The CLawBies have become an institution in the Canadian blogging community, one which recognizes established and new legal blogs in our corner of the Internet.  But it also recognizes that we very much are a community, and that even though we live in the second largest country in the world many of us have gotten to know each other quite well through blogs and social media.  For example, I am able to introduce myself to Nicole Garton-Jones on the west coast and David T.S. Fraser from the east, and we instantly know all kinds of things about each other and have an affinity for one another.

Community building, in any community, is an arduous process.  The low barrier of entry for blogging means the community is inherently fluid, but also characteristically democratic.  There cannot be any formal hierarchies or official leadership for the Canadian blogging community.  But there can be leaders, and those behind the CLawBies such as Steve Matthews, Jordan Furlong, and Simon Fodden, have certainly have positioned themselves as some of those.

Group psychology and organization behaviour, some of my passions I carry over from my management background, are just as relevant when applied to social media in the legal community.  One of the more memorable quotes which reflects this principle was expressed by Brian Solis,

“Social Media is about sociology and psychology more than technology.” – Brain Solis #socialmedia #quote

— Allison_1001 (@Allison_1001) December 19, 2011

Despite being spread out from coast to coast, those of us in Toronto have tried to organize gatherings and meetups to get to know each other better in person.  We’ve met regularly, almost every month now, for quite some time.  Our gatherings have ranged from 4-5 people all the way to over 30, and almost always of varied composition.  In fact I think I can say that we have never had a blawger meetup with exactly the same people there twice, with people like Simon Fodden, Barry S. Sookman, and Dan Pinnington all making respective appearances.

One of the more permanent hallmarks of these gatherings has been Garry Wise, another clear leader whose involvement has been absolutely essential in rallying both novice and experienced blawgers around the table.  People attend to share expert tips, war stories, or just talk about current events, while other arrive with a curiousity about whether they should start blawgging at all.  Our newest addition is Sara Cohen’s Fertility Law Blog, with a single post to date, launched earlier this month as a result of a discussion between Garry and her at our last meetup.

For those of us who love social media, it’s the exchange of well thought-out substantive legal ideas that challenge us on a personal level in a respectful manner which keeps us coming back for more.  The addition of new members to this dialogue can only be a good thing.

Supporting the cultural norms and celebrating positive additions to the blawging community are the themes of my 2011 nominations:

1.  SQP jeunes avocats | virtual mentor for new lawyers by Lee Akazaki

I got to know Lee primarily through is previous role as Ontario Bar Association (OBA) President.  He executed his duties in that office amazingly, and was a huge support to younger members of the bar.  He has continued his mentorship with a new blog focusing on mentoring.   And he’s doing it in both official languages.  Although the site was just launched in mid-November, I again reference the criteria listed on the CLawBies website:

newer, unlisted blogs may be eligible if they demonstrate all the critical elements of a great blog: decent post frequency, audience engagement, topic originality, and blog-to-blog references or citations.

Lee’s posts are coming through at least weekly (sometimes daily), and is expressly intended to be interactive,

This Blog has to be interactive

This is more than a website.  There is a real live senior lawyer behind this wall, who in turn has a large network of lawyers to draw on for expertise.  The function of this blog is to be interactive, to provide new lawyers with help and value for your time in reading.  Please consider leaving a comment to any blog post you have read.  Provided they are constructive, comments will be approved for the benefit of all readers.  If you have a question or situation which you wish to share with the readership, send it to me and it will be considered for a future article.  If you have a question you wish to ask on a confidential basis, contact me directly.  Click on the ‘about lee / contact’ tab above and get in touch with me.

This is a great idea, and one which I feel the need to support through an endorsement with a CLawBie.  See also Chris Jaglowtiz’s nomination of this site.

 2.  Social Media for Law Firms by Samantha Collier

The vast majority of lawyers I encounter are interested in social media primarily as a business development tool.  My passion for it primarily stems from the ability to connect with other, exchange ideas, and build relationships that eventually grow into communities.  But there is nothing wrong with  lawyers who enter our space out of an interest to make themselves more visible to the public, and people like Samantha can help them do it in a classy way.  Professional marketing advice doesn’t cheapen the profession, it enhances it, especially when done properly.

Most of Samantha’s technical content is probably introductory for many online veterans, but as I note above there are a lot of lawyers who are consider entering the field.  Her site provides a form of mentoring on how to use social media, in the same way that Lee uses social media to discuss mentoring.  She was also listed in the Top 24 Social Media Influencers in Canada this year, a list with many familiar faces and names which includes some very important non-lawyers who have helped build this community (special mention for Connie Crosby, for example).

