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.

Research

Legal Infographics
Shaunna Mireau

A note about an infographic was delivered to me by email yesterday by Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation website www.fightspam.gc.ca. The infographic touted in the email was titled “Worried it’s Spam? 5 Things to Look for”. Sharing the infographic was encouraged in the email. Sharing is what infographics are all about. . . .

Practice
What Are Firms Actually Using?
David Bilinsky & Laura Calloway

There are . . . [more]

This is about how and when to use SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). The graphics part of SVG is easiest to explain. SVG is a format for images, like JPEG, PNG, or TIFF. The SVG difference is that, instead of capturing the image with a camera or scanner, you define it with words.

This is where the word “vector” comes in. A vector consists of a distance and a direction. The simplest example of a vector is probably “from point A to point B.” Real estate lawyers will relate vectors to metes and bounds descriptions in surveys, e.g. “Commencing at the . . . [more]

Imagine a tool that would round out the existing built-in spell- and grammar-checking tools in Microsoft Word, but instead of simply correcting errors, this tool would make your writing more concise. This tool exists, and it’s called WordRake.

You can think of WordRake as an automated editor. Gary Kinder, a lawyer and writing expert, codified many of the patterns he saw while editing documents into a set of rules that WordRake utilizes while processing a document.

Here is example of WordRake’s automated editing in action:

WordRake is a powerful add-on to Word, and is one of the only . . . [more]

My post Why Can’t You Just Make it Work Like Google? last week surprised me by going viral. Well, as viral as a blog post about information management can go. It certainly seems to have struck a nerve with people from all across the legal industry. It turns out that making search work effectively inside the organization is something a lot of people are attempting to tackle. After posting it, however, I realized there is also a reason why you would not even want to use Google as it functions out on the Internet for use inside the organization.

Allow . . . [more]

This article by Jordan Nichols, claims counsel at LAWPRO, appears in the December issue of LAWPRO Magazine. It can be found at www.lawpro.ca/magazinearchives

Claims against litigation lawyers often involve allegations of communication errors. In this article, we consider steps that lawyers can take to avoid such claims right out of the gate – at the outset of their retainers.

When we attribute a claim to a communication problem, what exactly do we mean? Here are some examples:

• failure to warn clients that they were likely to lose a motion, trial or appeal;
• failure to warn clients that they could

Written with Meredith James

It’s a horror story – the beautiful glass-walled building you may work, shop or live in are killing millions of migratory birds. Many SLAW readers are likely familiar with the distressing thud of a bird breaking its neck or wing on those lovely glass panes, often at night when building lights are left on.

At least 1 million migratory birds die in Toronto alone each year due to collisions with buildings. The birds become confused by reflections and lights in urban areas and fly into windows at full speed. Often killed or badly injured, they fall . . . [more]

The OBA is running an early morning one hour program on Wednesday 12 December on the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision Southcott Estates Inc v. Toronto Catholic District School Board. This is the latest word on the law of mitigation in Canada. You can register to attend on-line or in person here.

The panel includes counsel who appeared in Ottawa for the appellant and respondent – Thomas Curry and Andrew Robinson.

The School Board sold surplus land to a corporation incorporated solely to purchase the land. The purchaser was a wholly owned subsidiary of a real estate developer. . . . [more]

With all the international law firm mergers currently taking place, marketing departments around the world will be scurrying to remake their firms in the new image. An international merger is a greatly magnified version of the procedure that takes place in all law firms when new lawyers join the firm. HR is preoccupied with payroll, benefits, and insurance. Facilities is scrambling to find a place for the new lawyers near their practice group—often causing the domino effect of multiple moves. IT is getting the new lawyers’ computer and phone systems set up. And that’s in firms big enough to have . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from thirty-five 2010 & 2011 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. Avoid a Claim Blog  2. Michael Geist’s Blog  3. Canadian Legal History Blog  4. Lee Akazaki: SQP jeunes avocats | new lawyers’ mentorship  5. Le Blogue du CRL

Avoid a Claim Blog
New in the practicePRO Library: Facebook in One Hour for Lawyers

This was the week . . . [more]

The Ottawa Citizen reported last week that a lawyer who posted confidential information about his own client online was caught in a police sting operation. The Ottawa criminal defence lawyer posted a PDF of disclosure that he received from the Crown in a criminal case against his client. The PDF contained blacked-out information and the lawyer used the web to seek someone to help him read the blacked out portions of the disclosure document. A man in Australia saw the post and contacted the Ottawa police who then caught the Ottawa lawyer in a sting operation. Read the Citizen . . . [more]

Search engine rankings are largely the result of mathematical algorithms and repetitive bots which crawl the Internet. Search engines have historically enjoyed considerable immunity from defamation and libel claims, given that they present themselves as automated organizers of information and not publishers of the information itself. That may change soon, especially where the statements are false and the plaintiff contacts the search engine requesting that the results be modified or removed.

The Supreme Court of Victoria in Australia has ordered Google and Yahoo to pay damages for failing to modify their search results. Michael Trkulja, a prominent member of the . . . [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 are in Stare decisis, Discovery, Labour law, Workers’ compensation, & Admiralty:

R. v. Zentner (R.) 2012 ABCA 332
Courts – Stare decisis – Authority of judicial decisions – General principles – Authority and use of precedents – General
The accused funeral director defrauded families and the Province of $4,999 over . . . [more]