All Our Tips
Tips on Law Blogging
With the 10 year anniversary of Wise Law Blog rapidly approaching this April, my thoughts have turned recently to the nuts and bolts of law blogging.
There are numerous articles online about the virtues of law blogging, and all the benefits becoming a blogger can bring to you and your firm.
These positives include increased profile, better optimization for your firm’s website, and the genuine professional advantage of being current and engaged in topics of interest to you and your clients.
There is somewhat less guidance online, however, on “how to blog.” Not surprisingly, this is a question new writers often struggle with. I thought I would provide a couple of Tips therefore, on law blogging itself.
So here we go, with tips on becoming a law blogger.
- Both Blogger and WordPress provide free platforms for blogging. The set up is intuitive and simple, and should not be an obstacle to anyone who has managed to make it through law school.
- Keep it simple. Do not try to write a textbook within every blog post. People who are looking for textbooks will read textbooks. Pick one narrow topic, address one recent issue or developments in the law, and describe it concisely in plain, readable English.
- Many of the best blog posts are short, often no more than five or six paragraphs. Some excellent blog posts can be only one or two sentences long. Less really can be more. Try it!
- Clever headlines attract readers, but you should take care to ensure your headline has some relationship to the content of your article.
- While I would not propose a specific “formula” for writing your blog posts, do consider including the following information:
1. Identify the legal development your post relates to – e.g. “In a landmark decision yesterday, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that….”
2. Explain why this development matters, and give examples of the changes that may flow from it – e.g. “The Court’s ruling brings major changes to the law of ___, as we have known it. As an example, Canadians will now be able to…”
3. Include an excerpt from the relevant court ruling, press release, or other primary document your blog article is describing. Try to limit your excerpt to a paragraph or two.
4. State your opinion about this development. Is it a positive or negative? Consider the possible ramifications of this development and employ your crystal ball to let your readers know what may lie ahead.
5. Close with a personal observation or pithy comment that brings it all home to the reader.
6. Always include hyperlinks to all cases, statutes, releases and journalistic materials you are citing. Ensure the hyperlinks are programmed to open in a separate window, so that your reader will not lose her place in your article if she travels to another site to view one of your references.
7. Give credit where credit is due. If you became aware of this development because of another blog article or newspaper story, give a bit of link love to the original writer. At its best, blogging is a dialogue between various writers, each providing a specific insight and often commenting, pro or con, on the opinions of other writers on the same topic.
A few other pointers:
- Don’t plagiarize, post photos or graphics you are not authorized to use, or run afoul of the ethical duties that remain applicable to you, online and offline.
- And fergawdsake, don’t even think about letting a ghost writer near your blog!
- Avoid sweeping, general comments about the macro state of the law. There will likely be at least two dozen cases at least partially to the contrary. Be careful. Be accurate.
- Be considerate of your reader by being interesting. The purpose of a blog post is to educate, entertain, or even provoke. Your post is not intended to be a substitute for prescription sleeping medications.
- Don’t worry about the Google machine when you write. Avoid keyword stuffing and other similar tricks. They tend to make blogs robotic and unreadable, and they don’t really work as optimizing strategies, anyways. If your content successfully addresses your topic, the important phrases and keywords will naturally find their way into your content in a way that Google and humans alike will appreciate.
- Finally, be yourself. The more you write, the more comfortable you will be utilizing your new, online voice.
The most engaging blogs are those where readers come to have a personal connection with the writer. Those are the blogs that people naturally return to, because they are interested in the writers’ takes and thoughts on legal developments as they happen.
Good luck and happy blogging!
English Translation of Cases
Lyonette Louis-Jacques posted some great strategies for finding an English translation of case law at Slaw. Today’s short legal research tip: Read Lyo’s Slaw post “How to Find Cases in English Translation, Revisited“
How Secure Are Your Law Firm’s Digital Defences?
Get a digital checkup.
Given this week’s news of attempts by “ransomware hackers” to extort payments from three British Colombia law firms by hijacking and blocking access to the firms’ confidential data, that will be my firm’s tech step #1 – and is my first Practice Tip – of the year.
Get a digital checkup.
Like it or not, law firms are increasingly vulnerable to malicious actors online; we are also perpetually vulnerable to the consequences of our own neglect within.
