Law student groups at the University of Ottawa are at it again. Those pesky students are demanding respect from their peers and the communities and institutions they participate in.

Last week the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) Ottawa Chapter took to the internet, local media, and held a press conference, to speak out against the racist graffiti found in the men’s washroom at the Faculty of Law.

In his interview with the CBC Radio the President of the Ottawa BLSA chapter, Christian Levien, said that the graffiti is reflective of a tension that is generally on campus. He . . . [more]

By Tiffany Wong

The 6th Annual Conference and Banquet of the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers (FACL) was held on November 10th, 2012 at the Toronto Board of Trade. Started in 2007, FACL and has grown from a small conference to a virtually sold out event of hundreds of lawyers, law students and allies from the Asian-Canadian legal community.

This year’s keynote speaker was Don Liu, Senior Vice-President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Xerox Corporation, Recipient of the 2011 Trailblazer Award from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA), and one of only nine general counsel of a . . . [more]

I seriously doubt the wisdom of mandatory mediation, for a number of reasons. One is that sophisticated parties who have paid lawyers to advise them, to serve pleadings and to discover evidence, should not be subjected to the additional financial and emotional trauma of mediation where without prejudice settlement discussions have been fruitless.

A UK High Court costs decision last month illustrates the point. At trial a claim for 16 million pounds for breach of a distributorship agreement was dismissed. The claimant argued that although the defendant was prima facie entitled to its costs, there should be a 50% reduction . . . [more]

You may have already seen this, but it was new to me. In 2010-2011 Harvard Law School and New York Law School hosted a year-long contest of ideas respecting legal education called “Future Ed“. One of the results was the book Educating the Digital Lawyer edited by Marc Lauritsen and Oliver Goodenough. The book explores the question “What will legal education look like as we train our graduates to be effective lawyers in the digital world of the 21st Century?”

Published by LexisNexis, a complimentary copy of the e-book format is available here [note: clicking on this link . . . [more]

If you missed the 2012 Futures Conference and Annual Meeting of the College of Law Practice Management in Washington, D.C. late last month (as I unfortunately did), then you also missed out on an extraordinary exploration of change and innovation in the legal marketplace.

Here are two excellent summaries of what went down at the Futures Conference:

• Ron Friedmann of Fireman & Co., co-chair of the conference, published an extensive report at his Strategic Legal Technology blog titled “Overview of the New Legal Normal.” Key quote: “One panelist noted that given how many consumers cannot afford . . . [more]

Today I went to the dentist – an experience that most people loathe as much as going to a lawyer.

As I lounged in discomfort, I had several thoughts:

First, I knew exactly how much I was going to pay for the professional services being rendered. Most dental work is done on a fixed fee basis, no matter how long, or how little time, the procedure may take. Some work, could, as my dentist explained to me take longer, but it all balances out in the end by other quicker work.

Small legal practitioners like myself understand the concept of . . . [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

Recently, a few of our favourite feminist law students took issue with an article entitled “ You Have the Right to Remain Stylish” posted in the University of Ottawa Common Law Student Newspaper. The light hearted piece aimed at law students doled out unsolicited fashion advice about things like what kind of suits to buy to dress for success, and the importance of wearing heels and jewelry.

The University of Ottawa OUTLAW Executive (the LGBTQA Student Association) and the University of Ottawa Law Union Steering Committee wrote a heartfelt and badass response to the article calling it out for perpetuating . . . [more]

Last week the Divisional Court upheld a trial decision in which the purchasers of a home were awarded $25,000 in damages from the seller.

The purchasers entered into an agreement of purchase and sale with the vendor and, smartly, made the deal conditional on the purchasers receiving a Seller Property Information Statement (“SPIS”).

The SPIS is a standard form document that was drafted by the Ontario Real Estate Association. The SPIS will contain information relating to defects, renovations and other pertinent property information based on the seller’s knowledge and experience. You can find a copy of the SPIS here.

Sellers . . . [more]

Adam Smith, Esq. is on a roll. Or at least, Bruce MacEwen, author of the Adam Smith, Esq. blog is. His blog posts, “Growth is Dead” have been an on-going series looking at the changes to “BigLaw” since the economic problems of 2008.

Revenues of firms have significantly dropped since that time. One pressure is coming from clients with respect to pricing. From Part 1 of the blog:

Simply put, clients are pushing back as never before. Among other things, they are:

• serious, for the first time, about alternative fee arrangements, caps and blended rates, rate freezes, and so on

There’s a smug feeling in our profession. A sense of entitlement and accomplishment, and inevitably for some, an assumption of superiority.

It’s true, most lawyers have undergone extensive education and training, often in high-stress environments, and presumably have developed some technical skills as it relates to their practice. But despite all of this, a lawyer simply may not be as intelligent as their local barista.

I will pause here for a minute to define intelligence as proposed by Howard Gardner, along various modalities often overlooked in legal practice:

1. Spatial
2. Linguistic
3. Logical-mathematical
4. Bodily-kinesthetic
5. Musical
6. Interpersonal
7. Intrapersonal
8. Naturalistic

Arguably some of these . . . [more]