Feed aggregator

Early this year, the Department of Justice released, seemingly for the first time, a report titled "Costs of Crime in Canada, 2008" by Ting Zhang [PDF version]. Given the impending omnibus bill on crime and the likely large increase in the costs to the provinces from their associated responsibility for corrections, this report might be of some interest.

It consists, essentially, of a series of "appendices" that set out cost tables for, respectively, the criminal justice system, the victims of crime, third parties, and finally intangible costs (pain and suffering, value of loss of life) associated with crime. The overall costs are conservatively estimated as follows:

In 2008, the total (tangible) social and economic costs of Criminal Code offences in Canada were approximately $31.4 billion.1 This amounted to a per capita cost of $943 per year. . .

In the present study, it is estimated that the total intangible costs were about $68.2 billion in 2008, which increased the total costs of crime to $99.6 billion.

We’ve examined the five essential steps to achieving flow; we’ve put those five steps into action; now, in Part 3 on flow and the art of lawyering, we’ll conclude with the one thing that ties everything else together.

It’s what will keep you going when you hit inevitable obstacles.

It’s something—a mindset, really—that will insulate you from so-called “failure” for the rest of your days.

It is that there is no such thing as failure.

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Rewards

There is no such thing as failure if you’re focused on the activity itself, rather than what you might get out of it.

If the activity itself is what drives you, obstacles won’t devastate your life. Something you want but have not gotten (and might never get)—like becoming a judge or the next John Grisham or simply getting a quote about your case on the local news—will not have the power to devastate you.

I think of this when I watch American Idol and I see someone whose dream is to impress the judges and “make it to Hollywood” and get a shot at stardom—yet their singing voice just isn’t good enough. You can see the shock on their faces, as if they cannot believe that they’re not good enough, that their dream will always be just a dream, and you have to wonder whether some of the more passable ones (but who still didn’t pass the audition) will stop singing altogether.

So I wrote in Part 2 that I wanted to be a “good writer.”

If I am being honest with you, a big part of being a good writer means getting recognized for it, getting published, and in my dream of dreams, perhaps even make a great living and earn some level of fame for my writing. But if that is all I am focused on, I will never make it happen.

Because the truth is that I have to love the activity of writing even if I wasn’t paid to do it.

You’ve probably heard this before, but I mean it the way Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi means it in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Writing is hard work and at times quite draining. It’s not romantic the way I used to believe it might be for novelists.

But it is a flow-inducing activity, like lawyering, and worth the intrinsic rewards that come from pursuing an activity that I enjoy.

Failure is an Illusion

If I truly want to be a good writer, and if you truly want to be a good lawyer, you must shift your focus off the extrinsic rewards—money, fame, power, quotes in the local news—and consider that so-called “failure” is an illusion: you fail relative only to some extrinsic goal you think you want, or that someone else thinks you should want.

If the coveted extrinsic things never come, will you have considered your effort a waste?

If you never get rich being a lawyer, or you never argue a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, or you never become a judge, or (gasp!) you lose a case, has what you’ve done with your life been in vain?

Will it devastate you and cause you to quit? Or will you simply become a bitter lawyer?

Not if the activities you’ve chosen were chosen for the right reasons: to enjoy what you’re doing in a state of flow, not worrying about the past or the future, but being totally absorbed in the task at hand, for its own sake.

(photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jennaddenda/4283391958/)

Flow and the Art of Lawyering: Part 3 is a post from the law firm marketing blog, Lawyerist.com

Related posts:

• Flow and the Art of Lawyering: Part I


• Flow and the Art of Lawyering: Part 2


• What If Anyone Could Give Legal Advice? (Part 3)

The latest Google Docs update goes a long way towards making Google Docs a viable alternative to desktop software, at least for the adventurous.

Until now, my primary gripe about Google Docs has been the need to custom format everything. Now, you can set custom paragraph styles, which makes formatting much easier. I’d like to see further updates, including a custom document template (margins, etc.) and custom list styles, but this is a big step forwards.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Office Live cloud software is still a few steps ahead of Google Docs, with web apps that closely replicate the desktop experience. Plus, since it is Office, it is easy to take advantage of the desktop as well as the cloud. Google has a few steps left to go on Google Docs.

