In just the last few weeks, I have talked to two lawyers dealing with hacked email accounts. In the past year or so, I have seen frauds perpetrated where a hacker hacked into a client’s email account and waited until the opportune time (just as a real estate deal closed) to send instructions to the lawyer (pretending to be the client) on where to disburse funds; and a situation where a lawyer’s email account was hacked and the hacker, pretending to be a lawyer, sent instructions to a client on where to send funds. In both cases the funds went …

♫  Get on your boots and visit the North Pole
Try every sport until you score a goal
Follow the path of a butterfly
Go to Ground Zero and do nothing but cry
We don’t know how much time left we got left in this world
This beautiful world…♫

Lyrics and music by  Nelly Furtado, Rodney Roy Jerkins, Rodney Jerkins, recorded by Nelly Furtado.

Having just returned from my summer vacation, I came across an article on Lifehack.org that struck a resonate chord deep within me.  The article is entitled: The Ultimate Bucket List: 60 Things You Should Do Before …

I like baking.  You gather all the ingredients, put them together according to a recipe and then, if all goes well, you share a tasty treat.  Starting a legal action is a little bit like baking:

• you start with the facts provided by your client (ingredients)
• you put them together according to accepted rules (recipe)
• you serve your claim on the other parties (share)

The recipe for a claim can be tested with a precedent for a pleading.  I was reminded today of how challenging finding a precedent can be. Sources of pleading precedents can be internal to your organization: …

If you frequently dial someone who as at extension, it can be frustrating to wait for the main phone number to connect before you can to enter the extension number, if you can even remember it. As Canadians, we frequently have to enter a number to select English or French before we can dial the extension. What a pain!
You can easily avoid this frustration can with a comma or two. Simply enter the main contact number as you normally would, but then add a comma followed by the extension number (e.g., 4165551234,567). The comma causes a pause of about …

Updated:

A question and some answers came across the CALL-L listserv this week about sources for BC Utilities Commission Decisions.  Like some other tribunals, the commission decisions are not available for searching on CanLII, LexisNexis Quicklaw or Westlaw Next Canada. There is a basic index function on the Commission website, but it was not adequate for the needs of the person posting the question.

Today’s Tip is thanks to the members of the CALL-L list who shared their knowledge with the crowd.

Anne Whelan of Mercer shared British Columbia Utilities Commission Online Document Library – a source that reports …

Movie enthusiasts may recognize that the title of Today’s Tip is a quote from my personal Disney favourite: Mulan. I much prefer this modern interpretation of the Admonitions Scroll. Reflect before you act is excellent advice for many things, including legal research.

Cathie Best at her Best Guide to Canadian Legal Research agrees that “Plan and organize your research” is the first step in the legal research process. How can your reflect before you act on your legal research question?

Start your research memo by writing the facts as you understand them and then skip to …

Photos are a major part of the profile pages on all the major social media sites. There are profile photos (usually your picture) and header or cover photos (the big photo that usually appears across the top of your profile or homepage).
As these photos play a big part in making a good impression with people, you want them to look good. But making this happen can be frustrating. Sometimes the photo you post will be scaled to fit in the allotted box with the result that the contents look blurry or distorted, and sometimes parts of a picture are …

Often, I write with too many commas.  A comma is a beautiful thing, in fact, all punctuation is necessary for readers to understand a piece of text. Just ask the  Associated Press who sent this punctuation-less tweet:

Then there was a clarification:

Today’s Tip: Think about your legal research responses.  Are you missing a comma?…

David Bilinsky and I are going to take our own advice about work-life balance, and will thus be taking a short summer break from our Practice Tips posts.

We will return in mid-August with our usual musings each Thursday.

Wishing all our readers a safe and happy summer.

– Garry J. Wise, Toronto (@wiselaw on Twitter)

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First let me say that I really like reading on screen for business purposes.  Second, let me contradict that by complaining about my aged eyes and how I keep pulling my monitors closer to my face. Third, let me tell you how much I enjoy reading novels in print when that is a viable alternative (not traveling, my public library has a print copy without waiting for an inter-library loan). Fourthly, let me give a hat tip to John DiGilio who noted a post on Lawyerist.com that inspired Today’s Tip.

Scientific American looked at some studies comparing paper vs. screen …