nature. And it’s rarely more prevalent than when it comes to technology. “It’s all just bits and bytes, why should it cost anything?” says one. “Information wants to be free” suggests another. 

Today’s generations have grown up in the age of Napster and Google and surveys indicate that there is almost an expectation that digital content, including music and movies, is free. Much to the chagrin of the entertainment industry who has been battling since the invention of the tape recorder and VCR to figure out how to keep making money off a . . . [more]

Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada use “*”. CanLII uses “!”. I’m referring to the symbol that these databases use for as a “wildcard”, that is the symbol used to represent one or more characters in a string when carrying out a search. Conversely, when it comes to the symbol used to truncate a word, Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada use “!”, but CanLII uses “*”. (Google does not allow users to truncate search terms at all, although it does use “*” as a wildcard in phrase searches.)

Not only does the symbol used for the wildcard vary among online services, but . . . [more]

I never had the opportunity to take Law and Economics, and almost everything I remember from undergraduate economics courses I could have learned at Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University. In spite of my lack of knowledge about the subject I’m beginning to suspect that whatever you’re thinking about, it’s important to follow the money.

I doubt that thinking most Aboriginal issues are about money, rather than constitutional law principles, international law principles, or human rights principles is any kind of insight. But I wonder, are there foundational legal principles about money? For example, is there a legal principle . . . [more]