Does your firm or organization have shortened office hours over the summer? Or perhaps you’re taking some time off over the next couple months and therefore closing up your office for a week or two. Either way, you want to make sure potential clients aren’t showing up at your office but finding it unexpectedly closed.

If your office hours will be deviating from the norm this summer, make sure you load those exceptions into your Google My Business profile so that they automatically appear in your maps and search listing.

To do so, log into your Google My Business account …

“Lawyer Norm Keith is 58 and laughs hard when asked about his readiness for retirement.”  There is an old adage that most good lawyers live well work hard and die poor”, he says referencing the quote from American Lawyer and statesman, Daniel Webster.  “Many probably for appearances sake, or life enjoyment or because they are not thinking or planning ahead.”  (Canadian Lawyer Mag, June 1^st 2015)

As a lawyer who owns or works for a small or large firm, or in the capacity as a sole practitioner, you need to be prepared to take responsibility for your financial future. …

Would you like to stay informed about Canadian legal news?  It is essential for members of the legal profession to stay current with new developments in the legal field.  However, this can be challenging. The multitude of blogs, websites, and information resources available online can make the task of staying up-to-date seem overwhelming.

Are you familiar with the Canadian Law Blogs List available at LawBlogs.ca?  The Canadian Law Blogs List describes itself as “open directory of Canadian blogging lawyers, law librarians, marketers, IT professionals and paralegals in Canada.”  It was launched in 2005 by Steve Matthews, founder and …

It’s June, already! It’s been a long winter. Yet, somehow it feels like summer has crept up on us.

For some law firms, that can mean the beginning of a slower period. A chance for some well-earned, rest and relaxation.

Not to be a downer about it, but that also happens to be a good time to do some planning for your firm.

Whatever has been on your mind for the fall – a new website, marketing plans for the associates, a succession plan for a retiring partner or even a retreat – it will be easier to get started …

Did your studies in French get you as far as the subjunctive mood and all its weird variations (que je sois, que je fusse, que j’eusse été)?

Things are a little less complicated in English, but still not straightforward. This partly because the English subjunctive, while falling out of use (since the eighteenth century), isn’t dead yet – and was never consistently applied when more alive.

To refresh your memory, the subjunctive is the form of a verb that is used for an action or state that is conceived (but not actual), hypothetical or prospective; or …

Periodically the question arises: how does one determine which English acts are still in force in Canada?

The short answer is that there is no comprehensive list of what English statutes are still in force in Canadian jurisdictions. In J.E. Cote, “The reception of English law”, (1977) 15 Alberta Law Review, 29-92, the author lists a number of statutes and the provinces in which they were still in force in 1964. This list is based in part on Appendix C (pages 1060-1064) of W.H.P. Clement, The law of the Canadian constitution, 3d ed. (Toronto: Carswell, 1916) which listed a …

Some days, it feels like text messages are the new email. Texting is rapidly becoming just as common as email for business uses (and may well have surpassed email for personal uses), but are you as careful with preserving your texts as you are with your email?

Maybe you use text messaging for business purposes and want to make sure your messages can be retrieved if they are inadvertently deleted or if your phone is lost. Or maybe you find yourself needing to locate a message but unable to remember whether it was in a text or an email… and …

This is the grammatical term for the distinction between the singular and the plural.

Unsurprisingly, a singular noun takes a singular verb (takes being an example of that), while plural nouns take plural verbs (that was another example, in case you missed it).

Where there are two subjects in the sentence, the verb is generally plural (Diligence and enthusiasm are desirable in an articling student).

It’s easy to lose the plot, however, when the two components of a compound  subject are separated by a lot of intervening material.

A case in point is a clause a lawyer …

Need an image for a poster, website, or social media post but don’t have a budget for stock or custom photography? Check out Unsplash, where thousands of photographers have generously made their photos available completely free for commercial or noncommercial purposes.

Simply type a keyword into the search bar and you’ll be presented with tons of photos that have been tagged with terms that match or are related to your search. The search function is pretty basic, but I’ve always been able to find what I need by getting creative with alternative search terms.

The site is very …

Mindsets are simply deeply held beliefs, and in the words of author and professor Dr. Carol Dweck “we can always change our minds”.

Dweck discovered that people generally hold one of two mindsets, a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. And these mindsets have a strong influence on how we approach challenge.

With a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them.

Dweck says that with a fixed mindset every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? …