In the April 20123 issue of Spectrum, the American Association of Law Libraries’ monthly magazine, I read the article “Law Firm Changes Offer Opportunities for Libraries” by Sarah Sutherland with great interest. Sutherland is Manager of Library Services at McMillan LLP in Vancouver and currently Vice-President of the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries.

In this article, Sutherland closes the loop on a couple of key legal industry ideas:

1. “Certain aspects of the practice of law are changing”
   

   …the movement toward KM, alternative billing, and initiatives to automate some aspects of legal practice is a movement away

It’s astonishing how much has changed in my five years of attending ABA TECHSHOW.

At ABA TECHSHOW 2008, Rian Gauvreau and I launched the beta of Clio, which at the time was not only the first of a new generation of web-based practice management systems, but the one of the first of any web-based product to be exhibited at TECHSHOW.

At this first TECHSHOW, Clio prompted both admiration and fear among attendees: half the visitors to our booth were thrilled about the prospect of putting their data in the cloud (by the way, back then “the cloud” wasn’t even . . . [more]

Nothing in the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Rules of Professional Conduct places much real pressure on the profession to incorporate equality in a meaningful way. If law schools cannot instill the true worth of equality into the minds of future lawyers, the expectation for a truly diverse Canadian legal profession becomes no more than an unrealistic pipe dream. By presenting ethical training as the sort of “easy” course students take in order to graduate, law schools may simply be creating new lawyers who are, as Professor Rosemary Cairns Way described, only “rhetorically committed” to equality.

Handbooks for equality: Hiring . . . [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. Wise Law Blog  2. Off the Shelf  3. University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog  4. Slater Vecchio Connected  5. BC Injury Law & ICBC Claims Blog

Wise Law Blog
140Law – Legal Headlines for Friday, April 5, 2013
Here are the leading legal headlines from Wise Law on . . . [more]

As I’ve been mentioning in Law Librarians News it really is rather dull at the moment in the world of legal publishing — from the outside anyway. 

You will all know Lexis have dumped Matthew Bender and that’s really the only big story of the last month. Both Lexis and Westlaw have done their usual slew of Joint Ventures, Mergers and Buyouts in the world of legal technology to boost ever decreasing revenues and as late as mid March press departments at both companies were in silent mode as the number crunchers and management run around furiously creating end of . . . [more]

For over 10 years LAWPRO Magazine has provided Ontario lawyers with a wealth of practice management and claims prevention content. It is delivered (in paper or electronic format) to every practicing lawyer in Ontario.

In 2012 LAWPRO decided to extend the reach of the magazine beyond lawyers already in practice to the law schools on Ontario. At first it was a magazine stand featuring the LAWPRO brand and the latest regular issue of the magazine, but the idea quickly evolved to creating a student-focused issue of the magazine. We wanted to a) introduce students to LAWPRO and what we do . . . [more]

There’s not much that the large law firms have as an advantage over mid-size and small firms. Their bloated overhead, high-priced rent, and unnecessary bureaucracy, all translates into higher operating costs passed on to clients.

There is one thing which does hold large law firms apart from the rest, and that’s the decades of institutional knowledge which is internally accumulated. As much as the law is constantly changing and evolving, much of it still remains the same, or is easily updated from precedents that have recently become obsolete. This realm, of internal legal memos and precedents, is the area where . . . [more]

There is a lot to think about beyond substantive law when you are starting a law practice. With that in mind, under the practicePRO banner LAWPRO has created the New Lawyer Resource page containing what we feel are the best resources we have to offer to new and soon-to-be-lawyers.

The page has two aims: 1) to help newly minted lawyers understand more about things like managing a practice, client relations, practice finances, marketing, and legal technology; and 2) its an introduction to the risk and practice management articles, precedents, checklists and other materials practicePRO offers to lawyers.

From a claims . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Sale of land / Municipal law / Accident and sickness insurance / Discharge of debtor / Arrest without warrant / Motor vehicle owner definition:

Tang et al. v. Zhang et al. 2013 BCCA 52
Sale of Land – Remedies of vendor – Forfeiture of deposit – General
The plaintiffs/sellers entered into a standard form . . . [more]

As we did last year, we’re having a modest Law Student Week on Slaw. In the coming week we’ll post each day a student essay chosen by Slaw columnist and Ottawa University law prof Adam Dodek from papers submitted by his first year students. As well, the Lawyers’ Professional Indemnity Company (LAWPRO) will provide daily posts of interest and benefit to law students.

As Professor Dodek said in his introductory post last year:

I have found that our students have great perspectives on these issues because they were so recently members of that ridiculous term that only lawyers use: “lay

Like most vertebrates, human beings are more or less bilaterally symmetrical. Sure, you’ve got a mole on one shoulder and your liver is very much one-sided. But still, it’s not as though we all had a lone tentacle growing out of a single hip. So how come left and right?

It’s a fairly peculiar thing, when you think about it. Up and down are easy: gravity does the work, and besides the sky is blue. Forward and backward are likewise a piece of cake: we’re iced on one side and not on the other. (We’re bilaterally symmetrical in only one . . . [more]

Janice has hit her stride. She has a busy practice in a speciality area of law at a large regional law firm. She is actively involved in the administration of her firm and weaves regular client development activities into the work day. She and her husband Nick, a corporate lawyer, have two young elementary school children. Janice is enjoying her family life and her legal practice. She would be the first to tell you that she feels stretched and like she is “acing” neither of these important areas of her life but she does have the sense that she is . . . [more]