It’s arguably the most important thing on your law firm’s website, the whole reason why it exists. Yet it’s usually parked in some distant corner of the site, and a challenge for visitors to find quickly and use easily.

What is it? It’s your “Contact Us” functionality.

A prospective client, having reviewed a firm’s website in detail, often decides to reach out and speak with one of the firm’s lawyers. This contact is typically established using one of three methods:

1. Phone us
2. Email us
3. Fill out and submit this online contact form. 

Many firms use all three contact methods, while . . . [more]

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal: more and more employers are using some form of pre-hiring assessment, such as personality tests. This is done in the hopes of better pinpointing candidates who will fit into the company’s culture. This article also clarifies that many companies do not rely solely on these tests; the test results can simply add another layer when evaluating a candidate with whom the employer has already met.

As this article states, honesty is the best policy when doing these assessments. Both the prospective employee and the employer will eventually lose out if the . . . [more]

Back in May, David Whelan wrote an excellent column on the pressures law firms experience because of consumer technology products titled The Core of Legal Technology. This month, the Law Society Gazette (UK) contained an article titled Technology in law firms transformed by ‘consumerisation’. Today I found a clever way to get the alternate spelling into the keywords of this article. Clever keyword content is not what I want to write about though.

I want to share three ideas to help law firm technology departments cope with the issue of consumer (and by this I mean Partner) demand . . . [more]

The study of law is very intriguing, for someone like me who came to it via the back route. Since I work in a law firm library, and haven’t been to law school, I am very aware of my limitations when it comes to legal research. I like to think that makes me more observant and diligent. One of the things I’ve observed is the way the law overlaps. A few years ago, I was helping an associate sort out where he’d find the answers to a question involving dangerous driving. He ended up needing three separate pieces of legislation: . . . [more]

The lengthy judgment of Lord Justice Lloyd in a decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales released 9 March 2011, contains the following tantalizing sentence:

“For the reasons that I have given above, in my judgment the principle known as the rule in Re Hastings–Bass… is not a correct statement of the law.”

These words are all the more tantalizing because the courts of England and Wales have applied the rule in Re Hastings Bass consistently since it was handed down in 1975. (The rule essentially allows trustees, in certain circumstances, to attack their own decisions and . . . [more]

The following article appeared in the new Fall 2011 issue of LAWPRO Magazine.

Don’t be a dupe: That’s the advice from those who were fooled.

In the months of July and August alone, hundreds of lawyers (from across Canada, the U.S., and even elsewhere in the world) have provided LAWPRO with emails seeking to retain them on bad cheque frauds. The most common scenarios are loan or debt collections and spousal support payments. (If you get obviously fraudulent emails, please forward them to fraudinfo@lawpro.ca) Dozens of Ontario lawyers have called looking for help in determining whether a matter they . . . [more]

E-mail’s days as a communication medium that offers a “reasonable expectation of privacy” may be numbered.

The ABA’s newly issued Formal Opinion 11-459 revisits the topic of e-mail security, and offers the following concluding paragraph:

A lawyer sending or receiving substantive communications with a client via e-mail or other electronic means ordinarily must warn the client about the risk of sending or receiving electronic communications using a computer or other device, or e-mail account, to which a third party may gain access. The risk may vary. Whenever a lawyer communicates with a client by e-mail, the lawyer must first consider

PR? What does it mean? I search around and wonder if it’s Public Relations or Press Relations (or rather media relations). But the two, although not unrelated, are not the same and that makes me think if, in that environment, there is more art than science applied; perhaps more faith and belief than evidence. In fairness, those within that trade seek to communicate their purposes and objectives, e.g., at the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations website, where, usefully and unsurprisingly, they offer a “jargon buster”.

Mostly, whether it’s one interpretation or another doesn’t bother me. The use of PR . . . [more]

This weekend I stopped by the Vegetarian Food Festival in Toronto to try out some new food products. The last thing I expected to see was a lawyer group. But there, prominently situated between food sample tables and advocacy groups was the Lawyers for Animal Welfare  booth.

University of Toronto law student Camille Labchuk and lawyer Nick Wright were staffing the booth, making members of the public aware of the group and a number of law-related animal welfare issues. I learned that Lawyers for Animal Welfare (LAW) is a registered charity dedicated to advancing public knowledge of animal practices and . . . [more]

I usually have an opinion on almost everything. Ten years ago I was working in an American military veteran hospital in Detroit, MI, and instantly saw a lot of things change.

But I’m keeping it to myself today to remember all of the lives, civilian and military, from September 11, 2011 and the military and social actions that followed it, such as:

• the 2,996 lives on September 11, 2011, including 24 Canadians
• an estimated 48, 644 lives in Afghanistan
• an estimated 1, 690, 903 lives in Iraq
• an estimated 3,000 people extraordinarily renditioned, including the Canadian Maher Arar
• an unknown

Oral cultures create knowledge, and some literate cultures produce many more publications than others. In our post-literate world, we have see the resurgence of oral communications on YouTube and elsewhere. Nonetheless, citations to the printed word remains a gold standard. Other forms of verification are needed, to address this imbalance. Enter Wikimedia’s Oral Citation Project. The project is outlined, and links are provided to a movie that looks at the problem.

For more interesting projects from the Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia), see here. . . . [more]

Orientation week is drawing to a close. 2L and 3L classes have begun with 1L to begin on Monday. To all 1Ls here are my pieces of advice. I know that not all who have experienced law school will agree with these and that’s fine, I hope that Slawyers will contribute their pieces of advice in the comments. Here are mine:

• Go to Class

I know this seems self-explanatory and I also know that one of the guilty pleasures of being a student is the occasional skipped class, so if you are going to skip classes be very judicious in . . . [more]