I was recently asked which one area of civil legal aid I would protect from the upcoming spending cuts in the UK. It is difficult to single out one area of law, but I think I would protect employment advice in the civil legal aid budget for three reasons:

The rise in unemployment 

In the last three years there has been a substantial rise in unemployment and The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development predicts that in 2011 over 200,000 people in the UK will lose their jobs. This increases the probability that the number of people requiring advice regarding . . . [more]

After speaking at the Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference in Orlando earlier this month, but before flying home, I managed to catch the event’s keynote presentation. It was delivered by Jeff Williford, a facilitator with the Disney Institute, which manages the Disney Corporation’s professional development and corporate culture. He described Disney’s disciplined approach to creating a business culture and applying it throughout the company’s 60,000-strong workforce. Law firms could stand to adopt a few of Disney’s philosophies in this regard (though maybe not the company’s custom of referring to its employees as “cast members”).

One of Jeff’s observations stood out . . . [more]

Hero defined: a man of distinguished courage or ability or a man who has acquired wisdom and virtue.

I have kept a list of heroes for many years. I suspect that the list reveals a good deal about my views on several subjects. The list is as follows:

1. Cecil A. Wright (1904-1967)

Wright was known to all as Caesar. Wright earned a Ph.D. in law from Harvard in the 1920s. He later taught and became Dean at Osgoode Hall Law School when it was located in downtown Toronto. In 1949 Osgoode was the only law school in Ontario. In . . . [more]

In technology today, and especially on the web, there is a constant push for the new shiny thing. Lately it seems like that new shiny thing comes in two flavors: Voice Recognition and Video. In my (not-uncontroversial) opinion those are two of the most overrated technologies in the business right now.

Video

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Undoubtedly true, but honestly…don’t use a thousand words when 56 words will do. It seems like today every website is trying to video-enable itself and recently I even saw a pitch for video e-mail! That’s fine when the . . . [more]

The Disney Institute speaker launched us into a fascinating 90-minute presentation that started with an invitation to take a drink from a high pressure water hose, took us “off stage”, and left us inspired.

The 2011 Legal Marketing Association conference was recently held in Florida’s Walt Disney World — a great venue to ignite a conference that centres on understanding and improving the client experience.

Our Disney Institute keynote speaker was as well-rehearsed as any Disney production, but with plenty of nuggets to take away and consider. Disney, as an organization, is a model to follow and learn from. Yes, . . . [more]

No matter how good a library is, space and economic constraints mean that it simply cannot carry everything a researcher might need. As a result, libraries rely on other libraries to help fill in the gaps in their collection. (This practice has its flaws, most notably being what happens when the other libraries stop carrying the materials you need, but that’s another column.) I run the library of a Vancouver law firm so my “go to” libraries (as you might expect) are the B.C. Courthouse Libraries and the University of British Columbia’s Law Library. However, I also use the . . . [more]

The only job security any lawyer has whether as a partner or as a sole practitioner is the ability to generate clients. Leadership and power in a law firm of any size attaches to the lawyer who brings in the most business and keeps herself and other more junior lawyers supplied with work. Yet typically, the major rainmakers in law firms are primarily men. 

The National Association of Women Lawyers in the US in their 2009 annual National Survey on the Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms (www. nawl.org) found that half of the larger law firms in . . . [more]

In the mid-nineties, I was asked to demonstrate in court our evidence display system for a major prosecution. Instead of my usual script and demonstration, Senior Counsel for the Defence asked that I demonstrate by editing a document ID on our interactive system on the fly. While the system was not built to do that, particularly in court, I thought I could do it, though not quickly. Then he asked for another document to be changed, and before I had finished, another, and then half a dozen in rapid succession. In my efforts to impress the Court, I had fallen . . . [more]

Racism is like alcoholism — you can’t deal with it until you admit that you have a problem with it. Somehow the same people who might agree that Canada is filled with systemic discrimination, in virtually every institution or sector imaginable, also seem to believe that no one is a racist. (Well, maybe those boot-wearing, skinhead white supremacists, but no one else.)

No one in government, education, law, health-care, business, or social services even wants to hear the words “racism” or “racist” – they are just too harsh. How then can we deal with the harsh and deeply entrenched reality . . . [more]

There’s a tendency, and I can be more guilty than most, to moan about how awful can be the major international professional information providers. Yet, compared to so many other sectors that affect our private, community and working lives, they’re, in relative terms, harmless and not especially evil. It’s not that they’re the oil polluters, the auto industry, the military-industrial complex, the tobacco industry and the like. Law publishing causes few deaths, helps professional advisers to perform valuable work and is generally on the positive side of the balance between democracy and totalitarianism.

So, for a change, I’d like . . . [more]

Research suggests that to be Canadian is to be a volunteer. A 2003 national survey found that 19 million Canadians do volunteer work every year. This is estimated to be 2 billion hours of volunteer time per year. That’s equivalent to 1 million full time jobs. The same survey found that only 7% of volunteer time consists of sitting on board, while the other 93% finds people helping to deliver programs and services or fundraising. Another national survey found that Canadian volunteers contributed, on average, an astonishing 166 hours each in 2007.

If Canadians are serial volunteers then Canada’s lawyers . . . [more]

My inspiration for this column comes from hearing Steven Levy and Rick Kathuria speak about legal project management at the Legal IT Conference on April 4^th. Steven very effectively described the “Seven Habits of Effective Legal Project Managers” which included creating a project charter, clarifying stakeholders, minimizing waste and building a communication plan. Rick talked about how this was put into practice at McCarthy Tétrault through the implementation of a legal project management framework that involved the following four stages:

LPM Framework Define Plan Monitor Evaluate

So far, most of the focus in legal project management has been . . . [more]