As we’ve often heard the future of practice can be found in technology, but it can also be found in the past. A review of some of the legal stories this week provide some ideas of how things can be transformed.

At a recent conference in New Jersey, a bunch of American judges heard about the future of court houses without the court house. Trials will be virtual, they heard, and hearings will be done with videos. Court appearances for most minor matters will be more like online banking than 12 Angry Men. At a car accident, a camera . . . [more]

All that has been written and said in relation to the “access to justice” problem — that is, the fact that the majority of the population cannot obtain legal services at reasonable cost – fails to contain the necessary solution. That is because the law societies and other such institutions and experts that write the reports and speak to the problem do not understand a fundamental fact. That fact, stated as an issue, is: shouldn’t the present method of delivering legal services be abolished in favour of some other method?

The present method of legal services delivery is the “handcraftsman’s” . . . [more]

There has been a great deal of buzz over Jeff Bezos’s recent purchase of The Washington Post for a fraction of what Facebook paid for Instagram, and also a fraction of what Yahoo paid for Tumblr. How can it be that a venerable old newspaper, guardian of the right of the public to know, with hundreds of employees and thousands of square feet of bricks and mortar be worth far less than smaller companies that simply deal with code?

If lawyers ever needed another reason to believe that the world has changed. This is it.

In my view, it . . . [more]

In a busy hospital emergency room, a triage nurse can literally mean the difference between life and death, as he or she makes the call on who needs to be seen right away, and who can wait for help.

Within the Legal Futures Initiative’s consultation, some tell us that the legal system similarly needs a good triage system “to move parties to the resources they need and to facilitate more efficient use of resources.”

Most lawyers, and law firms, likely have their own forms of triage – a system by which the firm decides who gets what file, who contributes . . . [more]

A lot has been written about the “death of the billable hour”. However, sadly, it’s not dead yet.

In the last year, I’ve made the move from private practice at a large firm to senior counsel at a larger national company. Professionally and personally, it’s been an amazing and challenging transition. One of my responsibilities has been to manage outside counsel and negotiate fee new agreements. It’s a task I’ve found very interesting, particularly given my prior experience on the other side.

From what I’ve seen both in-house and in private practice (and that of a number of colleagues I’ve . . . [more]

I’ve had the luxury of doing some good reading this holiday weekend. I thought I would share a few of the articles and books I’ve been looking at:

Resistance to courtroom tweeting based on myth, not reality, by Dean Jobb (Globe and Mail, July 31, 2013)
This is a summary of attitudes and policies towards Twitter use in Canadian courtrooms including a model policy for social media use in the courtroom developed by a team put together by the the Canadian Centre for Court Technology. Hat tip Luigi Benetton.

The Changing Role of Women in the Law . . . [more]

Last night I pulled my hamstring while making a lunging (and quite dazzling) shoestring catch for our softball team.

How is this relevant to law?

Many commentators have used the old Gretzky adage – don’t go to where the puck is, but where the puck is going to be. It applies the same to baseball. When a ball is hit, fielders mentally calculate the velocity of the ball and its trajectory, then run to where the ball will be. Same with quarterbacks in football – they throw the ball to a spot on the field where the receiver will be. . . . [more]

In Is Timex Suffering the Early Stages of Disruption? Grant McCracken describes the crowd-funding approach taken by bespoke watchmakers, Hudson Watch Company and asks whether this business model challenges longstanding watchmaker Timex in the marketplace. His point isn’t that this small upstart is a threat to Timex, but that Hudson’s arrival in the market creates an opportunity for the old guard to reexamine their business models and assumptions about consumers and the marketplace they operate in.

McCracken suggests that the questions for Timex to ask are:

1. “What could HWC be telling me about the world? What’s out here that I

. . . [more]

Access to justice, according to some definitions, includes a public that has some legal literacy – people who are aware of their rights and obligations under the law.

Technology helps promote a form of legal literacy, but some lawyers say it’s a double-edged sword – clients are more willing than ever to participate in the process, says one contributor to the CBA Legal Futures consultation, but they “lack the practical understanding of the limitations of the judicial system to fully appreciate risk.”

Just as some medical patients will research online and then ask their family physician to confirm Dr. . . . [more]

I now continue sharing some of the lessons I learned from walking the historic pilgrimage route in France and Spain, the Camino Frances, over six weeks in May and June. Before we started our journey, the question in our minds was how we were going to sustain walking 20 or 25 (or even 30) kilometres a day, carrying all our belongings? We practiced hiking regularly with our backpacks loaded, but could only really manage time for walking two or maybe three days in a row. How would we walk for 35 days?

After the first two weeks–especially walking through . . . [more]

We are closing in on the dog days of summer and so I was thinking about what greater efficiency, technology and new players do to large firms in Canada.

If a law firm invests more heavily in process improvement, it becomes more efficient – in other words it can do more work with less people or through a different mix of skill sets. The firm will no longer need to hire huge swaths of new lawyers every year as most of any annual growth will be accommodated either by efficiency gains or by better use of non-lawyer personnel to do . . . [more]

On July 15, 2013, the Ontario Human Rights Commission launched a new policy on removing the 'Canadian experience' barrier in recruiting. A requirement for Canadian experience, even when implemented in good faith, can be an impenetrable barrier in recruiting, selecting, hiring or accrediting, and may result in discrimination.