Contributors
Chris Bennett Andreas Lober
Beverley Spencer
Jared Adams
Addendum is published by National magazine, the official magazine of the Canadian Bar Association. The views expressed in the articles contained herein are solely the views of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Canadian Bar Association.
Going solo is one of the great dreams luring people to the practice of law. Almost any lawyer you meet will tell you that he or she has thought about it at one time or another. The lure of being your own boss, setting your own schedule and not having to put up with office politics, bureaucratic burdens, and the administrative hassles of someone else's system are a great enticement. But if you’re tired of your present situation and are thinking of making the switch to solo practice, beware: going solo isn’t the answer for everyone, and the grass isn’t necessarily greener on that side of the fence - just different.
When you go solo, you’re trading one set of problems and responsibilities for another. Whether you’ll be happier with the problems and responsibilities of a solo practitioner than you were with your previous situation depends primarily on who you are and what you want.
The benefits of being a sole practitioner are easy to describe. But each benefit comes with its own burden – sometimes more than one. The biggest benefit? You’re your own boss. You answer to no-one but yourself, you get to make all the decisions, and you get all the credit. But you also have no-one to rely on but yourself, you have to make all the decisions, and if you make too many bad ones, you have no-one to blame but yourself. As a sole practitioner, you can set your hours, spend your own money and run your own office any way you want, and take (or turn down) any case you want. It can eliminate a lot of stresses, but it can also create a lot of different pressures.
You’re your own boss. You answer to no-one but yourself, you get to make all the decisions, and you get all the credit. But you also have no-one to rely on but yourself, you have to make all the decisions, and if you make too many bad ones, you have no-one to blame but yourself.
Since going solo doesn’t work for everyone, here are some questions to ask yourself to help determine whether it might be right for you.
Am I self-reliant and self-contained?
One of the hardest parts of going solo is being alone. Sure, you’ll have other people in the office – your secretary, maybe a paralegal or associate or two, and maybe even other lawyers with whom you share offices. But as a lawyer, you’re on your own. You have all the responsibility for the decisions you make, and no matter how good a network of other lawyers and friends you may develop to brainstorm ideas, celebrate successes and commiserate failures, you’re alone with the responsibility. If this scares you more than it excites you, think twice before making the jump.
Do I enjoy handling administrative detail?
If you revel in the "pure" practice of law and disdain administrative matters, get ready for a big shock. Administrative tasks will take up a great deal of your practice. Most lawyers can delegate these tasks or ignore them, and for some matters you can too. But for the most part, you have to know how to handle them yourself, or closely supervise the person to whom you have delegated the jobs.
Most of the disciplinary and financial troubles that befall sole practitioners come from neglect or mishandling of administrative details. You have to know how to calculate payroll taxes, when they’re due, to whom they are paid and what happens if you don't. You have to know how to hire and fire people, what insurance is required, and myriad other employee-related matters. You have to know how a bookkeeping system is set up, and what kinds of safeguards are necessary to prevent mistakes. You have to know how to rent an office, select the equipment for it, and set it up. In short, you have to be half small-business person and half lawyer.
You can hire staff and outside consultants to help you, but ultimately it’s your responsibility to make sure everything’s done right and done efficiently. Remember, the cost of the mistakes comes tight out of your pocket. If you think running a small business might be fun, solo practice might be for you. But if you resent anything that takes your attention from the "pure" practice of law, you probably won’t be happy going solo.
Do I have good "street smarts”?
Being a good lawyer won’t automatically make you a good sole practitioner. You need to have the "street smarts" and common sense to know what cases and clients will benefit your business and which ones will hurt it. The fact that people may ask you to represent them and take them on as clients may be flattering. However, if they’re a bad credit risk and you don’t spot it, you might end up doing a lot of work for free and not being able to pay the bills as a result.
You also need to be able to spot trends in the marketplace that may affect your business. For example, if you plan on setting up a plaintiffs' personal injury or workers' compensation practice, what’s the risk that an insurance reform measure may put you out of business? If you’re going to engage in real estate transaction work, what will happen when the market nosedives? If your practice is going to be heavily dependent on one client, what will happen if that client takes his or her business elsewhere, or suffers a business failure?
