UK online newspapers and blogs are buzzing with the proposal outlined by George Osborne, a British Conservative politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the Tory conference yesterday: in exchange for shares given by their employer, newly hired employees would have to give up certain employment rights (see here for The Guardian article). Under this program, employees would be able to waive certain rights with regard to unfair dismissal, redundancy, flexible work time and receive rights of ownership. This employment-ownership scheme would see a large deregulation of the labour market and encourage start-up companies that are concerned with all the . . . [more]

In my last post I talked about a case in which Justice Brown noted that the Ontario Court system “lacks modern administrative infrastructure including, for example, proper electronic case management and document filing technologies.”

This week a friend of mine directed me to this interesting link about the state of the internet which got me to thinking, just how technologically archaic is our legal system?

Although (dare I say) most lawyers communicate by e-mail, you can only serve court documents via e-mail on counsel (you can’t serve self-represented parties) and this requires counsel to send back an acceptance of service. . . . [more]

This week, it was (on campus interview) OCI week at Western University Law School with law firms recruiting for summer jobs in 2013. For those who don’t know, students who don’t get a summer job are less likely to get an articling position, and those who don’t get an articling job are unable to practice. Not to put too fine a point on it but, 13% of students in Ontario last year did not get articling jobs. So the pressure on students can be immense.

Some students missed my class due to this time-honoured rite of passage that was only . . . [more]

The Ontario civil justice system is struggling to provide timely, cost-effective and fair access to justice to civil litigants. According to Justice D.M. Brown, if the Judges of the Superior Court are unable to respond to the challenges and stresses confronting the civil litigation system, the public system risks losing litigants to the private-sector justice system in which an ever increasing number of private arbitration centres offer parties dispute-resolution services employing modern technological systems and well-trained arbitrators, who are often retired Superior Court Judges.

Justice Brown used the decision of George Weston Ltd. v. Domtar Inc. to once again sound . . . [more]

Mitch Kowalski’s SLAW piece last week points to digital developments at the up-market UK clothier Burberry, as illustrative of what’s coming for legal services.

At the opposite end of the market there was another development in the UK last week. The Co-op supermarket chain announced the addition of a family law branch to the legal services it offers, which will evidently include fixed tariff family law and face to face advice, from over 1,000 locations.

One of the Coop’s major competitors in legal services, is Tesco supermarket.

Qualilty Solicitors with over 400 locations in a huge advertising campaign (developed by . . . [more]

Soon – perhaps within the coming days or weeks— the Prime Minister will name a new Supreme Court Justice to replace retired Justice Marie Deschamps. As set out in the Supreme Court Act, this judge must come from Quebec because section 6 of that act provides that “[a]t least three of the judges shall be appointed from among the judges of the Court of Appeal or of the Superior Court of the Province of Quebec or from among the advocates of that Province.” However, it is not completely clear who qualifies as “a Quebec judge” for the Supreme . . . [more]

A few things struck me this week. First, Jordan Furlong’s great piece, “Back when we used lawyers.” Then the opening of Burberry’s new flagship store in London, England (thanks to my colleague Antony Smith at LawSync for pointing it out to me and suggesting a digital connection to law).

Jordan’s premise is, as the title suggests, that change is constant and that in the lifetime of our parents (and even some of us) how things were done and by whom, when theywere kids, has dramatically changed. What is “normal” for legal services now or in the past will . . . [more]

We are delighted to join SLAW as your two feminist legal practitioners. We wear multiple hats with pride: we are small business owners, small practitioners, staunch feminists, young lawyers, and queer women. We stand in solidarity with sex workers, keen and questioning law students, community activists, brave women who survive trauma and are stronger for it, harm reductionists, transfolk, people of colour, contrarians, and people who speak frankly about the deficiencies in the composition and conventions of our legal system. We like all of these people’s voices to be heard, more so than what is traditionally allowed in the practice . . . [more]

This past Wednesday the Opening of the Courts ceremony occurred in Toronto, marking the start of the judicial season.

I covered the ceremony last year here on Slaw. True to their promises the protesters were present again this year.

Family Law Still a Problem

Their focus this year, as in last year, was primarily family law. Not much has changed though since last year, except that law enforcement asked the protesters to move to the sidewalk instead of using their megaphone right outside the doors.

The speeches by the judiciary also touched on family law this year. . . . [more]

Just when I had given up on major law firms doing something that makes them more efficient and innovative, international law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP relocates 250 of its staff from around the globe (if they choose to move) to Lexington, Kentucky into a former IBM building on the University of Kentucky’s Coldstream Research Campus business park.

The firm decided to move its finance, accounting, human resources, information technology, knowledge services, marketing, operations and risk management staff into one location to save costs, improve coordination and become much more efficient.

Certainly the $6.5 million in tax incentives from state and . . . [more]

I was recently prepping for a podcast with twitterite, @CharonQC, who unfortunately had to postpone it due to family reasons. So, why let some good thinking go to waste?

One of the matters we were going to discuss was that the legal profession has lost its way. Not in the sense that lawyers are struggling with the conundrum of whether they are a business or a profession. Rather, it is my view that one of the reasons that lawyers have not adapted to better and more efficient styles of legal service delivery is because by using these new styles, they . . . [more]

I missed the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference, which wraps up today in Washington D.C. So my thoughts are turning not only to envy, but also to some of my own KM thoughts mixed with those emanating from conference tweets.

Too often Canadian law firms see KM as nothing more than a repository of documents and clauses: Matthew Parson’s so-called “information landfill.” And because KM is seen as nothing more than a landfill site, firms see KM as nothing more than a software solution to assist lawyers sift through the debris.

What a terrible waste!

But, what if . . . [more]