Google Docs Adds Custom Styles! is a post from the law firm marketing blog, Lawyerist.com

Related posts:

• Sync Microsoft Office Docs with Google Cloud Connect


• Is Google Docs Practical in a Law Practice?


• Creating and Sharing Custom Microsoft Word Styles

When students groan about buying traditional textbooks, their grievances follow a familiar refrain: They’re expensive and usually boring. So this fall, a team of Temple University professors heeded those complaints and abandoned the old-fashioned texts for low-cost alternatives that they built from scratch.

The pilot project gave 11 faculty members $1,000 each to create a digital alternative to a traditional textbook. To enliven their students’ reading, the instructors pulled together primary-source documents and material culled from library archives. Steven J. Bell, the associate university librarian for research and instructional services at Temple, said the project tried to create new kinds of learning experiences while saving students money at the same time. The textbooks covered a variety of subjects, including biomechanics, writing, and marketing. The Temple program mirrors a similar effort announced at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in December.

Kristina M. Baumli, a lecturer in Temple’s English department, said she was motivated to join the project because textbook content doesn’t always meet the intellectual curiosity of students. Her students reacted “with glee” at the online book’s free price tag, she said. She used Blackboard to bring together content for the paperless text, but said that her students weren’t stuck reading in front of a screen every night. The course’s local ethnography project ensured that students could go outside and experience the material firsthand.

“It pushed them from the computer out into the real world,” Ms. Baumli said.

She acknowledged that her online text sometimes allowed students to get distracted by Facebook or other Web sites during class, but added that those same students would probably waste time sending text messages in a class using a traditional textbook anyway. By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book. One of her colleagues in the project even required students to submit assignments to be included in their marketing textbook, which was eventually used as study material for the final exam.

Mr. Bell said discussions were under way for a second round of the alternative-textbook program, which will likely include another 10 grants. For the next set of projects, Mr. Bell said faculty members would be encouraged to experiment even more with their alternative textbooks, incorporating student suggestions and using social media.

The benefits of blogging are well documented, but too many start a blog, only to have it go dark within months. If you’re going to take the plunge, you’ve got to make a long-term commitment in order to have a successful blog and rewarding experience. Whether you’re blogging about technology for lawyers or prosecutorial misconduct, here are a few general practices that can make the journey less burdensome, more productive and even enjoyable.

A post per day?

Some lawyers can crank out one or more quality posts per day. Lawyers Scott Greenfield and Kevin O’Keefe come to mind. But they are few and far in between. Be realistic about how long it’ll take you to write, edit, and publish a post. After years of blogging, I still set aside two hours for each post. Some posts may take 30 minutes to write and others a laborious, research intensive time suck (try to limit these), but I’ve found two hours to be a happy medium.

Start with a manageable goal and commit to getting out one post per week or every other week. Blogging is not to the swift, but the steady.

Store and develop ideas in Evernote

Ideas for posts can strike at any time and from myraid sources, including other blogs, Twitter conversations, Quora and Avvo Q&A’s, reading a book or even while watching television. Having a centralized place to store ideas as they occur is essential, and in my experience, Evernote is one of the best applications to handle this. You can quickly enter a note, image, web copy or URL into the application via Evernote on the web or its mobile or desktop applications, and your work is immediately saved and synched across all devices and platforms. Doesn’t get any better than that.

You can then develop your ideas and even collaborate with others within the application before transferring the draft to your blogging platform.

Create a Template

“Lawyers never do anything without a template“, writes Victoria Pynchon, in a recent Forbes piece, and provides a quick 7-step template that allows you to Create a Great Blog Post in Less Than an Hour. Among the steps are:

• Think of a broad topic inside your mission or expertise
•  State the problem that your knowledge or services can resolve, and
•  State your solution.

There are other templates you can use like the one detailed by Michael Hyatt in How to Use Evernote as a Blogger. Or eventually, create your own.