“As a sole practitioner, it’s not easy to jump from one practice area to another – building up a new client base and referral sources for a different type of work can take a lot longer than your cash lasts.”
As a sole practitioner, it’s not easy to jump from one practice area to another – building up a new client base and referral sources for a different type of work can take a lot longer than your cash lasts.
Can I sell myself?
Some lawyers are natural "rainmakers" to whom clients seem to flock; others, who may be equally talented, don’t feel comfortable promoting themselves. There was a time when just doing good work might have been enough to guarantee a sole practitioner sufficient referral work from other lawyers to assure a successful practice. But the legal marketplace has become more competitive, and as a sole practitioner, selling yourself is essential to survival. Unless you’re comfortable with the idea of selling yourself and your services, sole practice is going to be difficult for you.
Do I have a high tolerance for risk?
As a sole practitioner, you have to live with every aspect of your practice, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There will be times when business is not going well, and times when there’s not enough money to pay the bills. But after investing in going solo, it might not be so easy to just quit and go get a "real" job.
Not only do clients depend on you, but there are often long-term financial commitments on office space and equipment leases. When things are down, you need the fortitude to keep on going, and the objectivity to evaluate your situation realistically, determine whether changes are needed, and then implement them and hang on until they take effect.
If the thought of losing everything you own brings on a state of panic that prevents all rational thought, you’ll probably find it difficult to handle the inevitable business crises that face every sole practitioner. But if you handle adversity well, you’ll be able to weather the bad months and quarters, and keep on going to enjoy the good times that make being a sole practitioner so rewarding.
Adapted from Flying Solo: A CBA Guide to Solo Law Practice in Canada.
By Chris Bennett, Davis & Company LLP, Vancouver, and
Andreas Lober, SchulteRiesenkampff, Germany Tag and save to del.icio.us
More than 100 million gamers play massively multiplayer online (MMO) games each month, generating more than $4 billion per year in subscription revenue for game companies. The user base of World of Warcraft(WoW) alone is at least 8 million players, grossing hundreds of millions of dollars per year for Blizzard/Vivendi.
It’s not just the gaming companies, who design the games, sell the startup kits and charge a monthly subscription fee for users to access the game on company servers, which are profiting from MMO games. Plenty of MMO gamers make significant incomes from MMO games by buying and selling in-game property. For example, last year a gamer spent US$100,000 in the real world to buy an in-game space station with its very own nightclub in Project Entropia (now Entropia Universe). He thought it was a great investment, both in-game and out, because he taxed anyone who hunted on his land in the game, and he claimed these taxes generated up to $500 per hour for him. More recently, Entropia’s competitor Second Lifehas produced its first virtual millionaire.
But what would happen if someone hacked into the gamer’s account and stole the space station? What if the operator decided to shut down the gamer’s account, or even the entire game? Would the gamer have any remedies?
Virtual property
At least one real-world court has treated in-game items as property. A few years ago, a Chinese court ordered a gaming company (Beijing Arctic Ice) to return a stockpile of virtual weapons to a gamer whose Hongyue account had been hacked and whose items were stolen by the hacker. The court found the gaming company liable for security vulnerabilities in its software.
Early in-game issues regarding virtual property usually focused on intellectual property and ownership. The general consensus now is that the IP (if any) in MMO virtual property is owned by the game’s creators. In games where the player has great freedom to create IP, such as Second Life, where there are players who make real-world livings by creating in-game property, the player may own the IP in some or all of the work the player creates. But even if the game’s creators own the IP, in the event of a breach, players may have claims against the game’s creators or operators, or against other players. That’s where contracts fit in.
This video offers a brief overview of how companies, including Telus Inc., are making use of Second Life and how they're dealing with their intellectual property in-game.
Contracts
There are several potential contracts in the MMO world. For example, gamers enter into end-user licence agreements (EULAs) with gaming companies before getting access to an MMO game. These contracts limit what a gamer can do in the game, and they often prohibit gamers from selling virtual property in the games. There can also be contracts between gamers. For example, two gamers who want to buy and sell virtual property to and from each other are entering into a contract when they agree to the deal.
