As those who’ve read Slaw for a while might know, I’ve been critical in the past about the way the news media treat law. Simply put, law does not figure in their analysis of things that make the world go round. This is easy — and distressing — to see by looking at the way in which news media categorize their content. The Globe and Mail, for example, doesn’t include “Law” or “Justice” in any of its major menu headings, and only by looking at the website’s site map can we find “Law” among the 175 possibilities as a third . . . [more]

The impact of poor client selection and sloppy client service will be magnified in trying economic times. In response, you want to proactively take steps to build and retain a better clientele. Here are some pointers to help you meet that goal. This article orginally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of LAWPRO Magazine.

1. Get a retainer up front: The best way to ensure that you get paid in full at the end of a matter is to obtain a retainer at the matter’s start. After you and your client reach a consensus on what work you need

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Training United States law students in the skills of legal research has never been easy. It is hard to do well, but that is not the heart of the problem. The lack of institutional support for the effort has always presented the most basic of challenges. Like regular exercise or avoiding sweets, research skills are much praised but seldom actualized. At most law schools legal research is part of the first year curriculum. It is almost inevitably taught by non-tenure track instructors. In the hierarchy of U.S. legal education, and hierarchy is a major theme for law schools, non-tenure track . . . [more]

There are no such things as natural disasters, only situations with disastrous consequences due to lack of social preparedness. This sentiment was a quite common one to encounter during my time working in emergency management. For example, Ilan Kelman states,

The term “natural disaster” is often used to refer to a disaster which involves an event originating in the environment. The term has led to connotations that the disaster is caused by nature or that these disasters are the natural state of affairs. In many belief systems, including Western thought, deities often cause “natural disasters” to punish humanity or

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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:
Armed Forces – Criminal Law – Company Law – Constitutional Law – Copyright :

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Law firms and sleep deprivation seem to go together. So when The Atlantic needed a real world example to lead off their piece on the topic, guess which profession was front and centre?

And the described daily routine is brutal:

“Missy rises at 5:30 a.m. to run on the Capital Crescent Trail or head downtown to work out with a personal trainer. She’s back home by 7 to make sure the kids are awake and getting ready for school.

… “Arrives at her spacious office by 8:30 or so”

… “gets home between 7:30 and 8”

Then: dinner, which

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I thoroughly enjoyed all the discussion around my last column. It seems to me that these conversations are really around our long-time favourite legal publishing topic: where will change come from and what will it look like?

Colin Lachance’s response gave me plenty to think about. What’s the business model of the future for Canadian legal publishers? (This is another way of saying “show me the money”.) And what will new legal information sources look like?

There’s obviously an appetite in many parts of the country for more relevant and cost-effective secondary sources. Our CLEBC publishing program is something . . . [more]

Bach is the best.

Better than all the other big B’s — Buxtehude, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Bizet, Berlioz. . . . Better even than the M’s — Mozart, Mendelssohn, Mahler . . .

Foolish thing to say, though: that one composer at that level of excellence is “better” than another. Surely “different” is the right word. But for me, Johann Sebastian is the bees knees, il miglior fabbro, Napoleon brandy, the MVP.

Now I know that baroque music is not to everyone’s taste: it’s been called “sewing-machine music” because of the underlying ricky-ticky, rum-tum-tum lines that keep the . . . [more]

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) announced this week that Fastcase and William S. Hein & Co. were the joint winners of its 2014 New Product of the Year Award.

According to AALL:

“This award honors new commercial information products that enhance or improve existing law library services or procedures or innovative products which improve access to legal information, the legal research process, or procedures for technical processing of library materials. A “new” product is one which has been in the library-related marketplace for two years or less.”

Under the partnership with Fastcase announced last July, HeinOnline . . . [more]

The early articling hire-back numbers look dismal for a number of firms in Toronto, and this, coupled with the lengthening number of years that it takes associates to make partner – if they ever do – and the merry-go-round of serial lateral partners, should make all lawyers stop and think about how this environment is shaping the next generation of Canadian lawyers, and in turn, the structure of legal services providers.

My friend, consultant, John Chisholm was recently quoted in Australia’s, Lawyers Weekly. “I hear from senior associates who have had to wear the fact that their partnership prospects . . . [more]

Many companies seem to be struggling with the issue of online consent, according to a 2012 study by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC). The review of popular Canadian websites showed significant shortcomings in how organizations communicate their online privacy practices to consumers. On May 8, 2014, the federal, British Columbia and Alberta Privacy Commissioners published new guidelines to help organizations understand the importance of being transparent about their online privacy practices, specifically regarding consent.

Lawyers want to find information quickly. I often hearken back to now-increasingly dated LexisNexis workplace productivity surveys – 2008 and 2010 – for data on this need. Desktop search periodically raises its profile as one of the tools that lawyers can use. Vivian Manning and Catherine Sanders Reach have both taken a look at some of the tools commonly discussed in legal circles and they provide a good short list of products to review.

We had a recent need for a simple tool to roll out to a small group of researchers and decided to take a look at desktop . . . [more]