A picture is (not always) worth a thousand words

Sure, images can draw readers in and may enhance search engine optimization and page rank, but trying to find that perfect illustration can often take a lot more time than anticipated. If you’re starting to churn posts out at a brisk pace and locating images become burdensome, skip it. A quality thousands words is worth more than an exhaustive Flickr search.

Schedule your posts

Completed a bunch of posts in a burst of inspiration? Unless they’re time sensitive, don’t hit the publish button on all of them. Instead, schedule each to go out over the next few days or weeks. You’ll be thankful you did on those inevitable writer’s-block or hectic days. The terrific WordPress platform provides a two-step process for scheduling posts in seconds.

And finally, stop obsession over trying to be too complete with each post, and just hit the publish button. I’m still occasionally struggle with this. Posts can serve as an opportunity to crowdsource an idea or question with feedback from the community via blog comments and the social networks.

Quick Tip: You’re not writing a tome. Keep posts to a snappy 500-700 words.

Quick Tip 2: Increase engagement on your blog and literally double the comments by responding to every comment.

Happy blogging.

(photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/crossn81/6204728469/)

Blogging is a Marathon, Not a Sprint is a post from the law firm marketing blog, Lawyerist.com

Related posts:

• Can Lawyers Earn Continuing Legal Education Credit by Blogging?


• Blogging Provides Publishing Platform and Offers Control


• Blog Post Ideas

For many members of the general public seeking to understand the law, Wikipedia is the first and perhaps only stop. Others may go further and eventually come across equally accessible but considerably more reliable sources – online or otherwise. In any event, there is often a gulf between where the general public goes to understand the law and where the understanding is available.

Based on observations of a little experiment in contextual-linking, small efforts can go a long way toward bridging that gulf.

Contextual-linking is different from promotional or advisory linking such as is found on the "links" page of so many websites. I'm using the term here to describe links that pertain directly to the subject matter of the text in which the link appears. As I describe below, small efforts in building contextual links can redirect an engaged and curious person to valuable material.

There is no discovery or originality in my observation. In fact, I'm pretty sure Google and others are on to the idea. Innovation, if any, would come in the application of the concept to public legal education and, hopefully, in the scale of that effort.

A wee Wikipedia experiment

On December 23rd, I went to the Wikipedia article for the Criminal Code of Canada and in the "structure" section of the page where a prior editor had helpfully listed title of each of the 34 major parts of the Code, I embedded a hyperlink pointing back to the appearance of that part in CanLII's version of the Code.

It took about 15 minutes and had an astonishing impact.

December page view referrals from that article to CanLII were the highest of any month in 2011 of any of the over 2000 Wikipedia articles referring web traffic to CanLII. Relative to the Criminal Code article itself, December CanLII page view referrals:

• were three times greater than the prior most active month;
• equalled 45% of the Jan-November 2011 total; and
• represented over 1/3 of the 2011 total.

The momentum continued in 2012. Barely six days into the new year, total page view referrals from the Wikipedia Criminal Code article exceeded the December total and now demonstrate a daily pace that just prior to the experiment came only monthly.

In an attempt to confirm that the results were attributable to my experiment and not some external event, I examined overall referrals stats for other popular and related Wikipedia articles and saw no similar spikes or other evidence of general increases. To the contrary, as the Wikipedia site stats for article in fact showed lower than average visits since the time of my edits, including no visits at all on December 24th and 25th.

As a further step to confirm the impact of adding the links, late in the afternoon on January 2nd, I added the same sort of links to a different article (this time it only took 3 minutes) and observed an immediate six-fold increase in daily page views and attainment of the 2011 monthly average within 4 days.

Because CanLII is first and foremost a research tool, page views are primarily generated by users already on the site as they carry out their research and growth is therefore dependent on user satisfaction with the resource. Page views generated by referring links represent a tiny percentage of the total (typically in the 2% range) although the actual number of external referring sources is fairly large.

82 637 different external web pages sent traffic to CanLII in 2011 resulting in nearly 1.7M page views. Linked traffic from Wikipedia articles accounted for approximately 50 000 (or approximately 3%) of those page views. So while sizeable, increased traffic from Wikipedia will not move the needle much relative to CanLII's total page views (~80M in 2011), but I do hope people who discover CanLII as a result of a Wikipedia link will find some benefit.

