Two weeks ago in my post on indexes in law-related e-books I made mention of the 3 new e-book offerings from LexisNexis Canada that are included for free for purchasers of the hard copy.

I have now tested those e-books on my iPad and thought I would pass on my comments.

The three titles are:

– The Practitioner’s Criminal Code, 2011 Edition
– Ontario Superior Court Practice, 2011 Edition
– LegisPratique – Code de procédure civile annoté, édition 2010

The books are in EPUB format and were easy to download and transfer on to my PDA by . . . [more]

It can be frustrating when a client comes for trade-mark advice, but has already started down a less than optimal path with their branding from a trade-mark perspective. If they have already used the brand and built up some goodwill, or have invested emotional energy into the brand, it can be difficult to change. Here are a couple of common issues that arise.

The most common mistake is adopting brands that are descriptive of the product or service. The thought behind that is “how else is anyone going to know what my product or service is?”

That is wrong for . . . [more]

Although most of us may not be concerned with rules governing alcohol consumption and fireworks or a combination thereof on a daily basis, municipal law impacts our lives quite frequently. 

Unfortunately, this is one area of law where efficient, free and public access is far from secured. The presence of municipalities on the web has significantly expanded and improved over the past several years, but publication of municipal by-laws seems to remain low on the priority list. When it is made available, municipal legal information is scattered, often out-of-date and is not easily searchable.

When driving on the Montreal roads . . . [more]

Thank CERN for the Internet. One of the topics I read widely about is leadership. My personal interest, along with developing my own leadership skills, is law firm leadership. There is a great selection of writing on law firm managment and leadership here at Slaw and around the web.

In my opinion, it is important to read outside your specific niche. I can’t remember now what turned me on to the Leading Geeks blog. It may have been a retweet by Greg Lambert, or a reference from Jay Sheperd, but what ever it was, I quickly plugged . . . [more]

Many lawyers don’t think about testimonials until it’s time to create or update their website. Only then do they contact clients or send them a recommendation request on LinkedIn. The best clients are perfectly willing to provide a testimonial. Unfortunately, asking clients for a testimonial or a recommendation without providing any guidelines is likely to lead to bad testimonials.

By “bad testimonials,” I don’t mean testimonials that disparage the lawyer – indeed many bad testimonials are just the opposite – they praise the lawyer in glowing terms. Unfortunately, those glowing terms are often vague, which can lead to the impression . . . [more]

Whatever you may think of the current election, the law regulating it is a significant piece of legislation, comprising some 22 parts, three schedules, and 577 sections. The Canada Elections Act sets out the ground rules — who may vote, how they must do it, how one becomes a candidate, and who counts the ballots, etc. Much of this is almost routine for us, particularly given the fact that we’ve had four federal elections in six years. But some of what’s in the act is not the stuff of news chat, and so I thought it might be amusing to . . . [more]

I am very excited about the new offering from the Canadian Association of Law Libraries: the New Law Librarians’ Institute. This is a substantive learning opportunity that I wish I had as a new law librarian.

According to the flyer sent out by the Association:

the New Law Librarians’ Institute is an intensive, week-long, in-person course fostering key competencies in law librarianship, including knowledge and understanding of

• law-making institutions (legislatures, courts, administrative tribunals) and how law is created
• characteristics of, and differences between primary and secondary sources of law
• the principal substantive law publications (legislation, case reports, commentaries) in

You are at the stage of having worked with the members of your Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) for a number of months to finally come to the point where you have a draft strategic plan that has been approved by the partners and now needs some attention directed toward how certain components will actually be implemented. There are a number of actions contemplated that your fellow Committee members feel are critical and definitely need to be properly executed in order to make a significant difference. As an example, one such action item states:

Develop and codify in writing, a set

On occasion, a party will intentionally contact or attempt to meet with one or more lawyers for the sole purpose of creating a conflict that will prevent the lawyer(s) from acting for another party on a pending matter.

Despite the bad intentions of the individual making these contacts, the lawyer(s) contacted may not be able to act for the other party, especially if confidential information was disclosed.

This behaviour occurs quite frequently in the family law area and in specialized areas of the law where there are a limited number of experts. In smaller communities this can be very frustrating . . . [more]

I thought it might be useful to have a list of the public bills which died on the Order Paper when Parliament dissolved this weekend. I’ve attached them as .rtf files because of their size- it seemed overkill to paste them right into this post.

Government bills 2011

Senate orphans

I haven’t included the private bills because frankly most of them died (not a surprise, of course). See the Status of Bills document on the Parliamentary website for more details on the 400+ private bills introduced this session.

Which legislative deaths do you regret? I’m sure that the Copyright . . . [more]

Those who watched the 2009 Tony Awards will recall that Bret Michaels was injured while exiting the stage after the opening performance of Nothing But a Good Time. If you need a reminder of the incident you can view it here.

Michaels suffered a fractured nose and split lip. He has experienced a number of other health problems since, some of which, such as a subarachnoid hemorrhage, have been attributed to the incident. California attorneys, Spillane Weingarten LLP, filed a statement of claim Friday against the Tonys, CBS Entertainment, and a number of related producers and promoters . . . [more]

Eventually it will come to pass: someone will lament, probably on facebook in a few years, that modern communication practices are driving us all to lose our grand tradition of texting. The leetspeak, the comedy, the memes, the autocompletion bloopers… it will all be a thing of the past.

Here is a diverting meditation on the transition from manuscript to print culture to put you in mind of that future history. . . . [more]