Significant numbers of law firm partners are nearing retirement age. Many firms are facing the daunting question of how to smoothly transition their clients and practices to the next generation – and most firms have taken few if any steps to tackle the thorny issues this transition can raise.

Look to the May/June 2011 issue of Law Practice Magazine if you need help with building a succession plan for your firm. It has several articles that will help you with transitioning clients, practices and leadership.

Marcia Pennington Shannon’s A Short Course in Succession Planning article gives you a snapshot of . . . [more]

Earlier this week, Gartner offered up a press release that identified 5 myths of collaboration. If you have an interest in collaboration, it’s worth reading; but to summarize, those myths are:

1. The right tools will make us collaborative
2. Collaboration is inherently a good thing
3. Collaborating takes extra time
4. People naturally will/will not collaborate
5. People instinctively know how to collaborate

The explanation given for #4 was something that particularly caught my interest:

Depending on their level of cynicism, people believe that humans naturally collaborate, or naturally don’t. While there are individuals at each end of the spectrum, most are somewhere

I had the pleasure of attending an internal presentation at my firm today by two of our partners, Eugene Meehan, QC, and Scott Maidment, on the topic of “Civility as a Strategy in Litigation: Using It as a Tactical Tool.”

The topic of civility in the legal profession has in fact been raised on SLAW in the past, including a great post by Connie Crosby called Civility in the Law, a post that prompted a lot of Comments.

However, it appears that no mention has been made on SLAW of Eugene’s writing on this topic, including an . . . [more]

Most online defamation actions I encounter primarily seek one form of relief – the removal of the offending material from the Internet. Damages and costs are often a secondary concern to clients, albeit important ones, especially in offsetting the impact on the individual’s reputation and the inconvenience of litigation.

A Malaysian case this week highlights another creative remedy that might be of interest to litigants structuring an out-of-court settlement. The Daily Mail describes the case,

Fahmi Fadzil, an opposition politician’s aide and respected commentator, claimed on the social networking site [Twitter] that his pregnant friend had been

This morning, I’ve awoken to a significant change at my firm. The signs have been changed. New business cards have been issued. Even the stickers in the elevator have been swapped. If you go to www.ogilvyrenault.com, you will be redirected to a new site.

Ogilvy Renault LLP is no more. It is now formally known as Norton Rose OR LLP and is of the Norton Rose Group. I have no doubt we will be informally known as Norton Rose. With more than 2,600 lawyers, the enlarged Norton Rose Group is a now top 10 international legal practice with 39 . . . [more]

The Ontario E-Discovery Implementation Committee (EIC) released in February revised versions of all of its e-discovery and e-trial model documents and guidance materials. Links to all of these documents are provided below.

Annotations are included throughout the EIC’s model documents and the EIC’s other e-discovery guidance documents. Many of the annotations refer to The Sedona Canada Principles Addressing Electronic Discovery (the “Sedona Canada Principles”). The Sedona Canada Principles are a set of national guidelines for e-discovery in Canada, which reflect both existing legal principles and a set of identified best practices. The Sedona Canada Principles are intended to be . . . [more]

I had the pleasure last week of presenting at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries / /L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit on the topic “Legal Project Management: Is There a Role for Law Librarians?”

My co-speaker was Andrew Terrett, the National Director of Knowledge Management at BLG who provided a great, pragmatic overview of project management in law firms.

Although in my paper I also provided a brief overview of legal project management and what various law firms were doing about it, the focus of my talk was instead on the third part of . . . [more]

Following up on Dave Bilinsky’s post earlier this month, the BC distance family mediation project at Mediate BC has launched a new blog.

Located at distancemediation.ca, Susanna Jani’s goal is to provide more insights surrounding the project, and (of interest to me) reflections on how different technologies can support the families and mediators when they aren’t in the same room. As the project moves forward, regardless of whether one’s interests are in the area of mediation or technology, the insights provided should prove interesting to Slaw readers. . . . [more]

In an April 18, 2011 post on the Minnesota State Bar Association’s Practice Blawg, it was announced that the MSBA trust accounting guides are now available to non-MSBA members. In the past these guides were behind a members-only wall.

These guides help lawyers work with trust accounts in the several commercially available mainstream accounting programs. There are 5 guides including:

• Keeping Client Trust Accounts with GnuCash 2.2.4
• Keeping Records for Client Trust Accounts Using Microsoft Office Accounting 2006 or 2007
• Using QuickBooks 6.0 for Lawyers’ Trust Accounting
• Trust Accounting with QuickBooks 2005 Professional
• Keeping Clients’ Trust Accounts with QuickBooks

SkyNews is broadcasting live the hearings at the UK Supreme Court. As the site says, “The Court normally sits between 10am and 4pm” UK time, which means that most of Canada will have to get up very early to enjoy this show. At the moment (10am ET), however, I’m watching something called Scottish Widows plc (Respondent) v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (Appellant) (Scotland) – UKSC 2010/0178. (Perhaps it’s been recorded and is being re-played.) The court and the hapless barrister are fumbling for perhaps fifteen minutes as the lawyer tries to direct the court to the correct . . . [more]

No, I’m not the seller. I only recently found a copy of my own. I’ve “had” to use my firms’ copies, for years.

It’s not only the first edition, it’s the ONLY edition (g).

The original price was $39.99. I thought it was a bargain, then. . . . [more]

Recently I was invited to attend an information session on the e-disclosure pilot project that is about to get underway for a small number of police divisions in Toronto’s Metro North jurisdiction. While electronic documentation may seem like a 1990s innovation, its adoption by notoriously change-resistant lawyers (on both sides of the criminal bar) and technologically averse police officers, may genuinely herald a new era in the archaic field of criminal law.

Starting immediately, police from the pilot detachment (currently consisting of officers from Toronto’s 31 Division who are not tasked to special teams and rolling out to two more . . . [more]