One solution to these very real threats is to institute an Annual Digital Checkup for your firm.
Have a qualified professional inspect your systems to identify any potential vulnerabilities, and to provide recommendations as to any necessary steps your firm should be taking to protect its data.
In an era where it has become predictable that hackings and security breaches will regularly affect even the largest and most secure of our nation’s institutions and enterprises, lawyers need to become more proactive in fulfilling our basic ethical duty to protect our digital data through appropriate security safeguards, backup procedures and in-house computer-use policies.
Where does your firm stand on this? How well do you protect your digital data?
As a basic step, we should all get a professional opinion on the state of our digital defenses. I fear that many of us might be surprised by the results.
It’s a dangerous cyberworld out there.
(And happy 2015, too.)
RSS Feeds and Links for Alberta Court Decisions
There is some rumbling from Alberta this week. The Alberta Courts are no longer publishing decisions on their website, but rather redirecting visitors to CanLII. The rumbling comes from the seeming abruptness of this move, and the worry over whether decisions will be available as quickly for browsing on CanLII as they were on the Courts website – not about the change itself.
As a process improvement professional, I am the last person who would make a negative comment about change. How a change project is executed is another matter.
Having CanLII as the primary public source for Alberta Court decisions does mean that there are a couple of things that users external to the Courts will have to do.
- Update any links to judgments that point to www.albertacourts.ca that are on your website, on your intranet pages, in your documents, or in your internal procedures and training manuals.
- Move to RSS feeds from CanLII for Alberta decisions – you can even limit your feeds by subject
A cheat for updating your links
CanLII uses a static pattern for individual case links, bless them! It follows the pattern: website/language preference/jurisdiction/neutral court reference/doc/year/neutral cite no spaces/neutral cite.html
If your old URL is
http://www2.albertacourts.ab.ca/jdb/2003-/qb/civil/2011/2011abqb0519.pdf
your new URL will be
http://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2011/2011abqb519/2011abqb519.html
There are decisions from the Alberta Courts that are not available on CanLII, so you will have to test all your links.
Understanding Excel Error Messages
Anyone who has spent a lot of time using Excel will occasionally make and error when 
entering data or a formula. Thankfully, Excel is programmed to tell you that you made a mistake, and it will even give you an error message that will suggest what the problem is. These are the error messages that Excel will give you, and an explanation of what they mean:
- ###### = value is too long to display (make the column wider to fix this)
- #VALUE = the wrong type of argument or operand has been used
- #DIV/0! = a formula divides by 0 (zero)
- #NAME? = Excel doesn’t recognize text in a formula.
- #N/A = a value is not available to a function or a formula
- #REF! = a cell reference is not valid
- #NUM! = a problem has occurred with a number in a formula or function
- #NULL! = you specified an intersection of two areas that do not intersect
Remember these error messages next time you are troubleshooting an error in Excel – they will help you find and fix the problem.
Adapt to New Technologies
♫ Oh won’t you show me the way, every day
I want you to show me the way…♫
Lyrics, music and recorded by Peter Frampton.
The CBA’s Practising Ethically with Technology guidelines, published by the CBA Ethics and Professional Responsibility Committee, has identified five areas where lawyers most often face ethical issues using technology.
These are:
- Confidentiality
- Security
- Marketing
- Providing services electronically, and
- Accessibility
There is a lot of information poured into these guidelines and it is an excellent overview of the most important issues facing lawyers today in terms of technology and its risks. It is also a wonderful resource in terms of being a reference to further articles and information.
As much as some lawyers may prefer to not have to deal with the implications of technology in their practice, the fact is that the technological genie is out of the bottle. Every story about Aladdin meeting the Genie highlights that, while the Genie is powerful and amazing, he does raise the spectre of the law of unintended consequences.
Accordingly it is incumbent on lawyers to understand how technology may not only be beneficial to their practice (I would go further and say necessary to their practice) but also how to recognize and minimize the risks that the technological genie raises.
Furthermore, as competition increases in the legal field and as the calls for greater access to justice get louder, technology is going to become more and more important in terms of being incorporated into the solutions to meet these challenges. Accordingly understanding how to use technology ethically and appropriately will only loom larger.
