Dispatches from a legal profession on the brink
Filed under: Law21
Sincere thanks and appreciation go out to Gerry Blackwell and the editorial staff of Canadian Lawyer magazine, who paid a great compliment to this brand-new space by naming it as one of the ten best Canadian law blogs. The fact that you can collect a “top ten” list of Canadian blawgs demonstrates just how much… Read more »
Filed under: Big Firms, Innovation, Management
If you help make the decisions at a large law firm anywhere in the world, I assume you’ve been keeping tabs on the developing impact of the UK’s Legal Services Act. There’s been talk about the fallout from the Clementi Report for quite awhile now, especially regarding share offerings by law firms. Seminars are coming… Read more »
Filed under: Big Firms, Innovation, Management
Google my name and you’ll find I’ve written a few things about baseball, mostly during my time as a co-founder of and contributor to Batter’s Box, a top-notch Canadian baseball blog. As it happens, one of my favourite baseball books (outside of Thomas Boswell’s and Bill James’s works) isn’t really, I don’t think, about the… Read more »
Filed under: Innovation, Technology
The January 2008 edition of the ABA’s Law Practice magazine contains an intriguing article by Tom Mighell about a social network for Texas lawyers. (Hat tip to Larry Bodine.) Tom describes the Texas Bar Circle, which is less than a year old but already has 2,200 members who build profiles, link to colleagues’ or friends’… Read more »
Filed under: Collaboration, Leadership
“There go my people,” said 19th-century radical French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, supposedly on seeing a mob pass by the café where he was seated. “I must find out where they are going, so I can lead them.” You won’t find a more succinct summary of the paradoxical nature of leadership than that: how can… Read more »
There’s an interesting discussion in the legal blogosphere these days about, well, legal blogs. James Beck and Mark Herrmann at the Drug & Device Law blog wonder why law firms undervalue blogs, and provide four plausible explanations, three of which relate to demonstrable financial benefit for the firm. Ron Friedmann at Strategic Legal Technology furthers… Read more »
Filed under: Technology
E-mail has peaked and is in decline. That’s the clear message coming through in a wave of recent articles (in both the mainstream and business press) about e-mail bombardment and overload. If spam (and spam filters) don’t finish off e-mail’s usefulness, legitimate users’ misuse of e-mail will. We’re approaching the 15th anniversary of e-mail’s widespread… Read more »
Filed under: Collaboration, Innovation, Research
A terrific discussion is underway at SLAW, prompted by news of a new Canadian online research service, about the future of commercial legal databases. Ever since the LII system (Legal Information Institute) got rolling, the writing has been on the wall for fee-based online caselaw databases — how much longer can you charge a price… Read more »
Filed under: Clients
Nothing is more critical to the success of your relationship with clients than managing expectations, because expectations are enormously important to how people feel and behave. Among other things, as three recent articles explain, they relate closely to: Price: Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch reports on a study that shows people enjoy wine more… Read more »
Filed under: Law School
I took piano lessons as a kid. I didn’t hugely enjoy them, not least because of the timing — 10:00 to 11:00 Saturday morning was primo cartoon time — but the instructor was my aunt and it was kind of expected that all the nephews and nieces had to do their time. Anyway, I didn’t… Read more »