Building bridges to understanding link-by-link

I will never know if the 18 minutes I spent adding legislative hyperlinks to existing Wikipedia text made any difference to the people who clicked on them. The statutes are no less impenetrable; the justice system is no less imposing. But I take some satisfaction in knowing that the engaged and curious people who clicked those links have accessed reliable information and may be one step closer to understanding the law. More to the point, I am now fascinated by the possibility of taking this idea further and enhancing Wikipedia text with links to not just primary law, but to secondary and explanatory sources where actual understanding is delivered through useful and accurate information.

Lawyers, assiduous linkers and charmingly pedantic* in their desire to validate their every utterance by reference to supporting authority for every point made, are natural bridge builders in this context. Imagine the net benefit to those who will continue to make Wikipedia their first stop in knowing the law if there were hundreds more bridges available that could lead people out of the morass? Imagine how easy it would be to do this if hundreds of legal professionals made a one-time, 15 minute effort to improve a Wikipedia law-related article by adding a contextual link to a reliable and freely accessible legal information resource?

If you take up the challenge, be sure to take a glance at Wikipedia's style guide and its rules for incorporating external links lest a transgression come to the attention of a zealous Wikipedian who comes in and erases your footprints after you leave. [I approached this in reverse and only learned of the rules after making edits. As it happens, my edits are possibly offside the rules but have yet to be undone].

Looking for a redirection target? 

In addition to legislative and case links, how about linking to a relevant article found on a government or PLEI (public legal education and information) website? [See my November column for a discussion of the PLEIs.] For general legal terminology and understanding and you might consider an article from the irreverent but thorough Duhaime.org. For criminal law you might consider an article from the site maintained by B.C. crown counsel Henry Waldock (though targeted to police officers as a primary audience, the text is written in plain language and very easy to follow). Maybe you know of other in-depth legal issues websites maintained by lawyers, professors or others?

Why should we care?

Though it probably doesn't need to be said, I will say it anyway. As governments and the PLEIs well understand, access to legal information and understanding is a critical piece in the broader societal goal of ensuring citizen access to justice. This goal should be shared by all legal professionals.

There is no denying Wikipedia's drawing power. If readers of this article set aside 15 minutes to add to a Wikipedia article a few of the missing links could bring its legally-inclined visitors closer to their objective of understanding the subject of their search, we could make a small advance toward our shared goal of ensuring access to justice.

Choose any article you like or drop me a line if you want suggestions from among the 2 237 Wikipedia articles already driving clicks from people trying to learn more about the law.

______________________

*As just such a pedantic lawyer, I humbly present my new favourite joke (sourced from too many places to mention): " A pedant walks into a bar. Well, it's a restaurant with a bar. Technically it's a brewpub since it has an onsite microbrewery …"

Modern Web browsers are powerful tools but they all can be improved and enhanced with add-ons or extensions.  These small software applications live inside the Web browser to provide extra features that the browser itself may be missing.  One issue with adding many extensions to your browser is that it can slow down your browser’s operation.  Another is that they become unwieldy to keep track of what is running and what is disabled.  Ghacks has an interesting post on the Context extension for Google Chrome.  It enables you to create groups of extensions so that you can turn on and off a grouping all at once.  This can be useful if you have a number of extensions for one purpose – say multimedia extensions that manage sound and video files – and you are doing some other sort of research.  Turn off extensions you aren’t using to speed up your browser, and save yourself from having to uninstall and reinstall extensions.

Image [cc] Andrew Feinberg In preparation for the ARK Group Conference on Best Practices & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library, Research & Information Services, we are conducting a survey on the topic of embedded librarians. This simple two-question survey simply asks the size of your firm and if you have embedded librarians, or if you do or do not plan on using embedded librarians.

Marlene Gebauer will use the survey for her presentation on February 23rd, and we will post the results here on the blog a couple days later.

If you're a law firm librarian, please take a minute to fill out this survey.

