The Colour of Change
by Sandra Rubin
Despite the numerous high-profile fraud cases in the news of late, Canadian firms are still reluctant to call a spade a spade when it comes to white-collar practices. But as this area continues to blossom – and stigmas are removed – more and more firms could be throwing themselves into the mix
Senior partners in Canadian law firms must grit their teeth when someone suggests they lag US firms in practices or practice areas. But check out the website of just about any of the Am Law 100 firms and chances are you'll find a white-collar crime group. Try Canada's corporate law firms and, with one or two exceptions, you'll get from Aboriginal law all the way down to telecommunications or maybe transportation, but the practice group alphabet stops there. What gives?
It's not as though we don't have our share of white-collar crime because that's an area where we have made quite a name for ourselves. From Bre-X Minerals to YBM Magnex, Livent, Cineplex, Hollinger and Earl Jones, the pace in Canada is consistently lively.
The resulting legal work for the big firms? Not so much.
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The Virtual Legal Marketplace
by Marzena Czarnecka
Lawyers have been cautious about using social networking but are gradually embracing the use of social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Web 2.0 continues to challenge lawyers as they realize that opting out of this new system of connection may equal opting out of business
“One evening there was a remarkable breakdown of the local telephone system. Anyone who picked up the phone could hear everyone else at once. Hundreds of voices – some sounding distant, some close by – hovered in the first social virtual space I had ever experienced. An instant society of children formed, brilliantly superior to that of the schoolyard...”
Thus writes Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist-artist-entrepreneur who coined the term virtual reality in the 1980s, about the seminal childhood experience that inspired him to work towards developing a communication medium that would “subvert” the rules of the physical schoolyard – or brick and mortar workplace – and dangle the promise of “a virtual agora that brings out the best in people.”
Lanier's first virtual reality experience, detailed in “A Childhood Between Realities,” an essay in John Brockman's Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist (Pantheon Books, 2004), recounts the telephone system breakdown. While adults panicked and railed against the telephone company, the children played with the possibilities. Small wonder, perhaps, that those children, Lanier included, went on to invent the web and continued to play with its possibilities, giving rise to its more and more complex incarnations, each one of which is generally characterized by improved, more sophisticated – simultaneously more intimate and more virtual – communication tools.
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Law Firm Demographic Trends
by Marzena Czarnecka,Annette Bourdeau
Lexpert®'s first study on law firm demographics takes a look at the gender, diversity and age composition of the Canadian Bar. As relationships between the generations become more complicated, demographic data can provide law firms with some longer-term planning considerations
Law firms have always been multi-generational workplaces. But they're about to become even more so, and the relationships between the generations are about to become even more complicated.
The change is perhaps more palpable in the largest law firms, which also tend to be the oldest law firms. Their founders are gone, or phasing themselves out of the picture. The eldest baby boomers, who shaped the firms' evolution over the last two decades, are arriving at retirement age. The youngest baby boomers – a sizable bulge – are hitting the apex of their careers. Several younger generations are lined up behind them, and their make-up is significantly more diverse than that of the generations that preceded them.
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