♬ Red alert! Red alert!
It’s a catastrophe..♬

Lyrics and music by Buxton Ratcliffe, recorded by Basement Jaxx.

It reads like a bad lawyer joke. How many lawyers does it take to get caught in a fraud scam? Apparently the number is 80. The ABA Journal reported on Nov. 22, 2010 that Federal prosecutors have indicted 6 people in a $32 Million dollar internet collection scam that caught 80 lawyers in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Alabama and Georgia. . . . [more]

Congratulations to Bennett Jones LLP, 2010 Platinum winner of the Intranet Innovations Award from Step Two Design, announced Wednesday at KMWorld 2010 in Washington, DC. They won for a number of innovations on their intranet BenNet. Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), their intranet includes features such as an improved Precedent system, a “find the children” feature that locates documents using the parent precedents, and BenNet Books.

From the Step Two Designs announcement:

Bennett Jones, the 2010 Platinum Award winner and the first law firm to win this award, has created a highly sophisticated site that

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]

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]

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]

Today’s posting comes (almost live) from the Schulich Law School at Dalhousie University where Richard Devlin and the organizing committee managed what many would have considered impossible – made legal ethics interesting and relevant to a student audience. Dalhousie staged a lively well fought and provocative debate about the hottest current issue in professional ethics in Canada, the issue of Conflicts of Interest.

We at Slaw have had postings on the CBA Task Force Report on Conflicts of Interest and the Federation of Law Societies response.

Today’s Wickwire Lecture – named after F.R. Wickwire, a leading member of the . . . [more]

Ethics committees across North America are, as always, in the process of examining issues of great importance to lawyers in the US and Canada. As part of process of establish new ethics opinions and rules, ethics committees typically hold hearings or publish proposed opinions for comment, seeking input from practicing attorneys.

Unfortunately, these hearings and requests for comment are often met with silence from practicing attorneys. Vendors and other interested parties respond in force, but the group that will ultimately be most impacted by ethics committees decisions have, apparently, nothing to say.

For example, only one practicing lawyer signed up . . . [more]

The Practice Directions for the Toronto Region states,

Parties must consult with each other to select a return date convenient to all parties and which will permit all parties to file all necessary materials and conduct any examinations before the return date. At the time of booking, a realistic estimate of the time required by all parties for argument must be provided.
[emphasis added]

Most other regions have similar guidelines on consultation for scheduling.

Finding a single date when all counsel are available, and then also securing that date from the Trial Scheduling Office, can be challenging, especially when there . . . [more]

As earlier promised, a somewhat delayed post on legal project management (LPM).

The recent Ark Group master class on LPM, by Steven B. Levy of Lexician and Patrick Lamb of the Valorem Law Group, was a good overview of the topic, with Steven drawing on his experiences at Microsoft and from his book, with Patrick providing a law firm perspective based on the approach in his daily practice. The session certainly reinforced the points in Steven’s book and provided useful context and comfort for implementing LPM. In addition to both the various theoretical and practical ideas presented, . . . [more]

Last week Nicole Garton Jones, a BC-based lawyer and fellow Slaw contributor, provided some thought-provoking commentary on the position of the Law Society of British Columbia on the topic of Virtual Law Firms, as discussed in the latest edition of the organization’s Bencher’s Bulletin. In the bulletin, and subsequent response to Ms. Garton-Jones’ post, the LSBC identifies several key concerns relating to cloud computing for BC-based law firms, namely:

My good friend Jim Calloway, practice management advisor for the Oklahoma State Bar Association, just added a fantastic post on his Law Practice Tips Blog.

Jim’s post, One Firm’s View of Client Expectations is about a South Carolina law firm that has decided to use its web site to make certain their potential clients have clear and realistic expectations about the firm before they even schedule an appointment. Check out the Client Expectations (Realistic or Unrealistic) section of their web page.

This page has statements I have never seen on a law firm’s website before: “We do not work . . . [more]