Chris Mondics at the Philadelphia Inquirer wonders if the legal market has seen the worst of the biggest recession in the legal industry since the Great Depression,

For law firms, the devastation that swept through the legal marketplace in 2008 and 2009 has come to an end. Layoffs have stopped or at least have been sharply curtailed, firms that suspended hiring are recruiting once again, and profits, though flat or down, have stabilized at numbers that would make average middle-class American wage earners click their heels with delight.

Even the sky-high starting salaries for first-year lawyers, long the source of

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Rafia Zakaria is an American lawyer and Ph.D. candidate at the Political Science at Indiana University. She writes in the September 2010 issue of Guernica about how she has used Shari’ah (Islamic law) to enhance the rights of a female client from Jordan who had been married, abused in the U.S., and finally divorced.

Rudi Stettner of the IndyPosted gives a summary of the predicament of Zakaria’s client,

The woman had married a fellow Jordanian in a whirlwind courtship and followed him to America. It very quickly became apparent that the man had an American mistress. When Zainab (The young

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The OBA has graciously allowed me to reproduce an excellent tip sheet by The Hon. Justice Stanley Scherr for presenting spousal support claims. It was previously published in Matrimonial Affairs, the newsletter of the Ontario Bar Association family law section.

1. Always come with the Spousal Support Advisory Guideline (SSAG) software calculations for any appearance where you are seeking spousal support.
2. Imputation of income is often on the table, so bring different SSAG scenarios based on a range of incomes.
3. Make sure that you also present NDI (net disposable income) software calculations. The court will want to see that the

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The first Blog, the first Blawg, Slaw firsts

Toby Fyfe and Paul Crookall wrote a report earlier this year entitled Social Media and Public Sector Policy Dilemmas. It was written for the Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC), an organization whose role is to promote excellence in public service.

The report is based on consultations with stakeholders from across Canada and discusses many of the impediments to the use and spread of social media (blogs, wikis, Facebook-style tools) in the public/government sector:

This research paper examines the thoughts and attitudes of public servants from three levels of
government, academics, consultants, and members of think tanks on

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The Law Commission of Ontario has an ongoing project entitled “Best Practices at Family Justice System Entry Points: Needs of Users and Responses of Workers within the Justice System.” As Slaw readers may know from news reports today (see, e.g., the Gobe and Mail front page story), the LCO has just released a report on part of that study, “Voices from a Broken Family Justice System: Sharing Consultations Results,” setting out what they’ve learned from wide consultation with organizations, agencies, and people who are or staff the “entry points” into the family justice system in the province. . . . [more]

I’ve just come from the dentist. Yes, I know: too much information. But it got me thinking about pain, which in turn led me to thinking about scales — not the lizard kind, but the kind butchers used to put their thumbs on, or so I was told. Let me explain.

We’re beings that like to measure and compare: it’s the start of science and the heart of commerce, after all. So we tend to devise scales to rank events and experiences — lots and lots of scales. There are even scientific instruments to measure and compare pain tolerance, known . . . [more]

Yale Law School’s Lillian Goldman Library has an exhibition up entitled “Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books.” Some details about the curator and the exhibition are here. There’s a humorous description of the exhibit at the NYT. Another NYT notice of the event contains this nice description of the personality behind the event:

The exhibition is organized by Mark S. Zaid, a comic book collector and Washington lawyer who often represents employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. On his Web site, Mr. Zaid writes, “Many of my

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Five years ago, law firm web strategy for most firms I encountered consisted of the following statement: “Yes, we have a website”. If a firm could check that box, most felt they had done their duty and could get back to the more important work of practicing law. No longer.

The last half-decade has seen us move from a prevailing standard of mere existence online to a new framework where the firm website now forms the backbone of many firms’ marketing efforts, irrespective of firm size. Looking ahead, I see increasing emphasis on three broad areas: content, conversations and search . . . [more]

Andrea Zielinski, Librarian at Emery Jamieson LLP and Chair of the Edmonton Law Libraries Association let me know about a good read in the latest Canadian Lawyers 4Students issue (starting page 21). The article titled “Key to the Kingdom” quotes well respected academic librarians from law schools across the country about law student orientation week. The article is filled with great gems.

From the article:

Keys to legal research success

Get to know your librarians
These people are the oracles of legal information and they want to help you. David Michels says he even answers calls from graduates

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It’s no secret, and no puzzle, that lawyers’ attention generally follows the money. Indeed, with the possible exception of criminal law as romanticized on TV, the public’s view of law itself is shaped by this legal currying of currency and its sources.

But that same public’s actual encounters with the law often happen in areas that have a tiny bar or no bar at all. One of these is with respect to municipal by-laws. In a city of any size, there will be thousands of these laws regulating much of the activity and paraphernalia of everyday life: where and when . . . [more]

An Alberta woman did. She waited 19 years to be compensated over gender discrimination by her employer in an Alberta Human Rights Tribunal decision rendered on September 2, 2010. Her relentless battle against Mobil Oil Canada to receive the same pay as a man in the same position won her a damage award of more than $650,000.