In September, 2008, the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) formally launched its “Value Challenge” initiative with a goal “to reconnect value and costs for legal services.” At the time, many in the legal media declared that this would be the beginning of the change in the way law firm’s act as a business. They predicted that we would soon see the mass implementation of alternative and fixed fee arrangements, lowering of costs and increased efficiency. We’re five years on and there has not been nearly the movement the ACC had hoped, especially in regards to Canadian firms.

And so, it . . . [more]

Eric Franzon, over on semanticweb.com, has a nice post about a series of videos on semantic web and linked data technologies.

The series is called Build a Small Knowledge Graph and there are three videos:

• Creating and Processing Linked Data

  Jarek Wilkiewicz introduces the reference architecture for support of Schema.org Actions in the context of a specific use case (a music store). The video then focuses on exposing entities using Schema.org markup with JSON-LD.

• Managing Graph Data With Cayley

  Barak Michener introduces graph processing using Cayley, an open source graph database written in Go. Cayley is fast,

. . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Vincent Gautrais  2. Family LLB  3. First Reference Talks  4. Environmental Law and Litigation  5. Barry Sookman

Vincent Gautrais
Tournoi de pétanque CRDP / CICC

C’est déjà une tradition que plusieurs universités, à travers le monde, nous envient : après une pause l’an dernier, le 15 juillet prochain (12h) . . . [more]

I am not sure if the voices in my head were inherited or created for survival. I suffer from the disease of alcoholism and medical opinion suggests that the predisposition to this disease is inherited. All I know is that the voices are part of my disease and long before I took a drink and for as long as I can remember they were there.

At first the voices helped me cope with a very abusive father. However, even from a young age the voices were more detrimental than helpful. They told me “you are bad, you deserved it, you . . . [more]

The Canadian Open Government Initiative was announced on March 18, 2011. The project focuses on 3 main streams:

• Open Data, which is about offering Government data in more useful and machine-readable formats to enable citizens, the private sector and non-government organizations to leverage it in innovative and value-added ways.
• Open Information, which is about proactively releasing information, including on Government activities, to Canadians on an ongoing basis. It is about proactively making Government information easier to find and accessible for Canadians.
• Open Dialogue, which is about giving Canadians a stronger say in Government policies and priorities, and expanding engagement

. . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

Famille : L’appelante, qui a fait appel à une donneuse d’ovules et à une mère porteuse, obtient la placement de l’enfant née au terme de cette démarche auprès d’elle en vue de son adoption.

Intitulé : Adoption — 1445, 2014 QCCA 1162
Juridiction : Cour d’appel (C.A.), Montréal, 500-08-000409-120
Décision . . . [more]

One Sunday each month OnPoint Legal Research provides Slaw with an extended summary of, and counsel’s commentary on, an important case from the British Columbia, Alberta, or Ontario court of appeal.

Hughes v. Hughes, 2014 BCCA 196 

1. CASE SUMMARY

Areas of Law: Family law; Child support; Contempt of court; Change in circumstances

~ An order for a custodial parent to pay child support to the non-custodial parent pending the return of the child may be cancelled in circumstances where the child is not returned~

Background: At the beginning of the proceeding that gave rise to this appeal, the . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Civil Rights/ Courts / Trade Regulation / Criminal Law / Evidence / Extradition

. . . [more]

It would be my view that, even at its very best, the world of legal and professional publishing has been and is one that embraces evolution but not more. We see evidence of this in the recent sale back to its previous owners of American Lawyer Media. What goes round comes around would appear to be the preference and it seems that the major international law publishers were not interested in absorbing ALM. Perhaps this reflects their current view of the market. Still, there can be little doubt that the electronic revolution and the state of the economy . . . [more]

Like most of you, I’m sure, I get momentarily caught whenever I see the word “law” in something I’m reading. Much of the time it has nothing to do with our business and means to describe only some regularity, whether scientific, logical or folkloristic. That’s the way it was when I stumbled across “The Law of Unintended Consequences.” (See, e.g.,the title of this piece in the Economist.) Curiously, this “law” almost never gets framed as such, and from what I can tell amounts to nothing more than the observation that we’re not too good a predicting the future, particularly when . . . [more]

Prostitution law is back in the news, almost a year after the Supreme Court released its dramatic decision in Canada v. Bedford. The Court found the main provisions of Canada’s prostitution law unconstitutional, struck them down and gave the government one year to introduce a law that doesn’t offend the Constitution...

Are you in a rut? Are you just going through the motions of your business development? Are you not seeing results? Are you overwhelmed and going in too many directions? Maybe it’s time to take a closer look!

At the end of EVERY week reflect on your performance and results of the week. Here is a list of eight questions to ask yourself…

1. Was your client service so solid that your clients will give you more work?

2. How many referral sources did you reach out to this week?

3. Did you do something to develop a relationship this . . . [more]