3.  Blawg Review by Ed. (Anonymous)

A 2010 CLawBie winner for Friends of the North, Blawg Review is an example of what the Canadian law blogging community could do for ourselves on a more regular basis.  Blawg Review is truly an astronomical project that rotates to different sites every week and compiles a roundup of law blogs around the world.  I would love to see Canadian blawgers comment more in a constructive manner on other blawgs, and for us to have an ongoing conversation about legal issues and cases.

Crowdsourcing complex legal questions discussing legal philosophy in a respectful and open exchange is a best case scenario for me because it would foster the greatest forms of creativity and collaboration, something we already see happening in the tech, communications and business sectors.  Unfortunately law schools and most legal practices don’t properly teach interpersonal skills or the importance of collaboration, which in my opinion is a lost opportunity for potential development.  Those of us who have tried to work more closely with each other have developed some rather revolutionary projects, including LawTechCamp (Monica Goyal, Sapna Mahboobani and Mitch Kowalski) and our sessions at the Law Society of Upper Canada (Mitch Kowalski, Bob Tarantino, Garry Wise and myself).  You can read more about our sessions on Garry’s CLawBies nomination page.  The materials not only reached over 5,000 lawyers in our jurisdiction, but have travelled far beyond and are already being used by lawyers in other provinces and countries.  If there was any question about how social media can bring the legal community together in a positive way, this program has demonstrated how it can happen.

We don’t necessarily have to have our own blogging carnival for lawyers out here in Canada.  But we could learn a lot about the spirit and attitude that makes Blawg Review work to help develop our own community.  And yes, even the anonymous editor of Blawg Review has attended our blawger meetups in Toronto.  It already has that kind of international pull.  How many “Friends of the North” can claim that?  If blawgers in other Canadian cities start hosting their own meetups we would see this community move forward to another level, and I can promise that at some point in the future I’ll make make the effort to attend them all myself – in person.

It’s time for the 2010 CLawBie Awards, sponsored by Stem Legal, Dye & Durham, Clio, and Lexblog.

Before getting into my nominations it’s worth repeating that if you share a blog with me, you can be found in a video with me somewhere, or if I’ve nominated you before, I’m automatically excluding you.  Most of you already have nominations by other bloggers and will be in the running.

Instead, I’m going to focus on some of the newer sites to the Canadian blogosphere to help welcome them to the existing community, and hopefully provide some suggestions as to how to make their sites even better.

Prelude

I was recently reading Mark Herrmann‘s series on Above the Law, where he asks,

Is blogging a useful business development tool?

Almost everyone I’ve ever encountered in the public relations industry years before law seem to think it has worked for them.  And public relations professionals are miles ahead of lawyers when it comes to business development.

Although Hermann points to several benefits he gained from blogging over the years, including influencing the law, a book deal, and raising his profile, he didn’t directly gain any clients from the blog.  Personally I expect that he wouldn’t, but all the other opportunities stemming from blogging help form more of the complete package as to why someone selects a lawyer as their counsel.

Even though I’ve been blogging about legal subjects for about three and a half years now, just before I started law school, I didn’t set out with business development as my primary goal.  It’s been fun, a great way to exchange ideas and get to know more senior members of the bar.

As my own call to the bar approaches, and demands of my time from employers compete with nearly every other activity in my life, some prioritization and perhaps greater focus is likely in order.  I’ll still continue to write about a wide variety of legal subjects in areas that I do not practice out of my own interest.  But I’m also actively looking for content more closely related to my practice, which is what the following nominations will reflect.

The Nominations

1)  The Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure blog by Jeremy Millard and Tiffany Soucy of Fraser Milner Casgrain LLC.  The new Rules are intended to promote settlement and streamline the litigation process in Ontario, but there are a still many questions that remained unanswered.

For example, does anyone know how subrule 20.05(2)(k) works? If so, please contact me and let me know, because even these seasoned litigators don’t have a clue.  The FMC blog summarizes case decisions relating to the interpretation of the new Rules, and it’s one of my regular stops as I’m frequently tasked with figuring them out.

One of the greatest limitations is that it’s limited to case law, so we don’t have insight or guidance from secondary sources or interviews that could potentially sort out some of these issues for us.I’m also not a fan of their subscription service, which is limited to email.  I get enough emails as it is, thank you very much.  I was able to find the RSS feed and add it to my reader because I know where to look for it, but they should feature this more prominently on the site.

It’s still a great resource for those practicing litigation, and it’s also promising to see larger law firms dedicating resources to projects like this.

2) Herrmann conclusion in the post referenced above is as follows,

Whether blogging makes sense as a business development tool depends on your particular situation. Firms specializing in personal bankruptcy buy advertising space on billboards and time on television. Maybe a good personal bankruptcy blog would be a business magnet. So, too, for plaintiffs’ personal injury work, which seems analogous from a business development perspective. Eric Turkewitz, for example, writes a solid blog in the personal injury field; maybe he can tell us if it’s landed him any business.

