There is a great live webcast from Harvard today (March 6) on disruption and the future of law. It is a must listen if you are interested in these topics.

Live stream is here: http://video.isites.harvard.edu/liveVideo/liveView.do?name=plp

Conference Hashtag: #PLP_Disrupt

Featured Speakers are:
Chris Kenny, Chief Executive, Legal Services Board, Harvard Business School
Clay Christensen, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
William Hubbard, Incoming President of the American Bar Association
Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President, IBM Watson

Conference Schedule

10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. The Nature of Disruptive Innovation in Professional Services

Keynote: Clayton M. Christensen, Kim B. Clark Professor of . . . [more]

When the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council/Standards Development Committee was formed in 2013, one of its first orders of business was to review the Customer Service Standard as required under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA). The AODA requires that each accessibility standard be reviewed five years after it becomes law to determine whether the standard is working as intended and to allow for adjustments to be made as required. The council has proposed several changes to the Customer Service Standard and is asking interested stakeholders for feedback.

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Solicitor-Client Privilege for Ethics Counsel: Lessons for Canada from the United States
Stephen G.A. Pitel and Jordan McKie
(2013) 91 Canadian Bar Review 313

(Footnotes omitted; they are available in the original, via the CBR link, and in the pre-publication version via the main hyperlink above.)

(c) Privilege and Ethics Counsel

While there . . . [more]

Without your clients you don’t have a firm and yet, according to the findings of the recent Canadian Lawyer Corporate Counsel Survey, most clients (80.4% of those who responded) aren’t being asked for feedback from their main law firm in a structured and meaningful way.

So let’s agree that every firm needs to implement some form of a client feedback program. Depending on your firm goals, size, resources and budget your program will look different. It should have elements of the type of formal program to which Canadian Lawyer alludes, but a robust client feedback program has to be . . . [more]

One of my correspondents is a law firm with three offices across the Ukraine.

They posted this open letter this morning:

Dear friends, colleagues and partners,

Herewith we would like to draw your attention to the current political crisis between Ukraine and Russian Federation and the current situation in the Crimea. Being a Ukrainian company we are concerned a lot about the future of our State. We kindly ask you to spare 5 minutes of your time for the issue, which is incredibly important to every person in the world, and read this message to the end.

All the politicians . . . [more]

While many might have given up on AI in law due to its special challenges, interest is stirring nearby. IBM’s Watson ingestion of millions of journal pages, medical evidence and patient records, means that it is allegedly better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors. Meanwhile Google has been buying up the world’s top machine learning experts and their companies, with the latest being UK-based DeepThink. It is in part explained by the fact that Google’s engineering director Ray Kurzweil is a relentless inventor and an artificial intelligence pioneer. While Google helps make us smarter now, Kurzweil believes that AI will . . . [more]

I’ve noticed that a lot of lawyers are suffering from information overload in all the advice about what to focus on when building a practice. Clarifying basic concepts is a good place to start. And truthfully, it’s also a relief to simplify some of the jargon.

Here’s a guide to the four concepts that most lawyers and firms need to consider.

Who you are: your identity and brand

The attributes that describe who you are and what you have to offer are grounded in the concepts of identity and brand. Lawyers often feel anxious about marketing because so much of . . . [more]

What phone, that is.

At one time a Blackberry was the de facto standard for lawyers. (For the record, I have used various types of portable device over the years, but never a Blackberry. I’m now using an Android phone. I have an iPad as well, which you couldn’t pry away from me, but when it dies I won’t replace it with another iPad.) Lawyers in our firm who use a Blackberry are dwindling in number. Our IT department tells me that Android phones are becoming more popular. Even some iPhone users have switched to Android.

For some reason, Windows . . . [more]

If the current gaps in access to justice across Canada are to be filled, we will need to see a greater degree of collaboration between sectors and professions. As I wrote here, instead of legal services and supports provided in “justice silos,” such supports need to be integrated or provided in concert with other social services.

The National Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters recognized the need for greater cross-sectoral collaboration. In their October 2013 report, Access to Civil and Family Justice: A Roadmap for Change (the “Roadmap”), they emphasized that:

“We can and must

. . . [more]

As I’ve detailed in my book The Off Switch, Microsoft Outlook provides modern ways not just to communicate but to interrupt our work flow and make life harder.

For example, the new-mail sounds and desktop alerts (the blue “toasts” or translucent ghosties that pop up on a new message) may do more harm than good because they interrupt your thought processes.

So turn them off. (Go to Mail Options, which is under Options near the bottom of the File menu.)

Figure 1

People say to me, “But I need to be responsive to clients.”

Yes, you do, but interrupting . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Canada (Commissioner of Competition) v. Chatr Wireless Inc. 2014 ONSC 1146
   

   [1] This court found that the respondents had failed to conduct adequate and proper tests prior to claiming that Chatr Wireless Inc. (“Chatr Wireless”) dropped fewer calls than Wind Mobile in Calgary and Edmonton and Public Mobile in Toronto and Montréal.

   [2] The “fewer dropped calls” claim appeared on Chatr Wireless’ website,

. . . [more]

It’s not often that I comment on a U.S. legal decision (mostly because I’m not an American attorney), but a recent decision from the US National Labour Relations Board (NLRB or the Board) is particularly interesting from an employment and labour law perspective and because it also highlights a significant area where US and Canada labour law differs.

In the decision Design Technology Group, LLC, 359 NLRB No 96, the Board ordered the employer to reinstate a number of employees who were terminated for critcizing their employer on a semi-public Facebook page. In the US, most employment is “at will” . . . [more]