But are these contracts enforceable?
“The general consensus now is that the IP (if any) in MMO virtual property is owned by the game’s creators.”
Enforceability
A contract between the in-game seller and purchaser is probably enforceable. The tougher question is whether the contract between the gaming company and the gamer can negate the gamer’s rights in what is clearly valuable online property. Gaming companies generally try to limit these rights through their EULAs.
Some courts won’t hesitate to ignore licence agreements and online terms that are unexpectedly harsh or onerous. In Europe, there are even special laws declaring unexpectedly harsh or onerous terms in EULAs void. These laws contain an extensive list of clauses which are always considered void, and other clauses which are usually, but not always, considered void.
The easy way to reduce this risk is to avoid putting harsh and onerous terms in agreements. But that’s hardly any fun, so another option is to notify customers of the harsh and onerous terms.
This will increase the chances that the terms will survive a judge’s scrutiny. However, in many countries, timing is important. European courts, for example, often refuse to enforce terms which were not brought to the customer’s attention before the customer bought the game.
As for online terms, it’s probably not good enough to make them available through a link buried at the bottom of a website. It’s much better to require gamers to click “I agree” before gaining access for the first time – after giving them the opportunity to read the full terms.
Game over
What if the game company shuts down the game? Gamers spend time and real-world money to acquire in-game property, and could sue a gaming company that shuts down a game should it cause them financial losses. The easiest way for a game company to limit its risk is to clearly advise gamers that the MMO portion of the game might be discontinued, or that the contract with the gamer might be terminated.
Cheating
Cheating is always a problem in MMO games. Cheating destroys the fun for other gamers, and it can drive people away from a game if it’s not stopped.
Most game companies rely on their EULAs to stop cheating. For example, leading game publisher Electronic Arts recently confiscated 15 trillion in-game gold pieces and shut down 200 Ultima Onlineaccounts for cheating, and Blizzard recently banned 5,000 players for violating the WoW terms of use. But this is sometimes easier said than done, especially if an EULA is not extremely comprehensive. For example, Second Life publisher Linden Labs recently terminated a gamer’s account after the gamer manipulated web addresses to buy land before that land was officially released into the game. The gamer is now suing Linden Labs for breach of contract and violation of consumer protection laws, saying his activities weren’t prohibited by the EULA, so his account should not have been terminated. The lawsuit is still pending at press time.
Other MMO legal issues
There are plenty of other legal issues that arise from MMO games. For example, what legal remedies does a player have if another player hacks into his account and wipes out all of his virtual gains?
Ge Jin, a PhD candidate in Communication at UCSD, is researching areas of the computer gaming culture in China, real money trade in online games and documentary filmmaking. In China, a new kind of factory hires people to play online games like World of Warcraft and Lineage and produce in-game currency, equipment, high-level characters and other virtual goods. Affluent gamers from Korea, Europe and America pay real money for these virtual goods to quickly raise their status in games. Jin's research takes a close look at how these factories, commonly known as "gold farms," organize the production and distribution of virtual goods.
What can games companies do legally to combat gold farming (the practice of letting an automated character – or a real person hired from overseas – repeat the same actions over and over to accumulate in-game wealth)? Is virtual property taxable? How does human rights legislation protect gamers from discrimination in the online world? We’ll save these and other topics for a future article.
Chris Bennett is a video game and intellectual property lawyer at Davis & Company LLP in Vancouver. He can be reached at 604-643-6308 or at cbennett@davis.ca. His firm’s video game law blog is at www.VideoGameLawBlog.com. Andreas Lober is a video gaming and intellectual property lawyer at SchulteRiesenkampff in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He can be reached at (++49) (0) 69 900 266 or at alober@schulte-lawyers.de. This article originally appearedin the April 2007 Business and Corporate Edition of Addendum.
Want to manage your time better? Wish you could find more hours in the day? There are plenty of complicated time-management systems out there, with lengthy to-do lists dedicated to squeezing every ounce of productivity out of the day.
Project management is a professional skill that lawyers can and must learn.
