My friend David Stratas alerted me to the new food available in the new UK Supreme Court. He comments; “How marvellously civilised!

Legal teams who come to the UK Supreme Court can order in catering for themselves!!! Here is the menu . . . [more]

Another welcome diversion from the stressors of our daily legal lives.

Head over to Precedent Magazine to read my most recent travel column. Destination: Costa Rica. . . . [more]

How young has a major contributor to the law been? I’d argue the case of a brilliant 21 year old Dutch student.

Over at the Yale Law Library Blog, a great exhibition on the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of Hugo Grotius‘ Mare Liberum, (“On the Freedom of the Seas“) – or Huig de Groot if you dislike Latinization. Originally published as a pamphlet, it produced the first effective argument for the freedom of the seas and, with Grotius’s more mature work, De jure belli ac pacis (1625), lent substance and prestige to the idea . . . [more]

Have you any idea how hard it is to find a Jack O Lantern carved in the image of a lawyer? I’ll tell you how hard: impossible. That’s how hard. You’d think “lawyer” would be perfect, right? Scary for most people… often seen wearing long black garments… heard to spout strange rituals in a strange language… But no.

It’s just part of the trials of working in a profession that deals in abstracts: there’s a paucity of images to symbolize us, hence the proliferation of those silly little wooden hammers that only belong in the U.S. and those silly big . . . [more]

Google’s Eric Schmidt on how things might look in 5 years:

A nice except from his talk at the Gartner Symposium, provided by the NYT.

Among his points:

It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

More interesting points at source, as well as a link to the whole talk… . . . [more]

Weir Foulds’ litigator (and my former colleague) J. Gregory Richards published a wonderfully thoughtful piece originally prepared for the Advocates’ Society called “Grace Under Pressure”, ZEN AND THE ART OF THE LITIGATION PRACTITIONER: Some Strategies for Dealing with the Unexpected and the Uncivil that bears reading for all litigators, and that firms should insist be read by young litigators. Greg’s thirty years of experience distilled to twenty points.

It’s all worth reading but I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs:

3. Great Lawyers Are Good Listeners
When someone speaks, listen carefully. A good talker can sometimes be a good

That’s the title of my newspaper column for this week. It starts off:

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: It’s a lot harder to manage online when reputations can be made or smeared by campaigns that may or may not be fair

An old customer service axiom says a dissatisfied consumer will tell eight other people about their experience.

Perhaps that axiom should now say 800, 8,000 or more, given that the Internet has made sharing dissatisfaction easier than ever.

My agreement with the newspaper prevents me from reproducing it here this soon after initial publication, but you can read the full article on . . . [more]

Speaking of anniversaries, I am currently doing work with the Women’s Law Association of Ontario, and thought others might be interested in their upcoming 90th Anniversary Gala at the Royal York Hotel on Thursday, November 26. The Right Honourable Madam Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin will be the special guest for the evening. Everyone is welcome: members and non-members; men and women. A link to the registration form is below the fold.

The Women’s Law Association of Ontario is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to advancing issues and causes relevant to women in the legal profession through education and awareness programs. . . . [more]

Congratulations to Melissa Kruger, Publisher and Editor of the magazine Precedent: The new rules of law and style. Precedent magazine recently celebrated its second anniversary in real style with the invitation-only party Dressed to Bill, featuring a fashion show with new looks modeled by ten stylish lawyers. Precedent is an independent magazine aimed at young lawyers (aged 25-40) and distributed for free to over 20,000 lawyers and law students across Ontario.

You may recall Precedent started life over three years ago as a blog. The website has maintained its “bloggy” roots with additional blog posts and columns. . . . [more]

Followers of the fillip will know I often like to get away from words on this weekly indulgence, and this is one of those times. The simple offering today is a video of a woman doing sand animation. This is not quite the same sand art that you might find a Tibetan Buddhist monk or a Navajo shaman doing, though there’s a kinship here, perhaps. This is story telling achieved by forming and reforming images in sand on a light tray as you watch the ebb and flow from above.

But seeing is understanding. So take a look at this . . . [more]

I read this a few days ago now, but it has been on my mind ever since. It is an attempt to take what “The Office” has to say about workplace dynamics at least somewhat seriously. Not being well-versed in management theory, I’m not sure how good this thinking is, but it is provocative. It is The Gervais Principle, or The Office According to “The Office”.

The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully-realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business

The Uniform Law Conference of Canada is considering upgrading its web site – at least within its modest means. What do you think a legal reform and harmonization site needs to offer? Some ongoing projects are more accessible to the public than others, but once something has been discussed at the annual conference, any documents are in principle available.

What is lacking in your view? What needs to be kept? What should be improved?

Does a creative commons licence make sense for it? (We might not be able to provide that retrospectively for commissioned studies, but at present the policy . . . [more]