At yesterday’s 5th Annual Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers (FACL) Conference, Avvy Go and Julian Falconer spoke about mentorship and noted that large firms presumptively have resources that small and solo firms do not.

The future of legal practice management will invariably lie in technological solutions to strategic problems, especially for those with limited resources. I had a private tour earlier this week of the new LexisNexis product launched in Ontario, PCLaw Practice Suite, intended primarily for firms with 1 to 5 lawyers. The platform was developed after years of research and communication with small practitioners to assess . . . [more]

Libraries, and especially public libraries, are routinely an early target of budget cutting initiatives. It seems HR pros and other administrative types typically have not personally experienced how valuable sustained contact with high quality reading material is.

Where closing libraries is unpalatable, Librarians are fired. After all, the common perception of librarians is that “Librarians check out books. They read a lot. They tell people to be quiet.”

But libraries can’t run themselves, and more crucially, Librarians teach, by example and by the collections they build, how to detect BS. And lawyers, having spent a lot of time . . . [more]

How are hockey, poutine, and philosophy related?

The answer to this and all manner of other “connect the dots” sorts of questions is provided by xefer’s cunning use of Wikipedia. On the xefer-Wikipedia site, you simply enter one or more words or phrases, and provided that they’re Wikipedia article titles, xefer finds the paths in Wikipedia that will link up the concepts. The result is a map of logically related nodes each of which is an article title, making the whole look rather like a way finder for a subway system.

If you’re stumped for notions—and it’s surprising how empty . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

I was going to discuss the implications of Steve Jobs hypothetically attending Law School, but it became too challenging, especially with deadlines. Besides, when an article concludes with a quote from Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, like everything to do with Steve, the bar has been raised. The title of The Guardian’s Jean-Louis Gassée article: Steve Jobs: who’s going to protect us from cheap and mediocre now? says a lot.

One result of Steve’s having gone to Law School is that we might have missed out on benefiting from . . . [more]

Fellow Ontario lawyer and blogger Antonin Pribetic tweeted the following earlier this evening:

An RT taxonomy: RT+ (agree), RT- (disagree) RT= (indifferent), RT? (confusing), RT± (undecided), RT☀ (interesting), RT! (check this out!)

I really liked the concept and retweeted it. In a Reply to me, Antonin asked me if a RT without comment was a tacit endorsement. In a reply to him, I agreed that this was the case, and I asked if the taxonomy he proposed was his. Antonin indicated that @Charonqc had proposed RT+ and RT- at some point in the past and that he had added to . . . [more]

CAIJ, the Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (the network of law libraries associated with the Québec Bar Association), has a revamped website with many new research features:

• the UNIK search engine that allows for simultaneous keyword searching in its caselaw, commentary and Quebec and federal legislation databases
• the eDoctrine collection of free full-text commentary and textbooks including the Développements récents (annual reviews of areas of law), the Collection de droit (Bar School materials), proceedings of the annual Quebec Bar Association congresses and a growing number of treatises from Wilson & Lafleur
• the eLOIS collection of annotated laws (right now

No, the big white bear hasn’t replaced our industrious beaver as the national animal, as one Conservative senator has suggested. But any such move might have to hurry a bit, because Environment Minister Peter Kent has just announced that Canada’s polar bear, Ursus maritimus, is now a “species of special concern” under the Species at Risk Act, SC 2002 c 29. Under that legislation there are four categories of flora and fauna, according to their plight [s.2(1)]:

1. “extirpated species” means a wildlife species that no longer exists in the wild in Canada, but exists elsewhere in the

Site news for those who read Slaw only via RSS or email

1. Comment Watch:

In the last week there were 47 comments. You might be particularly interested in these:

• the 14 comments on Dave Billinsky’s post “Occupy Vancouver Demands Released”;
• the exchange on guest blogger Erik Makgren’s post “Tort Reform for the Better: Adding Liquidity to Dry Judgements”.

You can subscribe to the comments on Slaw either as a separate matter (RSS, email) or as part of a subscription combining posts and comments (RSS, email).

2. SlawTips

This week’s tips on SlawTips are: . . . [more]

Readers of this column over the past year or so will know that I’m rather preoccupied with the quality of legal material. When I compare free to paid legal resources, I often find the free resources wanting, usually because I don’t believe that enough checks and controls are used when the material is created.

We are proud of the work we’ve done here at CLEBC to create authoritative practice manuals for BC lawyers. But how does that material become authoritative; that is, what do we actually do to ensure that BC lawyers can confidently rely on these resources in their . . . [more]

by Erik Magraken

I’ve written many times that the phrase tort ‘reform‘ is often used in association with efforts to strip the rights of injury claimants. Reform, however, is a neutral concept in and of itself. Reform simply means change and the change could be for better or worse. With this in mind I’d like to share a tort reform idea for the better which recently crossed my mind. In short the idea is to add a pool of liquidity to rectify the injustice of dry judgement.

The thought crossed my mind as I was reading reasons for . . . [more]

There’s an old saying among lawyers (and law profs) that claims “you can’t suck and blow at the same time.” But it would seem that inventor Sir James Dyson is managing to expel steam from his ears even while his vacuum cleaners continue to inhale a decent share of the “hoover” market. The reason for his turbulence is that his share has been somewhat lessened in Britain thanks to a recent decision of the court of appeal for England and Wales. In Dyson Ltd v Vax Ltd [2011] EWCA Civ 1206 the court decided not to overturn a trial . . . [more]