They’re fine, says Derek LaCroix, Q.C., director of the Lawyers’ Assistance Program of British Columbia — but they’re not enough. “I took a lot of time management courses, and I was good at them for about two weeks — then I stopped doing them,” says LaCroix. The programs weren’t addressing the root problem.
Good time management, he says, begins with aligning your work priorities according to your personal values. Simply put, you’re going to be more effective and efficient when doing things that you’ve identified as important to you. “After I started to work on myself, so that I was doing more of what I wanted, I wasn’t overwhelmed,” he says. “I started planning things and I was much more able to implement systems.”
Many time management techniques, says Lacroix, don’t take into account whether an individual is doing the right thing in the first place. Recording your time, hitting your billing targets and keeping a clean desk are all worthy objectives, but the best time management system in the world won’t help someone who is half-heartedly engaged in their work.
That said, here are five general time management tips that should help everyone.
Divide your work into smaller parts that can be accomplished in shorter intervals — whittle down the workload.
Develop timelines for bigger projects. Start at the very beginning of a file and think it through until the end, outlining all the steps, tasks to be accomplished, limitation periods, key dates, etc. Project management is a professional skill that lawyers can and must learn.
Don’t keep deferring work till the evening or the weekend. Set aside scheduled time for family and community activities, so that you don’t have the option of simply putting it off until later.
Record your time — not for billable-hours purposes, which most lawyers do already, but in the sense of listing your accomplishments. Feel good about just how much you’ve accomplished in day — an especially valuable habit in a legal culture that focuses on problems and mistakes.
Take regular holidays — a minimum of two weeks a year, preferably a month. Most successful lawyers thrive because they’ve recognized there’s life outside the law office.
If you work on more than one computer in more than one location, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of not being able to find or use the programs and files you need. While you can bridge some of the gaps by using a laptop as your main computer and taking it everywhere, laptops do have some drawbacks despite their convenience. The batteries have a finite life – as, too, do the laptops themselves. Even the lightest are fairly heavy, and the relatively small standard screens aren’t designed for long-term viewing.
Fortunately, with a little ingenuity you can fit the solution right into your pocket by creating your own portable office.
Enter the thumb drive, sometimes known as a flash drive, USB drive, or jump drive. Over the last few years, these thumb-sized portable storage devices have replaced floppy disks and CD-ROMs as the method of choice for moving files between computers. Small in size but large in storage capacity, these increasingly affordable peripherals can solve a number of storage problems. And while you’re probably already familiar with what they can do in terms of making file transfers easier, you might not know about one of their lesser-heralded abilities: they can act as a portable computer.
Our friend the thumb drive.
Here’s how you can make your own in six simple steps.
1. Get a thumb drive: Making the common thumb drive into your portable office suite is easier than it seems. Start with any drive with a reasonable storage capacity – 512 MB is probably the minimum. Both Future Shop and Best Buy (in both online and bricks-and-mortar formats), for example, carry a variety of flash drives in a wide range of sizes from $40 and up.
2. Get secure: Once you’ve got your drive and connected it to your computer’s USB port, allow your computer to read the drive and install any necessary drivers, and then you can start customizing your portable office. First, and most importantly, download a copy of TrueCrypt. This open-source application will let you encrypt and password-protect your USB drive, so that if it happens to go missing, you don’t have to worry about sensitive information being compromised (you can also set your drive to automatically ask a finder to return it to you).
3. Get inoculated: Your next essential is anti-virus software. If you’re going to be moving between systems, there’s no telling what viruses the host computer has been exposed to, unless you’re the only user of both systems. And if you’ve got critical data stored on your portable drive, you can’t afford to lose it. Pick up ClamWin portable and McAfee’s AVERT Stinger in order to check for and remove any virus that happens to hit itself to your portable drive.
4. Get connected: Now you can head to a site specializing in portable applications, like PortableApps.com or The Portable Freeware Collection, where you’ll find a number of programs custom-built for life on a portable drive.
Grab Firefox Portable for a web browser, and its companion e-mail client, Portable Thunderbird. Installation is as simple as moving the downloaded files to your portable drive and double-clicking on the install program.