• Talking about ebooks on Law School Tech Talk. Live now lawschooltechtalk.com #lstt #teknoids #
• @montserratlj @sglassmeyer @tomboone Details on the ebook workshop will be at http://t.co/eNIfMcve as they become available. #

Powered by Twitter Tools

• Talking about ebooks on Law School Tech Talk. Live now lawschooltechtalk.com #lstt #teknoids #
• @montserratlj @sglassmeyer @tomboone Details on the ebook workshop will be at http://t.co/eNIfMcve as they become available. #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Julian Assange's extradition appeal was heard at the UK's highest court on 1 and 2 February. Assange is trying to avoid being sent to Sweden to face allegations relating to sexual encounters there in 2010. The key issue is whether a public prosecutor is a valid judicial authority.

Two things about this appeal illustrate the flexibility of what is wrongly thought to be a crusty, fossilized world. Both barristers in this extremely high profile case are women. And the proceedings were broadcast live from the court room. Here is an extract from the hearing.

And Simon Chester's post today reports an announcement that the court will start official tweets of judgments .

Solving the Financial and Sovereign Debt Crisis in Europe by Adrian Blundell-Wignall, OECD Journal, Financial Market Trends, volume 2011, Issue...

Detention of U.S. Persons as Enemy Belligerents, Jennifer K. Elsea, Legislative Attorney, February 1, 2012. "P.L. 112-81, affirm that the...

News release: "The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Department of the Treasury today released...

News release: "The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Department of the Treasury today released...

News release: "The Federal Trade Commission warned marketers of six mobile applications that provide background screening apps that they may...

Not all fraudsters are strangers. Even partners, associates, law clerks or other employees may turn to fraud because of financial pressures from a divorce, failed business venture, or other personal crisis. Its usually the last person you'd expect, and often one of your most long-standing and trusted employees.

Here are the red flags:

• Someone never takes vacation or sick leave, works overly long hours, or refuses to delegate work.
• A firm member undergoes a sudden change in lifestyle or change in temperament.
• The firm receives mail for a corporation for which no client file is opened or billed, or minute books are kept in the lawyer’s office instead of with the corporate law clerk.
• Unusual patterns such as a sudden increase in payments to a person or credit card company or government, or complaints about slow payment from suppliers or clients, or an increase in written-off work in progress (WIP).

For more information, and directions on what to do if you have a suspected or real fraud, see “Fraud on the Inside: What to do when partners, associates or staff commit fraud” in the Winter 2008/2009 issue of LAWPRO Magazine at www.lawpro.ca/magazine

OMB: The President's Budget for Fiscal Year 2012 - "Having emerged from the worst recession in generations, the President has...

The recent announcement that Massachusetts Institute of Technology would give certificates around free online course materials has fueled further debate about whether employers may soon welcome new kinds of low-cost credentials. Questions remain about how MIT’s new service will work, and what it means for traditional college programs.

On Monday The Chronicle posed some of those questions to two leaders of the new project: L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s provost, and Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. They stressed that the new project, called MITx, will be run separately from the institute’s longstanding effort to put materials from its traditional courses online. That project, called OpenCourseWare, will continue just as before, while MITx will focus on creating new courses designed to be delivered entirely online. All MITx materials will be free, but those who want a certificate after passing a series of online tests will have to pay a “modest fee.”

Q. I understand you held a forum late last month for professors at MIT to ask questions about the MITx effort. What were the hottest questions at that meeting?

Mr. Agarwal: There were a few good questions. One was, How will you offer courses that involve more of a soft touch? More of humanities, where it may not be as clear how to grade answers?

Mr. Reif: One particular faculty member said, How do I negotiate with my department head to get some time to be doing this? Another one is, Well, you want MIT to give you a certificate, how do we know who the learner is? How do we certify that?

Q. That is a question I’ve heard on some blogs. How do you know that a person is who they say they are online? What is your answer to that?

