Because law is a matter of words and because multicultural, multilingual Canada has a bilingual legal system for the most part, I think you might want to take ten minutes to watch a particular video from Microsoft. It shows Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid on a stage in China demonstrating their latest voice recognition, machine translation, and machine speech technologies, all working in concert.

Simply put, Rashid, speaking moderately slowly, has his talk perfectly accurately transcribed as he talks in English; then towards the end of the video the written English is translated as he speaks into proper written . . . [more]

Turn away from e-mail and pick up the phone.

Lately I’ve found myself starting to draft a lengthy e-mail, and then realizing I ought to just make a quick phone call instead. It may sound silly, but if you’re like me, when times are extremely busy and I am racing from one deadline to the next, a phone call feels like a luxury.

I’ve recently discovered that I’ll go too long before I speak with or visit a client. Sure, the work gets done and clients are happy, but e-mail alone does not deepen a work relationship.

We rely heavily . . . [more]

Picking up on a recent post by Prof. David Doorey on his blog, I thought this week that I’d highlight a recent decision by an Ontario court to sentence an employer (the director of the company) to 90 days in jail for repeatedly violating the Ontario Employment Standards Act (discussed also in the Huffington Post) He was also fined $280,000. In a press release, the Ministry of Labour explained as follows:

Between March 2007 and October 2009, 61 employees from six companies, operated by Blondin filed claims with the Ministry of Labour for unpaid wages. An investigation

By Tiffany Wong

The 6th Annual Conference and Banquet of the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers (FACL) was held on November 10th, 2012 at the Toronto Board of Trade. Started in 2007, FACL and has grown from a small conference to a virtually sold out event of hundreds of lawyers, law students and allies from the Asian-Canadian legal community.

This year’s keynote speaker was Don Liu, Senior Vice-President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Xerox Corporation, Recipient of the 2011 Trailblazer Award from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA), and one of only nine general counsel of a . . . [more]

Over the past seven months, I’ve attended several presentations made by consultants to small law firms. Three things that were spoken have stayed with me.

The first was at the launch of the Small Practice Portal of the Law Society of New South Wales, where a speaker addressed a sea of faces from small law firms and said that the number of new solo practices being launched every year in New South Wales was unsustainable. It was one of those “look to your right, look to your left, soon one of you won’t be here” moments.

The second was a . . . [more]

Like many areas of practice, family law is going through a period of change. Both clients and their lawyers are questioning traditional modes of practice. Economic woes both cause legal problems, and leave clients with limited resources with which to resolve them. Stress – for both families in crisis and for their lawyers – is a constant reality. Still, within this challenging climate, family lawyers are expected to work diligently and professionally in the service of their clients’ interests.

To understand how the bar is coping with the demands of modern family law practice, in the August 2012 issue of . . . [more]

I seriously doubt the wisdom of mandatory mediation, for a number of reasons. One is that sophisticated parties who have paid lawyers to advise them, to serve pleadings and to discover evidence, should not be subjected to the additional financial and emotional trauma of mediation where without prejudice settlement discussions have been fruitless.

A UK High Court costs decision last month illustrates the point. At trial a claim for 16 million pounds for breach of a distributorship agreement was dismissed. The claimant argued that although the defendant was prima facie entitled to its costs, there should be a 50% reduction . . . [more]

You may have already seen this, but it was new to me. In 2010-2011 Harvard Law School and New York Law School hosted a year-long contest of ideas respecting legal education called “Future Ed“. One of the results was the book Educating the Digital Lawyer edited by Marc Lauritsen and Oliver Goodenough. The book explores the question “What will legal education look like as we train our graduates to be effective lawyers in the digital world of the 21st Century?”

Published by LexisNexis, a complimentary copy of the e-book format is available here [note: clicking on this link . . . [more]

If you missed the 2012 Futures Conference and Annual Meeting of the College of Law Practice Management in Washington, D.C. late last month (as I unfortunately did), then you also missed out on an extraordinary exploration of change and innovation in the legal marketplace.

Here are two excellent summaries of what went down at the Futures Conference:

• Ron Friedmann of Fireman & Co., co-chair of the conference, published an extensive report at his Strategic Legal Technology blog titled “Overview of the New Legal Normal.” Key quote: “One panelist noted that given how many consumers cannot afford . . . [more]

There have been times, as a legal and professional publisher, when I have mused on a life without troublesome and quirky authors who take holidays, have families and sometimes put their professional work before their writing commitments. I speculated as to how it would be in an entirely automated world in which the nature of the problem was entered into one end of the over-sized computer and out the other emerged the single correct answer, as was seen in films of a bygone era. Expressed in books, perhaps each chapter or topic would end with “the answer, therefore, is . . . [more]

We brought you timely news about Iceland’s crowd-sourcing of constitutional reform. Now we invite you to look at what Finland is trying. This time it’s not the constitution but rather legislative initiatives that well up from the citizenry. A project called Avoin Ministeriö (Open Ministry) funded by the Ministry of Public Affairs invites citizens to place a legislative proposal online, where others can then vote to approve or disapprove of the idea. A successful idea will be put before the legislature.

The Slate magazine story on this experiment explains “success” this way:

Each suggested law gets six months to gather

Universities across the country are struggling with how to deal with their students’ use of social media. I previously covered the Alberta case of  Pridgen v. University of Calgary, where the court quashed a decision by the university to discipline students who made critical comments on Facebook about a professor. Key to this decision was the university’s actions lacked procedural fairness.

Earlier this year the Alberta Court of Appeal upheld this decision, with three separate decisions. Justices McDonald and O’Ferrall indicated that the Charter analysis undertaken by the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta was unnecessary, and upheld the . . . [more]