Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) continues to be the buzzword, in Canada, US and the UK. 

This month’s edition of The Canadian Bar Association’s National Magazine features LPO on its cover page and a six page article on the topic. The article is titled “Bangalore Calling” and showcases a Canadian perspective on LPO.

Legal Week announced last month that Balfour Beatty, the construction giant, is planning to press its law firms on the topic of legal process outsourcing. According to the global general counsel and company secretary Chris Vaughan:

We are at the start of a process to review

. . . [more]

One of the saddest chapters of Bill Kaplan’s excellent biography Canadian Maverick – the Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand, is his account of Justice Rand’s post SCC appointment as the founding Dean of the University of Western Ontario’s Law School. Rand didn’t fit, was remote from students, and was ill at ease and isolated. {For further references see Omar’s post and Jamie Cameron’s review.]

A different challenge awaits the former chairman and chief executive officer of McCarthy Tétrault LLP., Iain Scott who will be moving to take over the deanship of Western in September. This . . . [more]

Following a rotating strike and a lockout, the Act to provide for the resumption and continuation of postal services (the “Act“) officially entered into force on Monday night. The Act ends the dispute between Canada Post and its 48,000 employees and imposes “final offer selection arbitration”. Everybody should have gotten some mail yesterday.
The law imposes specific salary increases for the years 2011 to 2014. Unlike all other provisions of the agreement, the parties cannot chose to agree to different salary levels and the arbitrator is bound to include them in the final collective agreement. It is interesting . . . [more]

Benefits of the media

They may be friendly, but they are not your friends. They are skilled, resourceful and tenacious. And most drink too much coffee. Not to suggest a sinister intention, but their job is get information from you — information you may not want to share — whether it serves you or your clients or not.

There is a unique synergy between you though. Sure, you may be at odds most of the time, but you can come together in a highly productive manner if prepared and with a healthy dose of caution. 

Strange bedfellows

If there’s anything . . . [more]

Well now all of us can start gauging our effectiveness via a growing number of websites that seek to place a quantitative assessment of your clout (or Klout as it may be) in social media circles.

The Canadian Blog Directory, by Mark Evans and Seth Singer, aims to create a directory of the thousands of Canadian blogs out there. Each blog is reviewed and has to meet a quality test, and the directory can be searched by name or subject. Since its launch, the project has added about 300 blogs.

Be sure to submit your own blog to make it that much easier for Canadians to find you. . . . [more]

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court delivered a 7-2 opinion about violent video games: Brown, Governor Of California, et al. v. Entertainment Merchants Association et al. [PDF]. Justice Scalia wrote the majority decision, in which it was decided that a California law prohibiting the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors is invalid as violating the first amendment protecting freedom of speech.

As might be expected, Scalia reviewed those restrictions on speech that have been supported by the courts, finding them in American traditions as spelled out in United States v. Stevens [PDF], a case concerning depiction of . . . [more]

Ubaka Ogbogu, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta is writing what I expect will be a very useful blog called Health Law in British North America. The blog is very new – there are only a couple of posts, but they lead to some interesting places in google books – historical statutes of Canada for example.

I like that the blog links to places I rarely visit:
British Library: Canadian Collections
History Matters
NLM:Medicine in the Americas, 1619-1920
SSRN Legal History Page

Professor Ogbogu’s teaching and research interests include health law, law and bioethics, law . . . [more]

Last August I reviewed basic principles of authentication, in general and as applied to electronic documents. In that context I mentioned The Hague Convention of 1961 Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents, known as the Legalization Convention or the Apostille Convention. Since Canada is considering acceding to this Convention, this column will review some of the issues involved in that process and in particular the technological frontiers of authentication that The Hague Conference on Private International Law is exploring with respect to electronic apostilles.

Legalization

What is at stake in this discussion is the authentication of public . . . [more]

There is a chilling tale in the UK press this week about the trial of a man accused of abducting and murdering a child.

What is as gruesome as the fact of the murder, is the personal cost borne by the family members of the victim who gave evidence. It is a corollary of the adversarial system.

The path of the cross examinations was to show the victim’s mother was guilty of neglect, and that perhaps favouritism of the victim’s sister precipitated her death. The father’s use of pornography were put in evidence. Portions of the victim’s diary was read . . . [more]

practicePRO has worked hard over the years to make lawyers aware of the wealth of practice management and claims prevention information available on the practicePRO site. Those efforts have resulted in practicepro.ca becoming a regular destination for many lawyers, particularly solo and small firm lawyers who may not have access to all the resources of a larger firm.

Lately there is one segment of lawyers that LAWPRO and practicePRO have made an extra effort to reach out to: new lawyers and those about to be called to the bar. Its been our experience that when lawyers were students, they really . . . [more]

Omar Ha-Redeye gave an excellent write-up of some of the ideas explored at last weekend’s lawTechcamp in (and after) the sessions, but I want to make note of the event itself.

About 100 people from the law and tech industries attended the free half-day event, held at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. The event was organized by Monica Goyal, owner and CEO of My Legal Briefcase, Sapna Mahboobani, principal of Sapna Law Professional Corporation, and lawyer/writer Mitch Kowalski.

lawTechcamp took an informal approach, taking cues for topics from ideas submitted by registrants. . . . [more]