Mr. Agarwal: I could give a speech on this question. … In the very short term students will have to pledge an honor code that says that they’ll do the work honestly and things like that. In the medium term our plan is to work with testing companies that offer testing sites around the world, where they can do an identity check and they can also proctor tests and exams for us. For the longer term we have quite a few ideas, and I would say these are in the so-called R&D phase, in terms of how we can electronically check to see if the student is who they say they are, and this would use some combination of face recognition and other forms of technique, and also it could involve various forms of activity recognition.

Q. You refer to what’s being given by MITx as a certificate. But there’s also this trend of educational badges, such as an effort by Mozilla, the people who make the Firefox Web browser, to build a framework to issue such badges. Is MIT planning to use that badge platform to offer these certificates?

Mr. Agarwal: There are a lot of experiments around the Web as far as various ways of badging and various ways of giving points. Some sites call them “karma points.” Khan Academy has a way of giving badges to students who offer various levels of answering questions and things like that. Clearly this is a movement that is happening in our whole business. And we clearly want to leverage some of these ideas. But fundamentally at the end of the day we have to give a certificate with a grade that says the student took this course and here’s how they did—here’s their grade and we will give it to them. … But there are many, many ways the Internet is evolving to include some kind of badging and point systems, so we will certainly try to leverage these things. And that’s a work in progress.

Q. So there will be letter grades?

Mr. Agarwal: Correct.

Q. So you’ve said you will release your learning software for free under an open-source license. Are you already hearing from institutions that are going to take you up on that?

Mr. Agarwal: Yes, I think there’s a lot of interest. Our plan is to make the software available online, and there has been a lot of interest from a lot of sources. Many universities and other school systems have been thinking about making more of their content available online, and if they can find an open platform to go with I think that will be very interesting for a lot of people.

Q. If you can get this low-cost certificate, could this be an alternative to the $40,000-plus per year tuition of MIT for enough people that this will really shake up higher education? That may not threaten MIT, but could it threaten and even force some colleges to close if they have to compete with a nearly free certificate from your online institution?

Mr. Reif: First of all this is not a degree, this is a certificate that MITx is providing. The second important point is it’s a completely different educational environment. The real question is, What do employers want? I think that for a while MITx or activities like MITx—and there is quite a bit of buzz going on around things like that—will augment the education students get in college today. It’s not intended to replace it. But of course one can think of, “What if in a few years, I only take two MITx-like courses for free and that’s enough to get me a job?” Well, let’s see how well all this is received and how well or how badly the traditional college model gets threatened.

In my personal view, I think the best education that can be provided is that in a college environment. There are many things that you cannot teach very well online. Let me give you, for instance, an example of something that is important: ethics and integrity and things like that. You walk on the MIT campus and by taking a course with Anant Agarwal and meeting him and other professors like him you get the sense of ethics and integrity. Is it easy to transfer that online in a community? Maybe it is, but it’s going to take a bit of research to figure out how to do that.

My point is that for a while I view this as augmenting the education you get on a residential model. And yes, it may threaten, and if it does the residential model has to get better. Our objective is to actually use MITx to even increase further what we do on campus, to make it stronger and to be able to resist and survive and do very well in this potential disruptive situation.

Mr. Agarwal: The one piece I would add is that online technologies and online mechanisms will also improve the on-campus experience. For instance, making available a lot of the content in a way that more students can do things at their own pace will give both the lecturers and the students more time. If a lot of the grading and a lot of the mechanical and repetitive things that professors do can be offloaded to online technology, that gives professors more time and enables them, both professors and students, to participate in certain kinds of activities such as doing projects, being creative, the apprenticeship model of education. Many of these things will be given a lot more time and hopefully substantially improve on-campus experiences as well.

Library Boy told us last year about some tentative steps that courts were making to embrace – or to sniff around tentatively – the whole subject of social media. Today's announcement from the UK Supreme Court that it will start official tweets of judgments – this in anticipation of the Assange extradition decision – represents the first wholesale adoption by a final court of appeal.

It overshadows Chief Justice McLachlin's announcement within a speech at Carleton University on the Media and the Courts, that the Canadian judiciary should start to think seriously about social media.

See the Globe, the Star, CTV and the Halifax papers

You can see a brief video clip here.

I understand that the Australians may be thinking about the issues too.