For example there was a news story on cbc.ca yesterday on how a woman’s passport and other private information was freely available for viewing to anyone who was also on a hotel Wi-Fi network in Winnipeg. If she happened to be a lawyer and there was client confidential information on her laptop, that could have been not only embarrassing but an ethical breach of confidentiality as well. Unfortunately with technology you can unwittingly stumble into problems.
These Guidelines are a wonderful resource for lawyers looking for guidance when using technology. The CBA has stated that they intend to update this document every few years which is to be commended. Given the rate of change in technology, these guidelines will help us to show us the way…
Photo by JD Hancock.
-David J . Bilinsky, Vancouver BC.
Plan Your Research
I have been reading in the area of Lean Six Sigma lately and have come to the conclusion that good legal research practices and good project management skills have wide overlap. An excellent article from the May 2014 issue of Quality Progress by H. F. Ken Machado titled Plan of Attack: Managing the anatomy of your key projects is fundamental to organizational success has reinforced my conclusion.
Typically, the organizations cannot afford to work on all priority requirements that demand attention. At the same time, certain projects stand out because they are fundamental to business success. For those projects, the conditions for success must be formally and fully defined.
Typically, the legal researcher cannot afford to work on all priority requirements that demand attention. At the same time, certain issues stand out because they are fundamental to client success. For those projects, the conditions for success must be formally and fully defined.
Today’s Tip: treat your legal research question like a project – plan your research. Stick to your path before you follow the side trails that are revealed as you travel. Planning your research should help you find the most time and cost effective path to answering the question.
Critical Characteristic 1 – Integrity
For the last 3 legal research tips of 2014 I decided to give my opinion of the 3 most critical personal characteristics for being a successful legal researcher. I think the most important personal characteristic is integrity.
Integrity means that you do what you promise. You are ethical, honest, decent, and appropriate. You ask for help when you need to, regardless of what your ego suggests. You are dependable. If you provide an answer, it is as correct and complete as it can possibly be and you are open about limits to your capabilities.
Integrity in answering a legal research problem means that the truth of your analysis is irreproachable. If you make a mistake, you own it. Your mistakes are never purposeful. It may be difficult to predict your ability to meet deadlines for legal research answers, so integrity means that you persist in learning skills that will help you maintain your integrity in providing correct information efficiently and effectively. Let’s face it, there is a huge amount of information and it is easier and easier to find data that can be used for an answer; integrity keeps us seeking the best answer for our client.
I think integrity is the most critical personal characteristic for legal research, and most other life questions.
May your 2015 be filled with integrity – yours and everyone you connect with as well. Happy New Year
Critical Characteristic 2 – Persistence
For the last 3 legal research tips of 2014 I decided to give my opinion of the 3 most critical personal characteristics for being a successful legal researcher. I think the second most important personal characteristic is persistence.
Persistence means that you are devoted to an activity, persevering, tenacious, dedicated, determined, unwavering. You are intent on answering the question.
If you are not persistent in answering a legal research problem, there is potential to find an answer rather than the best answer for your client. It will be easy to take the path of least resistance to an answer. Let’s face it, there is a huge amount of information that can be used to finding an answer but what we always seek is the best answer for our client.
I think persistence is a critical personal characteristic for legal research.
Next week – characteristic #1
Avoiding File Avoidance
I was reminded earlier this week of the sage advice of one of my early mentors on the topic of “file avoidance,” a very particular form of procrastination that tends to attach itself to specific tasks on specific files.
He said:
“There will be files that you encounter in your career that, for one reason or another, you simply avoid.
“There may be no reason for it. You have tasks to be done and you absolutely know how to do them. But for one reason or the other, you never quite get to those files.
“They seem to linger and collect dust – and the problem just grows worse and worse until you fall behind. But your avoidance just grows worse.
“There’s a simple solution. Whenever you encounter one of those files, just do something.
“Do something. Make a call, write a letter, draft a memo. Just take one step. The problem will magically disappear and you will be back on track.”
So this week’s tip, with the holidays immediately upon us, is that this is an optimal time to look through your file cabinet and identify any matters that have been unattended to for longer then you would have preferred.
And before embarking on that well deserved holiday break… just do something.
Write that email, make that call, send that memo, and create momentum so that inaction can be turned into action in the new year.
– Garry J. Wise, Toronto
