One of Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms is “There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about.” This is sometimes paraphrased as “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” The “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right” statement is apocryphally attributed to P.T. Barnum.

Writing for law and other professional magazines, and law tabloids such as The Lawyers Weekly or the Law Times, is a not-expensive (at least to the writer) way of getting publicity and, perhaps, of educating the readership. I have no . . . [more]

With the new BC Supreme Court Family and Civil Rules scheduled to come into force on July 1st, many firms are now scrambling to ensure they have the most up-to-date versions available. On May 5th an Order in Council came into effect which introduced a series of new amendments to the new rules. A number of local colleagues have said that getting a consolidated version of the rules that included the May 5th OIC has been difficult.

Speaking with our legislative friends at Quickscribe, they do have a fully consolidated version. Given the demand out here in the . . . [more]

In the last couple of days there’s been quite a buzz among bloggers about Nicholas Carr’s proposal that web content creators experiment with taking hyperlinks out of their texts and gathering them instead at the end. He calls it delinkification. Now that the thoughtful Jason Wilson, who is, among other things, a columnist here at Slaw, has joined the experiment, I thought it might be interesting to bring it to the attention of our readers to see what they think about it.

Carr’s basic concern about visible links within the text has to do with his claim that they distract . . . [more]

A colleague alerted me to this resource: NewsGator offers free one-hour educational webinars. You can register for upcoming webinars or watch previously recorded ones. The upcoming webinar on June 3rd focuses on the benefits of Government 2.0. Previously recorded webinars have discussed the following topics:

• Next Gen Learning with Web 2.0
• Enterprise Social Networking. Is Your Company Falling Behind?
• Web 2.0 Bridges Gap for Information and Knowledge Management

. . . [more]

The title, “Are We Big Enough to Need a Marketing Department?,” is a question I’m often asked by smaller and mid-sized firms. Larger firms will ask, “How many people do we need in our marketing department?” Neither is the right question to be asking.

The “right answer” to your marketing staffing needs is in fact two more questions: what do you want to achieve and how quickly do you want to see results? 

If you’re a large, recently merged firm that needs to promote its new name widely and quickly, you need a lot of creative horsepower—for a short period . . . [more]

This week, a deal far away from home helped bring closer to home one of the challenges facing the biotech industry. Abbott labs bought a unit of India’s Piramal healthcare, moving further into the generics business (at least in emerging markets).

The recent introduction of generic Lipitor in Canada is one example of the challenges facing pharma companies as current blockbusters come off patent and face generic competition. A lot of commenters have been expecting that challenge to turn into more money spent by pharma companies on biotech; but the Abbott-Piramal transaction emphasized that there’s more than one way . . . [more]

The Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project released a report today, Listening to Ontarians, funded by the Law Society of Upper Canada, Legal Aid Ontario and Pro Bono Law Ontario. The study focused on middle-to-low-income populations, defined as a household income of under $75,000.

Tracey Tyler provides a summary of the report at The Star.

The study shows that one-third of those interviewed had a legal problem in the preceding year, with low-income populations facing the greatest hurdles,

While the rate of incidence of legal problems within this group was consistent with Ontarians in the total survey

. . . [more]

English accountants are seeking equivalent of solicitor-client privilege. Should they get it?

on Slaw.ca: As a first test of iPad ereader apps, @conniecrosby tries out the Kobo and iBooks apps

Law firm librarians are often critical of the lack of research skills demonstrated by the annual crop of new graduates when they start working in law firms. The issue has been a bone of contention for many years, and can create a divide between academic and firm librarians. I think the issue is not one of training, but of understanding that the purpose of a university education and that of a law firm placement are fundamentally different, and legal research needs and experiences have little in common from one environment to the other.

I was back in my home town . . . [more]

The proposed New Reconciliation and Recognition Act by the British Columbia government failed in 2009, largely due to the withdrawal of support by 1st Nations leaders. Vic Burstall, a retired lawyer in Victoria, outlines the developments today in the Times Colonist.

According to the province, the legislation was intended to:

• increase partnerships and bring certainty to the land base in B.C.;
• establish a flexible framework to avoid the costly and lengthy litigation that has too often characterized relations with First Nations in the past;
• ensure constitutional or common law on rights and title remain unchanged;
• not affect Crown-granted

. . . [more]

Tim Kevan, author of BabyBarista, the fictitious and amusing “worm’s eye view of the English bar,” has withdrawn the column from The Times where it ran for years, because of that paper’s decision to put its content behind a paywall. (See the piece on Slaw from last month.). BabyBarista is now a free-standing — and still free — blog.

The new main page sports a raft of cartoon illustrations by Alex Williams and potted biographies of the main players in BabyB’s life at the law, characters such as OldRuin, TheCreep, OldSmoothie, UpTights, and JudgeFetish.

[hat tip Charon QC] . . . [more]