As summer arrives, so does a new articling season throughout the nation.

The future of articling has been subject of much debate over the last year.  With the dust now settled on those deliberations,  Canada`s law offices will, over the next few months,  begin to welcome their new crops of eager and talented students-at-law.

For many students, it will be the best of worlds and the worst of worlds. And since articling rarely comes with a user manual, here are a few SlawTips for Students-at-Law on succeeding and navigating through the many challenges ahead in your new articling gigs:

1. There

Welcome news from David Whelan of the Great Library – Law Society of Upper Canada:

You can now print and download articles older than 18 months free of charge from the Law Society’s CLE collection, powered by the Great Library.

The service – AccessCLE – has been 100% pay-per-view since its inception in 2007 and contains over 6,000 PDF articles going back to 2004.  The articles represent the individual presentations from CLE/CPD seminars put on by the Law Society.  Our partnership with the Law Society’s CPD team is ongoing and we continue to receive and add metadata to articles from

PDF documents are great when you want to make it easy for anyone to view or print a document. But what happens when you need to alter a PDF? You can, of course, do it with Adobe Acrobat or other expensive PDF Editors, but you can also do it for free with Google Docs! It’s easy.
First, take the PDF you want to alter and upload it to Google Docs. Next, check the Convert text from PDF and image files to Google Documents checkbox. This converts a PDF document into a rich text document you can edit. When you are …

There are at least two types of realization that comes to play in the financial management of a law firm. In this context we are speaking of Billing Realization and Collection Realization.  Both of these represent potential ‘leaks’ in the financial boat of the firm if the firm is not properly attentive to these numbers.

Billing realization is the percentage of recorded lawyer or paralegal time that actually ends up on the bill sent to the client. For example, if $1,000 worth of time is recorded on the time sheet, but is whittled down and billed out for $900, the …

Most law firms have an orientation program for articling students.  I am certain that ‘legal research’ is part of the program – if not, my tip is to add it!

An look back at the conference site for last weekend’s Law and Society Association conference showed a Methods Cafe as part of the program.

Scholars experienced in using different research methods each sit in a large ballroom at different tables, which are prominently labeled with the method about which that expert is prepared to talk. The experts then act as a consultant to anyone who shows up to talk with

Smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers are more reliable and stable than ever before. Most of us take this for granted and we leave our devices turned on 24/7.
However, that doesn’t mean you should never “reboot” your device (i.e., turn the device right off and restart it). In fact, a regular reboot can be helpful.
Many programs and apps have “memory leaks” (i.e. they grab and use memory as they operate, but then don’t release it for other programs when they are done). While memory leaks may slow a device down (by limiting the memory the device can use for …

Today’s practice tip is get ready for change, because sometime soon, eCourts may be arriving in Canada.

It may seem like equal parts pipe dream and unscheduled inevitability, but in the context of an acknowledged access to justice crisis in Canada, the call for technological modernization of our nation`s courts seems to be approaching critical mass.

What will this brave new future look like? How can we ready our practices?

The recent Report of the Court Processes Simplification Working Group, delivered by the National Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, articulates a …

Today’s Tip is really about finding new sources of information as they appear.   The announcement yesterday in Alberta about the Alberta Open Data Portal is a good reminder that information may become available that is relevant to your legal research. 

A number of jurisdictions in Canada provide open data.  A handy list is available the datalibre.ca blog.…

Sometimes you just want to sit back and listen. It is very easy to have your iPad or iPhone read text to you (iOS 5 and iOS6). Go to Settings General Accessibility and turn “Speak Selection” to on. After doing this, simply highlight or select the text you want read to you, and then hit the Speak button.
See how it works for you, and remember to try tweaking the configuration to suit your preferences (you can make it read faster).
There are various screen-reader apps, some of which have more features, but Speak Selection can do the job for …

Sooner or later all of us will be facing a big decision.

Most of us put off making that big decision for a number of reasons…we fear making the wrong decision, we feel we don’t (yet) have enough information, we fear that we may be making the decision for the wrong reasons or we fear offending the feelings of those that are near to us by our choice (that may conflict with their views of what you should do).

Having done considerable research into this area just recently – in reading many papers, blogs and advice sites (and compared their …