As we journey through our professional careers, one valuable tool to acquire is a personal formula for overcoming the inner obstacles that often hold us back from taking on vital challenges, rich with learning and opportunity.

Fear and self-doubt don’t just come up for newly called lawyers, they also vex seasoned lawyers as well.

When I think back on this past year I remember of couple of my own brushes with these inner obstacles and the sinking, heavy, feeling that comes with them.

Oh no, I am not up for this.
I am going to fail this.
I am not . . . [more]

I love to race sailboats.

(To an outsider, a sailboat race usually falls somewhere between incomprehensible and watching-paint-dry boring. Trust me – it’s very, very different when you’re on the boat!)

I’ve raced everything from one-person dinghies to a 45-footer (14 meters) we owned until my wife noted she preferred adventures that didn’t involve frigid Pacific Northwest water. Currently, three buddies and I share a couple of Etchells-class boats – fast, fun, cheap, and easily sailed with two to four people per boat. We race them Thursday nights against other Etchells’ and similarly sized boats.

An Etchells – not ours . . . [more]

Close your eyes. Imagine living in a small apartment, with your partner and your two children. You bought it because four years ago a salesman told you it was cheaper to buy than to rent. You feel cheated because there’s so much to the deal that you feel he did not tell you. But you signed so you’re stuck, the bank says. You have a job as a foreman in construction – a flex-contract on which you’ve worked for more than five years. It asks long hours, regular work in the weekend, and provides limited long-term security. You think that’s . . . [more]

I’ve posted this article on the SSRN: “Access to Justice—Unaffordable Legal Services’ Concepts and Solutions,” for download (pdf). It provides a solution to the unaffordable legal services problem in Canada (“the problem”), so as to: (1) maintain law society management structures as they are; (2) fulfilling their duties in law to make legal services adequately available; and thus, (3) law societies can avoid being abolished. What is needed is to convert the way the work is done to provide legal services from a handcraftman’s method to a support services method. There are parts of the work done . . . [more]

I have numerous friends dealing with crises this summer. Two have mothers who have been diagnosed with life threatening illnesses. Their lives have been turned upside down. They are worried, stressed out, and deeply sad about what is happening with their moms. They are dealing with doctors and lawyers and trying to keep daily family life together while dedicating a big chuck of each day to helping their mothers.

This was the situation I found myself in last year when I received a phone call from my mother’s landlord telling me she had been found disoriented in the basement of . . . [more]

Avenue Bourghiba was closed off. A statute of the founding president of Tunisia on horseback was being reinstated in the square. The current President Essebsi was going to inaugurate it in two days. The taxi dropped me off as close as he could get. Hotel Africa is a high seventies hotel with large wooden panels, brown carpets, and huge chandeliers. As I made my way, urban Tunisia walked by and ordered drinks on the terraces: hip youngsters, women with blond hair, women with headscarves, families, groups of boys, and groups of older men.

Kalthoum picked me up later and we . . . [more]

People often talk about the intrusion of technology on our lives, particularly in the context of being at work 24/7 as long as you carry a smartphone. For a long time, I took pride in having the discipline to leave work at the office and enjoy my family time. I checked my phone in the evenings, but unless an email was a ‘true” emergency, I didn’t respond to it or think about it until the next morning when I went to the office. I told younger lawyers to train their clients and colleagues not to expect immediate responses from them . . . [more]

You have probably heard of blockchain. If you didn’t, I am sure you’ve heard of bitcoin. There is a chance you have also heard that blockchain or bitcoin are the next big thing. I believe that blockchain is the next big thing, and the purpose of this essay is to explain why and to show blockchain’s significance for lawyers and law practice.

Blockchain is an escrow of conclusive transaction evidence. That’s it. Don’t worry about hashes, blocks, distributed ledger, encryption and so on for now. Those are implementation details. All you need to know as a lawyer, a banker, a . . . [more]

At the expense of justice, governments improve the cost-efficiency of the criminal justice system but thereby weaken the safeguards against wrongful convictions. Doing so makes more money available to be spent on more politically profitable areas because there are no votes to be gained by improving the criminal justice system. This is a summary of part of a published article that develops this theme: that poor resources given the criminal justice system, increases the probability of wrongful convictions in these ways:

1. Prosecutors’ method of plea bargaining changes so as to produce more guilty pleas which increases the probability of wrongful

Nothing causes trouble in legal practice quite like communication failures. As Ian Hu from LAWPRO reminded us in his Slaw post last month, communication are the number one source of malpractice claims.

Honing proactive and effective communication skills has significant positive implications for everything from delegation, to the quality of your legal work, to your marketing and business development efforts.

With this in mind, focusing on improving your communication practices at work is probably one of the best investments you can make in your career. Where to start is quite simple, with your thoughts.

I work with many lawyers on . . . [more]

What do Ukraine and Uganda have in common, besides the U at the beginning of their name? An elaborate justice needs and satisfaction survey was just done in both countries. The Ukraine results were presented on 1 March. The Uganda results on 14 April.

First, some observations to put this in a wider context.

I hope such surveys are a trend. They should be. The UN has announced that it will hold its first ministerial meeting in July to review progress regarding implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We are, of course, mostly interested in Justice Goal 16. . . . [more]

This essay proposes a set of draft standards for automated online dispute resolution (AODR). The drafts I propose here are for transactional disputes, and specifically for AODR that generates arbitral awards in the millions of claims for debt and breach of contract. This proposal does not consider AODR for torts or disputes with non-AODR-compliant evidence or claims.

The AODR promise is simple and a little mind-boggling:

• Take millions of claims out of the court system.
• Reduce cost of dispute resolution (pre-enforcement) to zero.
• Increase speed of dispute resolution (pre-enforcement) to infinity (limited only by bandwidth and machine capacity).
• Give a