After appearing for trial scheduling at the Superior Court of Justice from Hamilton to Oshawa and several courts in between I can conclude pretty definitively that the best area of law to gain civil trial experience is in personal injury.  These files simply dominate the civil docket in any court in the province that I visit.  No surprise then that I’m finding this as my primary area of practice, especially given my health care background.  As this area of law is also ripe for business development through blogs, we should theoretically see much more personal injury sites.

The legal blogosphere is still emerging in Canada, so it’s still relatively easy to make an impression in a niche area for the dedicated practitioner.  Erik Magraken of the MacIsaac Group launched the BC Injury Law and ICBC Claims Blog in 2008, and was a recipient of the 2009 CLawBie for Best Practitioner Blog.  Still, I feel his site is worthy of a nomination this year from me because he has really shown what can be done on blogs for this area of law.

The statutory regime in B.C. is completely different in Ontario, and I cannot even pretend familiarity with the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia.  But I do rely on B.C. case law all the time, and my first stop in interpreting these cases in the past year has been Erik’s site.

One thing I’ve been pleased with as the site has evolved is the increase use of graphics and videos, which really adds to the flavour.  The Odiogo text-to-speech feature is especially considerate of a readership that could be visually-impaired, something I might incorporate myself down the road.

I’m not sure if Erik is scanning some of these pictures, but some of the graphics are pretty low resolution, or at least difficult to read. Although high resolution is certainly not needed for websites, when an image contains text it should ideally be crisp and readable, or at least have the option of increase the image size for greater scrutiny, especially when trying to read these images on a mobile phone (I do this a lot these days).

My one suggestion for Erik’s site would be to use screenshots instead of scanning text books, or find a way to make the images more crisp.

3) My final nomination is the Ontario Insurance Law Blog by John Norton and Tara Pollitt of McCall Dawson Osterberg Handler LLP.  (By way of disclosure, I did work with Tara at Legate & Associates while I was in law school).

This site, which is also focused on case law, comes up consistently when I’m doing research in the area as well.  I don’t receive the Ontario Reports until I’m called to the bar, so having these short updates on hand is incredibly useful.

It’s hosted on Blogspot, which is common enough for those starting out with blogging, although certainly not my preference.  But it’s also embedded on the firm’s website, which I find rather redundant.  Host it on Blogspot, or host it on the firm site itself, preferably the latter.  But don’t do both, it just doesn’t look good.

Postlude

There are many other blogs that I could mention, but I’m going to try to stick to the CLawBies rules and limit it to three nominations.

Here’s a list of other bloggers who have made nominations this year:

I am pleased to see Law is Cool has been nominated again this year, and with my name in conjunction, but the reality is that it always has been a team effort and my role on the site has diminished significantly since joining Slaw.  Although mentioning your own site(s) is generally a faux pas for CLawBie nominations, in this case I’m really just clarifying my role to share the accolades with others who are much more deserving.

Given my review of sites above and related commentary, I’ll have to write more on these subjects in the coming years.  More importantly, my greatest hope is that blogging continues to be an activity engaged in primarily for the fun of it and the adventure of unexplored opportunities, rather than for some elusive business development goals.  Let’s hope others in Canada see it the same way too.

Results from the 2009 Canadian Law Blog Awards (CLawBies) are in, and Law is Cool and Slaw are both winners:

1) Best Canadian Law Blog (or Blogger) Award: Slaw – As most readers will already know, Slaw is not only a huge presence on the Canadian law blog scene, but it’s also a testament to the innovative and creative vision of Simon Fodden. It’s often hard to see how Slaw could get better, but it did in 2009. Want proof? See this year’s guest blogging initiatives, which included major law firms, provincial ombudsmen from across Canada, plus five Justices from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Add a DK Blawggies recognition, and we have a winner!  Runner ups: Canadian Privacy Law Blog, Wise Law Blog

…

3) Legal Culture Award – Law is Cool – Two of the fastest rising stars in Canadian legal blogging just happen to be law students. Lawrence Gridin and Omar Ha-Redeye lead an impressive group of contributors at Law is Cool, and are seeding the queue with more law student bloggers for the future. Bravo! Culture doesn’t happen without a little sweat equity.  Runner ups: Precedent, Dynamic Lawyers Parody Videos

A special thanks to those who gave a special mention to me (although I freely lend my authority to the other sites I’m affiliated with instead):

Antonin Pribetic – My Nominees for the 2009 Canadian Law Blog Awards (the “CLawBies”)

Omar Ha-Redeye Blog: http://www.omarha-redeye.com/): Omar Ha-Redeye is a J.D. candidate at the University of Western Law School and a leading light in the Canadian blawging community.  His publications include scientific journals, trade magazines, and contributions to university textbooks. Ha-Redeye has served as a Senior Administrator for a tsunami relief team that operated in rural Aceh, Indonesia and consulted NGO’s and businesses on crisis communications. He has taken the lead in the field of reputation management law. A frequent contributor to Slaw.ca and Law Is Cool, I admire Omar’s dedication to law, justice and human rights.

