On May 7 I received some very good news about the Library of the Supreme Court. “David S. Mao has been named the new Librarian of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Mao will be the 12th Librarian of the Court. He succeeds Linda Maslow, who retired in August 2022 after serving 10 years as Librarian and 33 years at the Supreme Court. William Sleeman, the Court’s Assistant Librarian for Technical Services and Special Collections, has served as Acting Librarian since July 2023. Mr. Mao is expected to assume his new duties on July 1, 2024. As Librarian, . . . [more]

Aspen Publishing, until the end of 2021, was part of Wolters Kluwer’s Legal & Regulatory information publishing business unit. Around that time, it was sold, for $88m, to Transom Capital Group, a private equity firm. A mere two years later, it has been moved on again, this time to UWorld, a US-based online learning business, which was established in 2003, by a medical doctor.

UWorld’s existing learning resources and methods are offered in certain undergraduate, graduate and professional environments, such as accounting, finance, medical, pharmacy and nursing, as well as for some aspects of US legal training. In . . . [more]

I am very happy to be writing for SLAW again after 10 years of absence. I ended my time with SLAW in 2014 writing about general practice management issues and return in 2024 with a specific focus on risk management for artificial intelligence. My last column was posted in 2014 and bore the title “Risk Management Revisited”. In that post I briefly discussed the value of risk management for law firms and set out some basic steps that firms could take to begin the risk management process. I also observed at that time that “[u]nfortunately, in my experience, . . . [more]

“This is the largest theft in the United States, period.” Such is the judgment of author and scriptwriter Justine Bateman who has complained to the US Copyright Office that the AI industry has scraped her work, much as it has everything else, having exhausted Wikipedia and Reddit it is moving on YouTube transcripts and Google docs. This is what it takes to assemble the trillions of words needed to expand the training of ever-more-powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). As a result, Bateman’s complaint has become a common charge. Authors (notably Sarah Silverman and John Grisham), publishers (Universal Music . . . [more]

People’s Law School recently launched a ChatGPT-4 powered Chatbot to respond to questions posed by visitors to PLS’s website. The Chatbot is named Beagle+ and it has a very cute icon.

This PLS post describes the Chatbot and provides some examples of questions and responses. I was particularly intrigued with the assertion that it provides “helpful and empathetic” responses to peoples’ legal questions. I’m skeptical about AI’s ability to communicate effective empathy. But I was surprised to read the final example in the post:

Beagle+: Before you go, I just want to remind you to take care of

There are a lot of ways to characterize any event, and a good lawyer can use language to describe a situation and also advocate for their client. I learned from experienced colleagues who were teaching students this skill. The example my colleagues used was drawn from a tragic event nearby: a police shooting of a person who had not yet harmed others but who was behaving erratically and had brandished a weapon.

My colleagues used two documents from the case. The first was written by a pro-police advocate who described the scene and the confusion and fear felt by the . . . [more]

Legal service is a business. Run it that way.

Many law firms are successful by accident.

Anyone who knows anything about traditional law firm structures knows they are perilously fragile. It doesn’t take much to bring them down.

Up until this latest debacle—the 2024 collapse of Minden Gross—Canada’s highest-profile law firm failures were Heenan Blaikie in 2014, Goodman and Carr in 2007, and Holden Day Wilson in 1996.

Canadian law firms are not alone in this plight. For example—and this is only a small sampling—lawyer exits and merger failure brought down U.S.-based Stroock & Stroock & Lavan at the end . . . [more]

Everyone is the poet of their memories. … But like the best poems, they’re also never really finished because they gain new meaning as time reveals them in different lights.

Richard Hell

The resolution of disputes does not always depend on the memories of parties or witnesses, but when credibility is at issue the memories of actions can be a critical part of resolving disputes. The more we learn about how memories are formed, and more importantly, how they are retained, the more we should have real concerns about the ability of decision-makers to assess credibility of testimony of events . . . [more]

I recently read about an interesting concept about reframing one’s point of view.

It stated that if you wake up with the sun, you are still asleep. However if you awaken the sun, then you are truly awake.

I had to read it a few times to actually understand it’s meaning, but then I realized that what this means, is that the way our day develops is completely up to us.

If we set an intention for the day to unfold in a calm and peaceful manner, knowing that we are fully capable of dealing with whatever challenges may arise, . . . [more]

Earlier this month, the government of British Columbia introduced Bill 21, the Legal Professions Act. This bill amalgamates the Law Society of British Columbia and the Society of Notaries Public of British Columbia into a new corporation, Legal Professions British Columbia (LPBC), while also creating a licensing and regulation structure for paralegals. It could be the most consequential development in Canadian legal regulation in more than 100 years.

The British Columbia legal profession’s leading organizations (the Law Society, the Canadian Bar Association’s BC branch, and the Trial Lawyers’ Association of BC) strongly oppose Bill 21, with the . . . [more]

The use of demonstrative or visual aids at mediation is more widely accepted by lawyers and mediators since the legal profession began its rapid embrace of technology. Arguably, the pandemic accelerated this implementation. The technology adoption started with the exchange of electronic mediation briefs, improved access to scanned documents, and the use of video software, like Zoom and Teams. Now, counsel more commonly use Power Point or slides and electronic documentation in their introductory remarks, and present demonstrative aids in their Mediation Briefs to bolster arguments by visual communication.

Through technology, counsel can now utilize a variety of demonstrative aids . . . [more]

Case Commented On: KMN v SZM, 2024 BCCA 70 (CanLII), overturning 2023 BCSC 940 (CanLII)

We have both written previously on myths and stereotypes about intimate partner violence (IPV), one of the most common of which is that women make false or exaggerated claims of violence to gain an advantage in family law disputes (see here and here). In KMN v SZM, 2024 BCCA 70 (CanLII), the British Columbia Court of Appeal (BCCA) recognized the existence of this myth and the need for courts to avoid making assumptions that perpetuate it, holding that it is . . . [more]