Up until the Judicature Acts in 1873, lawyers in England and Wales practicing in the common law courts were known as attorneys-at-law, or attorneys for short. After this time they adopted the term solicitor, which was previously used for the courts of equity. Of course in Canada lawyers are both barristers and solicitors, although neither term is used much in common parlance.

Anthony Castelli of Circle of Legal Trust recently compared searches for “lawyer,” “lawyers,” “attorney” and “attorneys” using Google Trends in the U.S. and concluded,

…the obvious the word of choice to optimize for is attorney. In the United

I straddle a number of very different work environments every day all of which give me a very different perspective on many things. Some readers find this refreshing, others find it annoying or threatening.

As a writer hanging out with many different types of writers, discussions often crop up about getting paid for services rendered. Of concern to many writers is that more and more writers are willing to write for free, which drives down the value of writing – which in turn, drives down the already low living standard for most writers.

Harlan Ellison, well-known for his rants on . . . [more]

Sometimes a website’s message is bad because there’s so little behind it. As Bruce MacEwen puts it, there’s “no window into the strategic planning process”, and a lack of true differentiators.

I think most of us recognize that good writers can make a difference; occasionally generating that ‘homerun’ sound bite out of nothing. Even in the examples MacEwen uses, I can sense a little wordsmithing at play with a phrase like “getting into client’s heads”. But the critique here is sound. Just because you write something on your website, doesn’t make it true. And whether intended or not, a . . . [more]

The Quebec Bar Association has teamed up with Montreal radio station CIBL 101,5 and the Juripop legal clinic to organize a weekly radio debate program called Droit de Cité.

Every week, 2 teams of university debaters face off on a controversial public topic. Members of the public get to vote online to determine which team wins. All shows are archived on the Droit de Cité website.

The show started in the second half of October and will last 31 weeks.

Topics so far have included:

• Should Quebec set up its own firearms registry?
• Should the City of Montreal install

I was reading at a fairly innocuous post on Lawyers.com today, titled “The Advantages of Selling Your Own Home“, and noted the DIY nature of the topic. The coverage was fair; comparing the pluses and minuses of selling your own home, and few would likely find it controversial. I can see how many realtors would even tolerate it, as it describes a small section of the marketplace; and the numbers don’t lie — few people clearly have the time or savvy to sell their own home.

However, I would say this: if this was my site, I wouldn’t . . . [more]

Yesterday I had the pleasure of addressing the annual gathering of the Federation of Law Reform Agencies of Canada on the topic of using social media in the context of legal research. I have shared the presentation using slideshare for those who are interested. Patricia Hughes, Director of the Law Commission of Ontario shared some tweets via #FOLRAC as well.

Simon posted last year about QR Codes on lawyers’ business cards. Building on that, I put a QR Code on presentation title slides. The code links to my social media channels so that people who have questions about my . . . [more]

This is certainly one of the more ambitious public legal education initiatives in Canada.

The third season of the television series “Le Droit de Savoir” (The right to know) began on Quebec cable TV on September 18th on the Canal savoir channel (with repeats on the Télé-Québec public educational network in the summer of 2013).

The French-language series is a co-production of the Quebec Bar Association. Lawyers already write the deals for TV and film projects. So, why not just jump into producing the material itself?

Episodes in the coming season will feature reports on topics such as aboriginal law, . . . [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]

First, an important proviso. Numbers don’t actually matter.

And yet we all obsess over metrics, especially law firms trying to determine some form of ROI for entering the social media space. Largely by default and in part by design, the leading site emerging for tracking social media influence is Klout. Other sites include PeerIndex and Kred.

CEO and Klout Founder Joe Fernandez  told Forbes,

Klout is basically your social credit score. Consumers should care because it affects the way employers, companies and everyone looks at your ability to spread information as a critical part of the

Earlier this week, Tech Vibes reported that as worldwide Twitter subscribership crossed the half-billion mark, Canadian accounts were shown to account for 2% of that total, placing Canada at 8^th spot among all countries in total Twitter subscriber numbers. Canadians, of course, were also among the early adopters of Facebook and routinely top the rankings of ComScore and similar reports for such things as time spent online, so our collective Twitter presence is not actually all that surprising.

The surprise comes courtesy of some recently completed but not-yet-released research conducted by CanLII. Over a 6 week period in . . . [more]

Here’s a small matter, tiny in fact:

I’m collating some material from various Canadian law firm websites, and as part of the project I need to record the firm name along with the material I’m referencing. I imagine I’m not alone in doing this sort of thing: whether it’s a phone number, a lawyer’s name, or something the firm’s proud of and has published, it’s pretty common to grab it with select-copy-paste, and sensible too to select-copy-paste the firm name into the note as well. Yes, I could type McCarthy Tétrault, but I’m as stingy with my keystrokes as the . . . [more]

I’ve seen other summer reading lists lately and thought it would be fun to put together my own list of books currently or recently on my nightstand. There’s quite a range here–management/leadership type titles, geek girl titles, and some challenging fiction. I’m not really one for light reading! And, there’s probably no way I can get through all of these in the summer, but I can certainly try. And of course in putting this list together I found even more new books, so I better get reading.

What is on your summer reading list?

Here is the list (with no . . . [more]