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

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,

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]

I love my iPad mini. I have been using it for just over one year. It has proved to be tremendously helpful in my civil litigation practice.

There are hundreds of similar pieces about “ipad apps for lawyers.” This is a simple setup that works for me. 

My basic tools are PDF Converter and PDF Expert.

I use the PDF Converter app to convert Word documents into PDFs so that I can annotate them using the PDF expert app.

Using the PDF expert app, I can mark up any PDF document. I can highlight it, put text annotations, arrows, . . . [more]

Google Alerts are emails generated by Google when it finds new results. Alerts have mentioned on Slaw including an interesting article by Omar which offered an alternative service that uses a desktop or mobile device download – Mention.

Despite reports of concern about the continuing functionality of Google Alerts, I have continued to use the service for select monitoring with success. Google Alerts continues to be generally reliable and it was recently used by a team member and I to watch for notice of a newspaper article. There is an interesting story about our watches that may be relevant to . . . [more]