Voting is now underway for the Law Society of Manitoba’s 2014 Bencher election and will continue until May 6 at 5:00 p.m. As has been the case for the past several elections, voting takes place electronically. It’s a good system in that it works effectively and efficiently, at least from this voter’s perspective.

The Benchers function as the board of directors of the Law Society of Manitoba. The composition of this board is set out in s. 5 of The Legal Profession Act as follows:

• 10 practising lawyers elected for the City of Winnipeg Electoral District;
• 2 practising lawyers elected

In an earlier post, I described how Ontario’s courts drastically need to be modernized.

A new initiative went online last week at www.ontariocourtdates.ca. Members of the public can now access the site to obtain daily court lists of the Superior Court of Justice or the Ontario Court of Justice throughout the province. The information is presented in aggregate form.

Although this is a great first step, it is not a significant one. The Toronto Lawyers Association has been providing very similar information for Toronto court lists on its website for many years. All that this new information does . . . [more]

A few months ago, I wrote about the general direction in which Bill No. 28, Quebec’s proposed new Code of Civil Procedure, was heading. The Code’s reform aimed at simplifying Quebec procedure and expediting matters before the courts, as well as encouraging out of court settlements and alternative dispute resolution.

The New Code has since been adopted and will govern proceedings in Quebec beginning in the Fall of 2015. It will bring about major changes to Quebec civil practice, such as the ones I highlight below.

Experts :

One of the most significant changes is to narrow the scope of . . . [more]

On April 10 UK-based Acritas legal market research company released its Canadian Law Firm Brand Index 2014. The index was derived from impressions of large corporate clients:

The Canadian Law Firm Brand Index 2014 was compiled from the unprompted responses of 191 senior general counsel in Canadian organizations with revenues over $50M who, as part of Sharplegal 2013 research, were asked about their awareness of and favorability towards law firms; their consideration of firms for top-level litigation and major M&A; as well as their use of firms for high value and inbound work. A further 77 senior in-house counsel

Technology, particularly legal technology is supposed to make the delivery of legal services more convenient. However, sometimes lawyers get in the way and muck things up. Teraview is a perfect example.

Back in the day, anyone could walk into the local registry office and register any document they wanted. Since the mid-1980s registration documents were not witnessed, nor were signatures checked. The system was one of openness and accessibility.

Then along came Teraview – which allowed registration from anywhere in Canada via the internet. A seemingly great idea that would make real estate transactions faster and smoother. However, everyone forgot . . . [more]

This article provides more details on the following comment that I posted (April 10^th) to Dan Pinnington’s article of April 8^th, “Ontario Judge Strongly Pushes for Greater Use of Technology in Courts and Orders E-Trial”:

My Comment, excerpted:
Make the preparation work of a lawyer making production comparable to that of an accountant. The client doesn’t give the accountant 100,000+ records and say, ‘here, you make up our financial records and then do the audit.’ The litigation lawyer should be able to work the same way, by combining the searching and reviewing into

Access to justice is an ongoing problem across Canada and the call is out for lawyers to contribute to the solution.

Late last fall, the Canadian Bar Association’s Task Force on Access to Justice issued a final report, Envisioning Equal Justice. The Task Force set targets to bridge the growing gap between those who can afford legal services and those who are eligible for publically funded legal services (i.e. legal aid). One of those targets is that by 2020, all lawyers will volunteer legal services at some point in their career.

Around the same time, the Action Committee on . . . [more]

We’re obviously talking about the high-minded ideals of the profession, and not the day-to-day reality of a sole practitioner trying to balance the books, but lawyers historically don’t like to think of themselves as being part of the rough and tumble of the business world.

The fear is that lawyers who are worried about the business end of the business will be distracted from their higher purpose – how do you preserve justice when at the same time you need to promote shareholders’ interests?

This sort of philosophical rhetoric is really the purview of big firms with separate accounting departments. . . . [more]

As a PhD student studying the use of knowledge technologies and access to justice strategies, I am following with interest the development of the Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) [Civil Resolution Tribunal Act, SBC 2012, c.25;] in BC – an online dispute resolution process which will provide an alternative to the courts for small claims and strata property disputes. I want to share some thoughts regarding online dispute resolution processes and to pose the possibly provocative question: Are online dispute resolution processes necessarily access to justice strategies?

You might ask how an online process could not be . . . [more]

I was in my wife’s favourite Chinese bakery the other day searching for red bean buns. The décor is nothing special, but the baked goods are exceptionally well done and insanely fresh! It’s no wonder then that we’re willing to travel a little bit out of our way to go there. And judging by the line-ups, many others feel the same way.

There are other places we can go to in Chinatown for baked goods, but we choose this one because of the quality of their goods. And they can compete against other bakers on quality because none of the . . . [more]

Yesterday was Equal Pay Day in the United States, and while the statistics released by the Pew Research Centre on the pay gap between men and women in the U.S. showed progress in shrinking the gap over time, the evidence overall revealed a persistent difference.

Last month, on the day before International Women’s Day, the federal government announced seven judicial appointments. Only one of the appointees is a woman.

It is challenging to keep from becoming frustrated with a plodding pace of change that sometimes feels like one step forward, two steps back. I know I am not . . . [more]

How well do most law firms understand and address reputational risks? Last week, I referenced the extreme example of Dewey & LeBoeuf, a bankrupt global firm that ignored reputational risk to the point where it now serves as the profession’s poster child for what-not-to-do.

This week, I’ll be more constructive.

Why pay attention to reputational risk?
It’s said that we’re now operating in a reputation economy where “who you are” matters more than “what you sell”. Research shows that across all sectors of society, transparency is now valued more than tradition, sharing more than showmanship and security more than . . . [more]