Once again a Canadian law firm is in merger discussions. The Blog of Legal Times said earlier this week that Dentons is in discussions with US-based McKenna Long & Aldridge to create a firm of 3,100 lawyers – assuming no one leaves.

John Grimley makes a good point on this potential merger – what’s really in it for McKenna?

George Beaton said on Twitter, “Pray, why is bigger better for clients?”

My thought is, “My God, what is with this obsession with size?”

The marketplace for large international firms is pretty small – enough for only a very few players. . . . [more]

The baby panda cam at Washington’s National Zoo is not the only digital casualty of the shutdown of U.S. federal government services that started this week [awwww man, not the cam with the adorable baby panda!].

The websites of Library of Congress and the Law Library of Congress, the world’s largest law library, are also down, although THOMAS, the legislative information site is still functioning.

Even NASA’s website is knocked out of commission.

The Washington Post, the Ars Technica site, and the government transparency NGO the Sunlight Foundation have details. . . . [more]

The CBA Futures Initiative took to the Twitterverse Tuesday night to talk about legal education.

What was supposed to be a half-hour discussion about objectives and obstacles turned into more than two hours of enthusiastic participation from across the country. Mitch Kowalski summed up the responses about 75 minutes in: “So we’ve seen tuition, diversity, maturity, practicality, length of study are issues. Solutions?”

Karen Dyck summed up the legal profession’s response to these issues so far with an emoticon wink: “Don’t change a thing.”

A lot of the early discussion focused on high and rising tuition costs, in response to . . . [more]

BrightPlanet has created a new online product called “BlueJay,” which it is advertising as a "Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner." The tool allows users to monitor virtually every single public tweet published by Twitter users in real time for indicators of crime or wrongdoing. Users can set up virtual perimeters or geo-fences to track tweets specific to those areas. BrightPlanet’s main business is “open source intelligence”: searching the “deep web”—those parts of the World Wide Web that are public but which regular search engines cannot reach.

Over the years I have seen dozens of contracts with dreadful arbitration clauses.

They are generally found near the end of the agreement, with the other so-called “boilerplate”. One often wonders whether the lawyers even read them before the contract was signed. Almost certainly, the business people didn’t. One consequence of this neglect is that, if and when the clause must be dusted off and used in a dispute, it may not work as intended. And unworkable arbitration clauses tend to give the process as a whole a bad name.

There are 7 essential elements of an effective arbitration clause. . . . [more]

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.

LAW FIRM LIBRARIANSHIP: ISSUES, PRACTICE, AND DIRECTIONS
John Azzolini
Oxford : Chandos Publishing, 2013

Excerpted: pp. 9 and 10-14 from Chapter 2: Tasks, Skills, and Attributes

[Footnotes have been converted to endnotes here.]

Abstract: Law firm librarianship can be distinguished from its public and academic counterparts by examining several of the emblematic features . . . [more]

Aka Phantom Cellphone Vibration – when you think you feel your phone vibrating when it is not. Yes, this is a real thing that has been the subject of academic studies.

From a study at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, United States entitled Phantom vibrations among undergraduates: Prevalence and associated psychological characteristics:

Phantom vibration syndrome,’ or perceived vibrations from a device that is not really vibrating, is a recent psychological phenomenon that has attracted the attention of the media and medical community. Most (89%) of the 290 undergraduates in our sample had experienced phantom vibrations, and they experienced them . . . [more]

The Personal Information Protection And Identity Theft Prevention Act (Bill 211) has recently passed in Manitoba and takes effect upon proclamation.

This Private Member’s Bill was most recently introduced on May 28, 2013 but had been put forward a number of times previously. The Explanatory Note sets out that:

This Bill governs the collection, use, disclosure and destruction of personal information by organizations in the private sector. It also establishes a duty for those organizations to notify individuals who may be affected when the personal information the organization has collected is lost, stolen or compromised.

Winnipeg lawyer Brian Bowman, . . . [more]

I’m (re-)reading Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf following last month’s enlightening set of sessions at ILTA on why we need to find new ways of doing things. Whether it was legal project management, change management or application and software development, ILTA was full of ideas about re-imagining and simplifying the very traditional processes at our firms.

By adopting processes that are faster, leaner and with more feedback loops, both this book and the ILTA sessions suggest we can turn those massive boil-the-ocean stalled projects into that which entrepreneurs and innovators already know well – the Minimum Viable Product . . . [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 past week:

1. Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571
   

   1. This Court has developed a new awareness and understanding of a category of vexatious litigant. As we shall see, while there is often a lack of homogeneity, and some individuals or groups have no name or special identity, they (by their own admission or by descriptions given by others) often fall into the following descriptions: Detaxers;

. . . [more]

The Ministry of the Attorney General in Ontario announced today that they will introduce a Bill to change how legal professions are regulated in the province.

The proposed Bill would allow the law society to recover legal costs from discipline proceedings, and will allow information protected by solicitor-client privilege to be used in hearings.

The main thrust of the Bill appears to provide more equitable representation of paralegals within the law society, increasing the number of benchers at Convocation from two to five. The committee chair, who is elected by paralegal members, can attend Convocation but cannot vote unless they . . . [more]

The Quebec Court of Appeal (decision in French) recently overturned a decision of the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal (decision in English) made in 2010 which had essentially held that any decision not to train a pilot made by the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was prima facie anti-muslim and/or anti-Arab and discriminatory. Accordingly, Bombardier could not refuse to train a pilot for a license on the basis of a U.S. DHS determination that the pilot constituted a security risk. The CBC described the original case and its ramifications here. The follow up on . . . [more]