Real estate, personal injury-plaintiff and family law are the top three areas in the “Profile of Legal Malpractice Claims: 2008-2011,” released today by the ABA Standing Committee on Lawyers’ Professional Liability. It is the first time that insurers reported a higher percentage of claims involving real estate than any other area of law in this survey, first conducted in 1985. In all five previous versions of the survey dating to 1985, personal injury-plaintiff matters were No. 1 in generating lawyer malpractice claims.

Eleven member insurers of the National Association of Bar-Related Insurance Companies (link:NABRICO) from the United States and nine . . . [more]

The following article from the August 2012 issue of LAWPRO Magazine introduces LAWPRO’s new domestic contract matter toolkit. The toolkit can be downloaded in full or in part at www.practicepro.ca/checklists

Between 2007 and 2011, 830 family law claims were reported to LAWPRO. These claims are costly. Resolving them will cost LAWPRO approximately $21 million. Some of these claims arose due to real (or alleged) problems with domestic contract matters. That is the bad news.

Domestic contracts are complex documents that deal with complicated issues involving emotional clients. The dangers are real and there are many places that errors can . . . [more]

Via a post on the Legal Writing Prof blog, I’m reading an interesting paper, “Say Goodbye to the Books: Information Literacy as the New Legal Research Paradigm,” by Professors Ellie Margolis and Kristen Murray of Temple University. The paper is available for download in the SSRN Working Paper Series.

Purely coincidentally, a similar thought arose this morning in an internal planning meeting about our legal research and writing instruction this fall. It was expressed that to introduce online research resources by reference to or comparison with their print counterparts is likely no longer a suitable approach. The argument is not . . . [more]

The following is the introductory article to LAWPRO’s new commercial transaction checklist that appeared in the August 2012 edition of LAWPRO Magazine. The full checklist can be downloaded from our Checklists page at www.practicepro.ca/checklists

Many commercial matters involve the preparation of one or more documents. These documents are drafted based on communications between the parties to the document and/or their respective lawyers, the specific circumstances of the matter and applicable substantive law.

While the majority of commercial deals in Ontario are concluded without difficulties, all too often LAWPRO sees claims arising due to various real – or alleged – problems . . . [more]

The new issue of LAWPRO Magazine includes an article entitled Diversify without dabbling: before expanding your practice, expand your competence!. It looks at how how lawyers who are considering expanding the scope of their practice can do so safely and avoid a malpractice claim (dabbling outside one’s comfort zone is often a cause of claims). Watch for the full version of this article at www.lawpro.ca/magazine.

Here are five tips from the article on how to expand your practice skills safely.

1. Expand purposefully
If you decide to expand your scope of practice, make sure that the decision to . . . [more]

Today, a brief interview on PBS with US Supreme Court Justice Scalia, who published in June Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. In the interview he says the book sets out in detail the full range of originalism as he understands it (with the help of co-author Bryan Garner, Editor of Black’s Law Dictionary). The first part is a rationale, reportedly, and the second a how-to. To my knowledge, this is quite novel for a sitting judge.

Originalism does not have much purchase in Canada, apparently, on the grounds that it is unnecessary to conceal the policy making . . . [more]

Today’s Toronto Star has an article on the email-based scams that have been plaguing lawyers the last few years.

It claims that these frauds have cost law firms in North America $70 million. That sounds like a huge figure at first, but from what we’ve seen the size of these scams are about $200,000 to $300,000, so it would only take about 250 or so lawyers to fall for it to reach that total. practicePRO’s fraud-reporting email address has received thousands of emails since it was set up, but that’s probably only represents a small portion of the lawyers who . . . [more]

Everyone loves a good story. Numerous studies show that people are more likely to learn and retain information told in the format of a story, probably a vestige from the primary means of relaying information through most of human history.

So what about the story describing the imminent doom of the legal profession as we know it? Mitch Kowalski, who joined the Slaw team this year, just released a book this year which tells this tall tale.

Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century relates a fictitious account of an innovative and visionary law firm, Bowen, Fang . . . [more]

You’ll likely have read about the effort by Stephen Harper and assorted other defendants to have Helena Guergis’s statement of claim for defamation and all manner of other unkindness thrown out as failing to disclose a reasonable cause of action and for raising non-justiciable issues. That motion continues to be argued today.

What you might not have read, however, is the statement of claim itself, court records not being digitized and accessible over the internet. But the CBC now does what all good news agencies should be doing: they make the original documents that lie behind stories available online. So . . . [more]

A discussion on the Canadian Association of Law Libraries list this morning strikes me as worth a share here. Dawn Urquhart drew subscribers’ attention to a National Post – Legal Post article published on the web yesterday, “Court decisions may be lost in translation.” The article appears in today’s National Post with the somewhat less fair title, “Quebec decisions isolated by lack of translation,” and the even less fair lede, “Lawyers outside Quebec can’t read useful judgments.”

The author cites Ted Tjaden’s excellent post here on Slaw from last year, wherein Ted noted the limited overlap in . . . [more]

The Canadian Judicial Council has launched a sleek new website. Over the years, the Council has put more and more information online. For some time, there have been links to previous inquiry committee decisions, annual reports and news releases. There is a publications section which is a treasure-trove of information including an interesting Reference Guide for Judges Appointed to Commissions of Inquiry. I’m not sure if the site is just more user-friendly and I discovered hidden information or the CJC has actually posted new material. Either way, one can now find a sample of complaints (anonymized) . . . [more]