Connie kindly updated Slawyers with key links relating to the flood situation in Southern Alberta. As you can imagine, for those of us with close family, friends, colleagues and clients in the affected areas, the situation of our Southern neighbours is top of mind.

I am so proud of the way my colleagues have dealt with this situation. Our Calgary Managing Partner, Doreen Saunderson, has been keeping our staff updated with information. Her first email, June 20, 2013 just shy of midnight shared “We hope that all of you and your families are safe. Caring for them is your . . . [more]

One of the costs to the justice system is the failure of many who are accused of summary conviction offences to appear at scheduled court hearings. A group of researchers in the US studied the effect on the no-show rate of sending out reminder postcards. These would be cheaper than the reminder phone calls typically used in many jurisdictions. The study sample was roughly 8,000 “misdemeanants” in Nebraska, a selection of whom received one of three postcards, each with somewhat different wording (as to consequences of failure to appear). The results are described thus in the current issue [PDF] of . . . [more]

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

Crop (Don’t Zoom) for Better Smartphone Pictures
Dan Pinnington

With our camera-equipped smartphones, most of us are snapping more pictures than we ever did before. And while not quite the same as working with a digital single-lens reflex camera, the cameras on today’s smartphones can take amazing pictures. Among the many features they now have, most smartphone cameras offer a zoom function. Nice to have a zoom, but you . . . [more]

Few would argue that the core of legal business development is… relationships. How you build them, nurture them and value them is the difference between lawyers who are serious about building a successful practice, and others who just give it lip service. Sure it’s easy to meet people but the question is… what do you do with that introduction? Inc. Magazine contributor Minda Zetlin looks inside the success of Mobile Deluxe, a tremendously successful gaming company, to examine founder Josh Hartwell’s secrets to becoming a master relationship builder. Zetlin explains…

How did Hartwell launch a successful mobile gaming company–with no . . . [more]

On Thursday, the retiring English Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, published final guidelines for crown counsel on the approach they should take in cases involving communications sent via social media. The approach they take could be usefully read by Canada’s prosecutors.

First step is to assess the content of the communication and the conduct in question. It distinguishes between :

Communications which may constitute credible threats of violence to the person or damage to property.

Communications which specifically target an individual or individuals and which may constitute harassment or stalking.

Communications which may amount to a breach

Slaw readers interested in the theatre may want to mark the date of the Shylock Appeal, which will take place at the Stratford Festival on Saturday, October 5, at the Studio Theatre (behind the Avon Theatre), at 10:30 a.m. Alan Lenczner and another leading advocate will argue Shylock’s sentence before a panel of judges including Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and former Justice Ian Binnie. With actors in the other roles, this day in court will be as entertaining as it is judiciously sound. . . . [more]

One of the perqs (?) of writing for traditional, paper, law journals is the author’s offprint. One of the problems of writing for those journals is what to do with most of those offprints if one wants to keep one’s friends who aren’t compelled to accept one. They (the offprints, not the friends) aren’t as convenient as the old-style paper matchbooks for levelling off-kilter restaurant tables and the like.

I received, this morning, 3 packages which, when opened and emptied, yielded an about 14″ (about 35.56 cm) stack of offprints containing my recent too-long article “Factual Causation in Negligence After . . . [more]

Ontario lawyers might be familiar with the Law Society of Upper Canada’s AccessCLE service, which is a database that provides electronic PDF access to papers and materials from LSUC events since 2004. Previously this service was pay-for-view.

However, the Law Society just announced that articles older than 18 months are now free of charge! Articles newer than the 18 month time frame will still be available on a pay-per-view basis, at costs ranging from $25.00 to $35.00 per article. Lawyers outside Ontario can access all these articles as well.

AccessCLE allows you to conduct a full text search, preview the . . . [more]

On Thursday night the OBA Civil Litigation and Insurance sections held their end of term dinner.

The keynote speaker was Alan Lenczner. I have heard many speeches about how to fix the broken civil justice system, but this was different because of its focus on how the judiciary can assist in the fix.

Lenczner’s message was that sophisticated litigants are leaving the civil justice system in droves, opting for private arbitration. The result is a shrinking body of decided cases. To get these litigants back into the civil justice system, we have to get rid of the inefficiencies.

One of . . . [more]

Actually, the big news, of course, is that the U.S. Library of Congress has integrated its web archives into its main web search function. For quite some time now, LOC has been archiving significant websites, of which Slaw is one. At the moment there are 940 such sites being archived. Though archiving began in 2008, the archives of Slaw contain some posts reaching back to its inception in 2005 but extend only up to 2010, because the archiving process lags by a few years. (As a digital archivist at LOC explained to me by email, “We do have an . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from forty-one recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Doorey’s Law of Work  2. Official Clio Blog  3. Precedent: The New Rules of Law and Style  4. Thoughtful Legal Management  5. Clicklaw Blog

Doorey’s Law of Work
Unpaid Intern Scams Continue to Flourish in Ontario. What Can be Done?
Almost every ‘unpaid internship’ that is not affiliated with . . . [more]

There are a number of articles about how libraries can be part of law firm-wide Knowledge Management projects and initiatives. Ted Tjaden has written a particularly good article on the subject: “The Evolution of Law-Related Knowledge Management in North America – Opportunities for Law Librarians”. However there is very little literature out there on how law libraries can use knowledge management processes within the library.

Private law libraries tend to be small, so they may not feel the need to have a formal KM program. That said, most law libraries are already practicing some sort of informal KM, . . . [more]