Last month's episode discussed the importance of listening and hearing.  As it takes two to communicate, this month's executive coach Debra Forman looks at the speaker's side of the interaction: getting your message out clearly so the listener will focus and act on your words.

 

Last August, Ontario Superior Court Justice Katherine M. van Rensburg narrowed the scope of the Court of Appeal for Ontario’s decision in Sharma v. Timminco Ltd. by affirming the court’s authority to grant leave nunc pro tunc, or with retroactive effect, to the plaintiffs’ secondary market disclosure claims in order to avoid the expiry of a limitation period.

In 1957, a prominent American group denounced homosexuality as “socially heretical or deviant,” and determined that laws against it posed no constitutional problems. That organization: the American Civil Liberties Union. For years thereafter, “sodomy” was a criminal offence in every state.

When my parents adopted their dog, the humane society inserted a tiny microchip under the skin on her shoulder for future identification purposes if her tags are lost. Insertion of the chip costs about $50 and the proceeds are generally donated to benefit homeless animals. The animal version of the chip is neatly inserted under the skin into the muscle tissue using a syringe and is held in place by the scar tissue that develops around it over time. There’s nothing to it.

Working as a new lawyer is hard enough without having to strategize about developing business. The good news, I’m told, is business development should be fun or you’re not doing it right.

In this third of four videos from Canadian Lawyer’s law firm management roundtable, moderated by editorial director Gail J. Cohen and sponsored by the Phoenix Legal Group, our panel of experts discuss the issues of globalization and outsourcing legal services. They look at the use of legal process outsourcing and expanding it from e-discovery and document review into other areas.

This column will deal with some of the key results of the 2012 Canadian KPI Survey conducted by Law Firm KPI Inc., a for-profit company co-founded by Karen MacKay of Phoenix Legal Inc. and me in 2010 to specifically undertake surveys of key performance indicators for law firms with up to 100 lawyers. The purpose of the survey is to provide Canadian law firms with industry information in order to benchmark their own performance against the performance of other firms of reasonably comparable size.

Has the online world become so pervasive as to warrant judicial notice? For the most part, the answer remains no.

In the fall of 2011, the Law Society of Alberta implemented a new Code of Professional Conduct. The new code is based on the Federation of Law Societies of Canada Model Code of Professional Conduct. Its implementation resulted in the repeal of the prior Law Society of Alberta code of conduct (1995 code), the implementation of which in 1995 may be the most innovative step ever taken by a Canadian law society. The 1995 code rejected the Canadian Bar Association Model Code, which all Canadian law societies had to that point followed, more or less, with its narrow scope and tendency towards the aspirational. Instead the 1995 code set out clear and comprehensive guidelines establishing the essential obligations of lawyers working across practice contexts, and covering the spectrum of the tasks that lawyers do.

September marks the real beginning of the lawyer’s year. In Ontario, we open our courts during this month. The cycle also starts getting busy after the summer, as do the law firms and legal departments supporting the nation’s business. For many new lawyers after their call to the bar in June, the end of the summer means both legal mentors and mentees working side by side, in earnest.