Featured Articles

Before leaving for the Amazon, Nicole left an article for me from the Illinois Bar Journal, The Checklist Manifesto for Lawyers. It discusses Atul Gawande‘s incredible book, The Checklist Manifesto.  The IBJ article is not special, but Gawande’s book is a must read.  Many years ago, I bought copies for everyone in Valorem and we became disciples.  When…

For many of us, our working day is spent in an office where we sit at a desk, staring at a computer screen and not moving for long stretches of time. It’s no wonder so many of us suffer from: – Lower back pain – Shoulder and neck pain – Headaches and…

Promoting engagement with LinkedIn is a BCLMA 2017 initiative. The goal is to educate and encourage individual engagement with LinkedIn as well as follow and share our BCLMA Company page. This article, “LinkedIn for Dummies” By Kristina Marlow, Director with Lateral Link, is a good start. Enjoy. More than a third of…

Is continuing professional development a waste of time? Or, more specifically, have law societies made a mistake by using mandatory professional development as a mechanism for ensuring lawyer competence? The Supreme Court of Canada recently upheld the Law Society of Manitoba’s mandatory CPD requirement in Green v Law Society of…

Successful businesses and law firms succeed because they get the right things done. They determine a vision, identify strategic key objectives, strategies to achieve those, make decisions around these and then make sure they are implemented. This gets results – the real test of everything. Too often I think firms and…

Each time an electronic document comes into being, metadata is created along with it. People often add their own, too. From the obvious (like page numbers) to the obscure (like dates of creation and author names), every piece of metadata serves some purpose. During discovery, document metadata can prove just as…

For over a century motivational tools for the workplace have centred on job title, career potential and, perhaps unsurprisingly, remuneration. However, while businesses continue using these extrinsic workplace motivators they are no longer fuelling people’s desires to contribute to what is now a less industrialised economy. Instead, in the 21st…

Employees are the cornerstone of any successful organization. Businesses are constantly looking to fill positions with top talent in order to improve the products and services they provide. However, in a competitive job market, businesses must up their game to avoid losing top talent to the competition. What is an…

Outsourcing some of the old “full service” model allows marketing departments to work within shrinking budgets By Heather Suttie, Lexpert, March 2017; reprinted in The Law Office Management Association (TLOMA) newsletter, April 2017 Continuing pressure for value and intense focus on profit is resulting in tightened controls and reduction of law…

Natural disasters can strike at any time. Is your firm prepared? Ten years ago, 70-mile-per-hour winds gusted through downtown Indianapolis. They blew out the windows of Krieg DeVault LLP’s headquarters, damaging the framework of the building and sending thousands of papers to the ground below. Immediately, every worker was displaced,…