The Canadian Bar Association‘s magazine, National, has an article in the December 2009 issue by Luigi Benetton on Canada’s Best Law Firm Websites.  A copy of the article can be found on Luigi’s website.

Law student and blogger Omar Ha-Redeye believes good bios are the exception today. He sees bios that vaunt lawyers instead of providing useful information to clients. “When looking for a lawyer, most clients could care less about the
things that lawyers care about, [like being a] Gold Medalist, or having clerked with so-and-so,” he says. “I would love to see social media linked from profiles (e.g., a lawyer’s blog), but this rarely if ever happens,” he adds.

The best sites listed in various categories were:

Ogilvy Renault LLP, Hyndman Law, Neff Law Office, Bull, Houser & Tupper LLP, Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer LLP, Torys LLP, McInnes Cooper, Legault Joly Thiffault, Davis LLP,  Clark Wilson LLP, Hull & Hull LLP

Runners-up:

Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, Clark Wilson LLP, Hicks Morley Hamilton Steward Storie LLP, McMillan LLP, Cox & Palmer, Bélanger Sauvé, Lavery, Torys LLP

Omar Ha-Redeye was also quoted for the multimedia award given to Hull & Hull LLP,

They’ve probably been doing it as long as anyone, and have fully integrated videos and podcasts into their practice. Experience with these formats has not only resulted in a highly polished product, but also content that is actually relevant to what they do.

See more on Slaw.

Canada’s Best Law Firm Websites

In his regular column for Lawyers Weekly Magazine, freelance technology writer Luigi Benetton quoted Omar Ha-Redeye in Draft, edit docs in real time, in the Aug. 21, 2009 edition.

Omar Ha-Redeye, a University of Western Ontario law student, shares Smith’s point of view. “It’s all incredibly inefficient, especially in light of the technology we have today,” he says, adding that lawyers will need to better their productivity using such measures. “If they don’t, their competitors will,” he says.

…“The majority of graduating lawyers are now female, and the majority of practising lawyers are not,” Ha-Redeye notes. “Legal practise is not conducive to having a family, picking up kids, dropping off kids and those types of responsibilities, which are not necessarily gender-specific but tend to be, given our history.”

…Ha-Redeye believes that collaboration systems might strengthen groupthink in organizations as hierarchical as law firms.

“They’re different from anonymous tools like Wikipedia,” he says. “People may be highly deferential to those higher in a hierarchy than they are.”

Reviews on Slaw and Law is Cool.

Draft, edit docs in real time