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]

Over the past year, I have been working on a book about the evolution of legal information in my lifetime. It is probably one of those projects that will never be finished but it is worth trying. The vagaries of time and fate placed me in an excellent position to observe the shift in the tectonic plates of legal research. When I graduated from law school in 1974, the world of printed legal information was at the end of its golden age. The West National Reporter System, the American Digest System and Shepard’s Citators were ascendant. The cutting edge of . . . [more]

In 1994, Ontario adopted the grandly named Crown Forest Sustainability Act (CFSA). A long, bruising environmental assessment (the Timber Management EA) had shown that we were ravaging Crown forests with a short term focus on extracting the most timber now, damaging the future of the forests and everything that lived there. It will be better now, the government said. The CFSA begins with impressive (if wordy) promises:

1. The purposes of this Act are to provide for the sustainability of Crown forests and, in accordance with that objective, to manage Crown forests to meet social, economic and environmental needs of

. . . [more]

In my last post on young people’s legal capability, I explored how NGOs such as PLEnet and IARS are piloting innovative Public Legal Education (“PLE”) programmes to enable individuals to take control of their own legal problems. One of the main arguments that I made for PLE is the long term pecuniary advantage to be gained from empowering (young) people to resolve their own legal problems before they reach the stage at which the state might need to step in and provide legal aid funded support. I also made the point that PLE is not a panacea that completely . . . [more]

The ISO has been Studying ZIP

Annex A of "New Work Item Proposal on Document Packaging" (April 12, 2010), ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 N 1414, said:

Today many electronic documents are embodied not in wholly proprietary formats, but in formats built on the foundation of standards.

One increasingly common approach is to specify formats in which XML documents and other digital resources are stored together in an archive based on a minimal implementation of what is known as the “ZIP” format.

Examples of document-centric formats which take this approach include:
• ISO/IEC 26300 (Open Document Format for Office Applications)
• ISO/IEC

. . . [more]

Roberta Shaffer, the Law Librarian of Congress, recently gave a keynote to the American Association of Law Librarians Vendor’s Colloquium in Chicago, and during that presentation made a number of observations about socio-info, law practice, legal research, and legal publishing trends [Fn. 1], two of which I found particularly important to highlight. First, she said that legal publishers can find lawyers to update existing content, but are having problems getting lawyers to write new treatises. Second, she said our vocabulary has changed, specifically that we are using shorter sentences and shorter words to help us cope with information overload. [Fn. . . . [more]

Michelle is a colleague of mine – an executive coach working in the oil patch. Michelle’s workdays start early. By 7 am she is in the cab of a pick up truck with a client at the wheel. Instead of business suits she wears jeans, work boots and a parka. The coaching sessions don’t take place in boardrooms but rather as her clients drive to and from the various work sites. Most days this winter it was minus thirty degrees and the trucks never warm up because of the frequent road side stops to roll down the window and conduct . . . [more]

Responding to a Request for Proposal (RFP) is an expensive exercise. Proposals are labour-intensive, often last minute, and have the capability of greatly enhancing or diminishing a law firm’s reputation with the recipients. 

Lawyers find proposals intrusive on their billable hours and think that their marketing staff should be able to handle the process. However, even the best marketing staff, who can research the prospective client and pull together a decent first draft, needs input from the lawyers on the proposal team. They need the lawyers’ insights on the client’s legal needs. They need relevant, specific examples of the firm’s . . . [more]

Myth #1: I don’t need life insurance because I’m single and have no dependents.

Fact: Everyone leaves behind expenses when they die. In addition to funeral costs, there may be medical bills and personal debts that have to be paid. While your estate could be liquidated to cover some of these costs, it takes time and may not be enough. Life insurance relieves the financial burden of your death on your family or executor by creating instant tax-free cash. 

Myth #2: I have enough life insurance through my employee benefits.

Fact: Most employee life insurance benefits are designed to provide . . . [more]