The world of biotech was all shook up this week:

In venture capital, GrowthWorks was stepping on Covington’s Blue Suede Shoes by soliciting votes against Convington’s planned acquisition of the VenGrowth funds, saying it wants time to make its own offer. The CPPIB handed a Big Hunk O’ Love to NorthLeaf Capital, turning over management of its $438 million portfolio of venture capital investments including Celtic, Edgestone, Lumira/MDS, Skypoint and Ventures West.

Meanwhile, Dr. Mick Bhatia’s group at the Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute at McMaster University found a way to make human skin cells sing “Any Way . . . [more]

The big news from London is that Norton Rose is taking over Deneys Reitz, one of South Africa’s largest firms – and African firm of the year in 2006 – and the Canadian firm Ogilvy Renault. The expanded firm will fly under the Norton Rose flag.

The two firms will formally join the Norton Rose Group on 1 June 2011. This will raise the firm’s head count to over 2,500 lawyers spread over 38 offices.

Norton Rose Chief Executive Peter Martyr commented

This is a very exciting move…Canada and South Africa are increasingly influential economies for our clients

. . . [more]

If you are a law firm starting from scratch looking to build an intranet, what would you do? Would you emulate many of the big US and Canadian firms and implement MS Sharepoint? Or look for a different solution? So often firms look over each others’ shoulder to see what the other is doing. But with intranets one size does not fit all.

I am currently in Washington, DC for KM World 2010 and was fortunate to have a good discussion with Gordon Ross, Vice President of Open Road Communications Ltd., web consultants and creators of the social intranet . . . [more]

This is the third of three posts on how information and privacy issues are shaping the future of employment law. Two weeks ago, I posted on the impending clash between information governance and personal use of corporate IT systems. Last week, I posted about internet use and the “virtualization” of workplace harms. This post is on labour stability, departing employees and information-related harms.


“Job stability, departing employees and information theft” is such a good heading for this “big picture” look at workplace law. I’ve long had a theory that departing employee litigation is on the rise because of . . . [more]

The September/October 2010 Issue of Law Practice Magazine focused on law firm professional development and how to build talent.

I think one of the must read articles from that issue is Building A Better Talent Game Plan: Best Practices for Training and Developing Lawyers by Marcia Pennington Shannon.

When making decisions about lawyer development and training programs, many firms focus mainly on how it will affect the short-term bottom line – especially when the bottom line is hurting due to a struggling economy. The article sternly warns against doing this: Giving the short shrift to professional development today can have . . . [more]

Today’s wire service announced the merger of McMillan (as McMillan, Binch, Stuart, Berry, Dunn, Corrigan & Howland ultimately slimmed down to) and Lang Michener.

The Post, Gazette, and Globe all carry the story.

Here is the video of McMillan leader, Andy Kent, and the western and eastern leaders of Lang Michener commenting on their ambitions and achievement. The new firm vaults into the top dozen of Canadian firms by size and gives McMillan a reach beyond Calgary, with Lang’s Vancouver and Hong Kong offices. There will be 400 lawyers affected by the merger, which is slated to occur . . . [more]

In addition to our post last Monday, here is the video of what happened at Dalhousie Law School during the Wickwire Lectures.

Our thanks to Richard Devlin and his colleagues for making it available. Wickwire Lecture 2010

Be patient with it loading – it’s a 1350 MB beast of a file, which will load wonderfully on university broadband, but may be slow to load on the computers of mere mortals. . . . [more]

McCracken v. Canadian National Railway Company, 2010 ONSC 6026 (Ont SCJ) is necessary reading for any member of the legal profession with any (relevant) involvement in class actions. . . . [more]

1. Following the example of the UN Model Law on Electronic Commerce, the UN E-Communications Convention [PDF] contains a provision on when electronic messages are received. They are received when they are capable of being retrieved by the addressee at an electronic address designated by the addressee. (Article 10) An electronic message is presumed to be capable of being retrieved by the addressee when it reaches the addressee’s electronic address.

The explanatory note to the Convention explains at para 180 that this presumption of retrievability may be rebutted, for example, if the security filters of the addressee’s system prevent the . . . [more]

Top 10 take-aways from the 2010 ODR and Consumers Conference in Vancouver, BC, Nov 2-3, 2010.

This is the second of three posts on how information and privacy issues are shaping the future of employment law. Last week, I posted on the impending clash between information governance and personal use of corporate IT systems. This post is about internet use and the “virtualization” of workplace harms. Next week, I’ll post on labour stability, departing employees and information-related harms. Please comment.

Some days I yearn for a case about something tangible – a theft of tools, a punch thrown at a supervisor or a marijuana cigarette smoked on lunch hour. These kinds of matters seem like . . . [more]

If you want to get a glimpse of one possible future for small to medium-sized law firms, you might take a look at the website for Britain’s QualitySolicitors. Launched this Spring, QualitySolicitors is a marketing alliance in which existing law firms become rebranded with the common logos, advertising, and approaches to potential clients. The alliance purports to identify the “best” high street firm or firms in a given area (i.e. firms for clients from the general population).

This is seen by some as a pre-emptive strike against the coming of “Tesco law practices” when the new Legal Services Act . . . [more]