Is it the future if it’s already here?

The Canadian Bar Association launched its Futures initiative with a view to helping legal practitioners best position themselves to face the challenges ahead, but it also took a look at the legal service providers who have already taken the plunge.

The Futures research has shown that there is no lack of ideas about how to face the future of the legal system, but none of them present a clear, obvious option. Any of them, or any combination of them, could work. Or maybe there’s another silver bullet out there, one creative solution . . . [more]

They say it takes a community to raise a child – to watch out for it, to teach and shape him or her, and to give wise counsel.

Could it be that a community is also what it takes to put the legal profession in a position to flourish?

Slaw.ca founder Simon Fodden, in a background paper prepared for the CBA Legal Futures Initiative, suggests that the lack of a communal sensibility could be one of the reasons the profession is such a slow-turning ship.

That lack is both top-down and bottom-up. Inertia is found at the top in the . . . [more]

Technology is the game-changer in the legal field, and yet most lawyers are not very technologically inclined. LawTechCamp seeks to change that, bringing together non-lawyers from the tech sector and the lawyers who are eager to identify the opportunities of the future.

Now in it’s third year, LawTechCamp is scheduled for June 8, 2013 in Toronto. The panels this year will again focus on some of the cutting-edge developments in the intersection of law and tech, and brings in several speakers from outside of Canada. Here’s a sampling of what you can expect:

Due diligence is one of those things . . . [more]

Western Union. IBM. Kodak. All are examples of well-established, successful businesses that failed to seize perfect opportunities to evolve to meet changing market conditions and paid the price. How much bigger would Western Union have been if it had bought the patent for the telephone when Alexander Graham Bell offered it? IBM’s not a small fish, but think of where it might have gone if its business modelling hadn’t suggested that carbon paper was a better bet than xerography. As for Kodak, the firm focused on film instead of the digital camera – on which it held the first patent. . . . [more]

Much is made about women leaving the practice of law. For the most part, I find the concerns somewhat overstated, and the emphasis misplaced on gender issues when this is much more likely a signal that what firms are doing isn’t working for a significant proportion of the profession. (A notable exception is the excellent piece written by Jordan Furlong this past February on Law 21: Why women leave law firms, and when they’ll return.)

Women aren’t leaving legal practice; they are leaving, for the most part, private practice. Does that say something about women? I’m not sure. Does . . . [more]

It takes a special kind of mind to love statistics, but only the wilfully obtuse ignore them.

Prior to the 2008 recession the statistics for the legal profession could borrow the Olympic Games’ motto – Faster, Higher, Stronger. Nearly five years later, higher numbers of law grads and rising fees are more problematic. Stronger? That’s a difficult question, and part of the impetus for the CBA Legal Futures Initiative. Phase I looked at the current state of the profession in an attempt to identify where the forces of change will take it so as to position Canada’s lawyers to flourish . . . [more]

The Law Society of Upper Canada (“LSUC”) held its annual general meeting last night. The meeting garnered more attention than it otherwise might have due to the mysterious last minute pulling of a motion that was received on March 28, 2013. This motion dealt with a study to enlarge the paralegal scope of practice. You can read the motion here.

There has not yet been an explanation behind the pulling of this motion–a motion that was proposed well in advance of the meeting.

So we are left to speculate.

It has never made any sense to me as to . . . [more]

♫ There’s a Law, there’s an Arm, there’s a Hand
There’s a Law, there’s an Arm, there’s a Hand… ♫

Words, music and lyrics by Leonard Cohen.

Lawrence Lessig wrote a very famous book called Code is Law (now in version 2 simply called Code v2). In these books, Lawrence (and here I am guilty of oversimplification but at least I can claim that this is Lawrence’s own oversimplification from his web site describing the books):

More than any other social space, cyberspace would be controlled or not depending upon the architecture, or “code,” of that space.

Globalization. Technology. Economy. Unbundling. Alternative billing. Offshoring.

A CBA-commissioned survey of the state of the research into the future of the legal profession suggests that while these words come up again and again in the thousands of pages of text devoted to the subject, that is where it ends. While there is a near-consensus on the forces driving change, and how law firms might adapt to the new normal this change will bring, there are few recipes showing how best to implement the ideas, and fewer cases still of them actually being implemented.

The American Bar Association held its first . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association is running through its CBA Legal Futures Initiative which ostensibly looks at allowing outside investment into law firms, the so-called, Alternative Business Structure (ABS). This initiative should be of interest to all lawyers, but most particularly to younger lawyers, as it may determine the course of their careers – perhaps for the worst.

Younger lawyers should take note of the behaviour of the CBA and various law societies in the late 1990’s and the early 2000’s around Multi-Disciplinary Practices (because of backward-thinking individuals in the CBA and in provincial law societies, MDPs have been regulated into . . . [more]

Happy May Day all! A day for celebrating the labour movement, gathering community, and strengthening the search for greater workers’ rights everywhere.

On May Day, we celebrate and support vulnerable and embattled workers as if they are outside our profession. But we’d like to return yet again to the issue of retaining women in the legal profession, and ask why, as a profession, we are so bad at turning that critical gaze inwards. An April 2013 study commissioned by the Law Society of Upper Canada and authored by Fiona M. Kay, Stacey Alarie, and Jones Adjei of Queen’s University tells . . . [more]

When we come to a new fork in an old road we continue to follow the route with which we are familiar, even though wholly different, even better avenues might open up before us.

– George Manuel

Yesterday, the Canadian Bar Association invited us to join a conversation about the future of law. The CBA’s Legal Futures Initiative launched last summer and has been in a research and information gathering phase since that time, with the results trickling out now, and to be fully released next month.

In response to their invitation, a few conversations got started on Twitter yesterday . . . [more]