There is considerable discussion these days about how the legal community can help to increase access to justice for Canadian citizens. We know that mediation is a valuable tool to that end but I wonder whether lawyers are recognizing its full potential or, in some cases, shortchanging its benefits.

While this may not be entirely “new”, this post encourages lawyers to amplify the role that they play in choosing and using mediation.

There are increasing opportunities for lawyers to participate in mediation, not in a mediator role but in a counsel or advocacy role, all of which support increased access . . . [more]

A few smart watches are on the market now. The Pebble that resulted from a Kickstarter project is probably the most well known one.

Many manufacturers are working on their own versions. Samsung today revealed its Galaxy Gear smartwatch .

For now, it apparently only works with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3, but I’m sure that will change soon.

So what does a smartwatch do? Basically, it works as an interface for your smartphone. You can make and receive calls from it, send and receive texts, control music, and interface in other various ways. It responds to touch, voice, and gesture . . . [more]

Thanks to a comment Noel Semple on the legal ethics email list to which I belong, I was alerted to the fact that the Advocates’ Society has filed a factum as an intervener in the appeal by Joseph Groia of the finding against him of misconduct — “incivility,” principally — by the Law Society of Upper Canada. (See also the Advocates’ Society note on the matter.) The appeal has yet to be heard. The Advocates’ Society has also placed online Groia’s factum, that of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association as intervener and the respondent Law Society’s factum.

This . . . [more]

Last month, the Manitoba Court of Appeal commented on the practice in some Manitoba courts of ordering charitable donations be made as a part of sentencing in criminal or other quasi-criminal proceedings.

The Court, in R. v. Choi (J.W.), 2013 MBCA 75 (CanLII) was considering an appeal of sentence by the Crown from a conviction under s. 124(1)(c) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act relating to the defendant’s illegal employment of six foreign nationals. The sentence imposed by the lower Court was an 18-month conditional discharge including supervised probation and a condition that Choi:

Make a charitable

That’s the question. Whether it’s a no-brainer to hang in and suffer all of the outrageous highs and lows of advertising, economic instability and the decline of print or instead, in search of fortune, shake a spear at that particular sea of troubles? These might be among the issues facing the multiplicity of business to business publishers that continue to produce magazines, directories, exhibitions and other activities that rely on advertising and sponsorship, for lawyers and other advisers.

It hasn’t been an easy time for the magazines and related sectors for a good number of years now. Moreover, many of . . . [more]

In a recent tweet, I was asked whether a company should use a big, medium or small law firm. In my opinion, the answer is “Yes”. In my time as in-house counsel at a company with operations in every province, I’ve learned that it’s essential to establish relationships with a number of law firms across the country, of various sizes, in all provinces. While it irritated me when I was in private practice, the era where a company was faithful to one firm for all legal services is over. Using multiple firms can be a very effective tool in managing . . . [more]

I have the pleasure of presenting some information to University of Alberta Law students today who are taking a seminar course titled “Low income individuals and the law”. To prepare, I gathered some free legal research/legal content resources for a handout.

Free law links (PDF)

What would you add to this list? . . . [more]

As service levels and service level credits have become a standard component of outsourcing agreements, service providers have responded with requests for earn backs: the right, if a specified level of performance is achieved, to earn back, or not have to pay, the service level credit. However, if earn backs are to be included in an outsourcing agreement as part of a service level regime, they need to be defined carefully at the beginning and integrated into the service level methodology: when they are included late in the game, as a concession granted by the customer in response to a . . . [more]

According to a study commissioned by CanLII and released today reported cases have varying “life spans” and cease to be important — as measured by their citation in other judgments — somewhere between three and fifteen years. The exception to this are judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada, the average “time to failure” of which is a whopping fifty years.

Citation Analysis of Canadian Case Law by Thom Neale is a full-on informatics study that:

uses simple statistical and functional analysis in conjunction with network analysis algorithms to examine the network of Canadian caselaw using data supplied by the

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on technology, research and practice.

Technology

[No technology tip this week]
Dan Pinnington

Research

Think About the Reader
Shaunna Mireau

I have had the benefit of working on a writing project with others from my firm recently. One of the key things that I have learned from this is that writers, especially if the work is intended to convince others to act, must put themselves in the shoes of the reader. . . .

Practice . . . [more]

CHANGE. Few like it, and least of all lawyers. It’s important to have a firm culture built on good work but equally important is to build a firm culture around business development. If business development is at the core of how everyone thinks and goes hand-in-hand with excellent work, the financial health of your firm will be more stable. 

But… it’s easier said than done. Your team will resist change… we all do. Samuel Bacharach, a professor of labor management at Cornell, writes for Inc. Magazine… 4 Reasons Your Employees Resist Change–And How to Overcome Them. Bacharach suggests that . . . [more]

If writing is hard — and it is — then legal writing is both easier and more difficult still. Easier, perhaps, because it is stylized: everything from briefs to judgments and legislation is carefully cropped of individuality and approximated to yesterday’s example — understandably, because “It’s not about you, writer” and it is about avoiding risk.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

More difficult, because, well, because life must break through from time to time if legal writers are not to fall on their quills or die of acute accidie. It’s far from easy to give . . . [more]