Donna Seale – My Picks for the 2009 CLawBies

3. My last pick is Slaw.  Slaw is a co-operative weblog covering pretty much anything that has a connection to Canadian law and it does that in spades.  Since I started following this blog a few years ago it has grown leaps and bounds and now has so many contributors I’ve lost count.  In fact, it has grown so much that I sometimes find it hard to keep up with the blog’s multitude of posts, but I always find something in my feedreader from Slaw that is of interest and use to me.  I do have to admit, though, that because of the sheer volume of content coming from Slaw I have taken to scouting out posts from particular Slaw contributers — David Bilinsky, Dan Michaluk, Steve Matthews, Jordan Furlong, Omar Ha-Redeye always top my list because they produce content I find personally relevant.

Connie Crosby - My nominations for the Clawbies

Like almost everyone else who have blogged their picks, I can’t help but mention others who are well deserving and should be included in any “top Canadian law blogs list” – Library Boy by Michel-Adrien Sheppard, Law is Cool by an ever-growing slate of law students, created by the inimitable Omar Ha-Redeye,  Thoughtful Legal Management by David Bilinsky, Canadian Privacy Law Blog by David Fraser, Michael Geist’s blog which has a reach far, far outside the legal community in Canada,  and Halo Secretarial blog by Laurie Mapp who is a legal virtual assistant (or legal VA) and helps me stay on track in my day to day work. And so many others!

Blawger of the Year – Omar Ha-Redeye

Slaw, a collective blog of legal writers, recently cleaned up at the 2008 Canadian Law Blog Awards (CLawBies).

Slaw contributors and Slaw itself cleaned up this year, demonstrating the enormous impact the site has on legal commentary in Canada.

Law is Cool, another site Omar contributes to, was a recipient last year of the Legal Culture Award, and came in as a runner-up this year.

Here are all the entries where Slaw won a category or was a finalist:

1) Best Canadian Law Blog (or Blogger) Award: Law21 – Anyone that says it’s impossible to break into blogging these days needed to watch Jordan Furlong this past year. Wherever you went in 2008, Jordan’s thoughts were cited and more frequently revered.  Law21 received the most nominations, both from fellow bloggers and via email. But mostly, Jordan’s blog is the 2008 winner because it became a fixture for anyone trying to think critically about legal practice.  Runner up: Slaw – Once again a bridesmaid, though I do try to make up for it below. Not that Slaw can’t win, but solo blogging is a tough gig to do well, and in 2008 it simply felt right to let Jordan bask in the spotlight.

3) Legal Culture Award - Slaw evolved in 2008, drawing in more Canadian blogging talent (see Omar & the Daves!) and producing even more quality commentary.  Despite my own involvement, this year’s nomination process (and Blawggies award) support what I’ve always known: Slaw has become a beacon for what Canadian law blogs have to offer.   Runner ups: Law is Cool, Precedent.

6) EuroCan Connection Awards – This award was envisioned to recognize some of our European law blog friends who frequently highlight and link to Canadian law blogs. In 2008, Charon QC reached out to many Canadian law bloggers, myself included. The work he did late in the year creating a Canadian Law Blog Pageflake just sealed the deal.  Runner Up: Our 2007 winner Nick Holmes became an occasional contributor to Slaw in 2008, and earns a finalist nod this year for doing so.

9) Best Legal Technology Blog – (TIE) This may seem a bit odd, but this award is a tie between Slaw and the great big gap in Canadian legal technology blogs. We web-geeks may be plentiful over at Slaw, but what Canada really needs is a few Mac Lawyers or iPhone JDs.  Or even a run of the mill (but competent & unbiased) legal technologist.  So let it be known, the gauntlet has been dropped for 2009!

Donna Seale, a human rights lawyer that was recently interviewed on Law is Cool, just republished the show notes from the episode.

Donna was a finalist in the 2007 Canadian Law Blog Awards (CLawBies).  Law is Cool won the 2007 CLawBie for Legal Culture.

Here’s what she said:

Recently, along with human rights lawyer Pearl Eliadis, I had the opportunity to be interviewed via podcast by Omar Ha-Redeye over at the Law Is Cool Blog and Podcast regarding recent media criticism of Human Rights Commissions across Canada.  Here’s a full reproduction of the blog post referencing the interview (I don’t usually do this but since they did such a good job setting things out, why reinvent the wheel?)…

If you’re interested in listening to the actual podcast, head over to the Law is Cool post and scroll to the bottom.  You’ll see the podcast there for download.