(If you’re absolutely married to Internet Explorer and Outlook, you might want to take a look at CoCoSys’ Carry It Easy, which allows you to carry your data – e-mails and IE favourites – around while making use of a host system’s versions of the software. The catch? While most of the software listed in this article is freeware or shareware, Carry It Easy will set you back about $25)
5. Get tools: Now that your Internet needs have been taken care of, add some office software. OpenOffice.org Portable is the on-the-go version of Sun Microsystems’ OpenOffice suite: a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, all compatible with Microsoft Office’s range of products, and acting in much the same manner – and it’s free. Again, installation is straightforward.
“And better, your 'new computer' fits into a pocket, around your neck, or into your perpetually packed attaché case with ease. Just try doing that with a laptop…”
Your portable office is starting to take shape. Already you should be able to plug your drive into just about any computer and work away, without having to use any of the host system’s programs, and without having to worry about your confidential files being saved on a third-party system or accidentally accessing someone else’s confidential files while looking for one you’ve saved (always check to make sure you haven’t left any temporary files on the host system). Moreover, your portable system will get more and more familiar with time, especially if you haven’t been using the products up until this point.
6. Get flashy: With the basics taken care of, you can start looking at some bells and whistles. Consider adding some other programs, like Sunbird Portable for calendar and task management (or export your current Outlook calendar to portable calendar EssentialPIM).
With the rise in popularity of both portable drives and the idea of using them as mobile workplace solutions, just about any type of program you might need now has a portable version. Need to access PDF files? There’s Cool PDF Reader or Foxit Reader. Graphics editing software? There’s GIMP Portable or i.Mage. An RSS reader? RSSOwl or GreatNews will do the job. And the list goes on.
With your thumb drive loaded, you’re ready to go on the road. You should be fully equipped to work from any relatively new computer, although you may find some problems if your host computer is still running Windows 98 or early, un-updated versions of Windows XP, with a full suite of useful applications, and your information protected. And better, your “new computer” fits into a pocket, around your neck, or into your perpetually packed attaché case with ease. Just try doing that with a laptop…
Office software, accounting packages, web browsers, e-mail clients, case-management applications – you probably figure you’ve already got everything you’ll need when it comes to computer software.
Well, in this month’s edition of 5 Sites, we take a look at five downloadable software programs that are small, straightforward, useful in ways you might not expect, and available at the low, low, rock-bottom price of free (although some developers do ask for donations – and if you find the program useful, you should probably consider chipping in).
McAfee AVERT Stinger
http://vil.mcafeesecurity.com/vil/stinger/.
While it’s no substitute for real-time virus protection, Stinger is a lightweight virus checker and removal tool. If you’ve got reason to suspect that your computer – home or office – has picked up a nasty bug from the Internet or from other file transfers, Stinger does a great job of tracking it down and removing the problem. While Stinger might not come with the support resources you get with other anti-virus applications, it’s effective at solving your virus problems quickly, allowing you to get back to what you’re supposed to be doing. As a bonus, store a copy on a thumb drive and you’ll have a great way to deal with an infection that bogs your computer down so much it won’t run other applications.
Eraser
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/.
Once you’ve deleted a file, it’s gone forever, right? Not quite. There’s a whole industry based around charging you exorbitant sums in order to recover lost data. And while the ability to recover data is sometimes useful – if you just accidentally deleted your client’s entire case file, for example – it can be a privacy and confidentiality issue in other situations. If you’re selling or giving away an old computer or hard drive (or want to make sure a thumb drive is fully erased), use Eraser to wipe out your data so that the files are unrecoverable and your clients’ confidentiality is assured.
Bullfighter
http://www.fightthebull.com/bullfighter.asp.
Sure, the document you just wrote is perfectly readable to you, but can your client read it? If you’re not already an expert in clear writing thanks to CBA PracticeLink http://www.cba.org/cba/PracticeLink/CS/plainlanguage1.aspx, Bullfighter, a small Word plugin, will scan your work and let you know if you’re venturing into incomprehensibility. Bullfighter will flag jargon – it has a particular dislike for overused “corporate words” like “leverage” and “global” – and its Bull Index feature will also provide an analysis of sentence length and total up the Flesch Reading Ease score. All in all, a great tool to keep you on the path towards clear communication.
KeePass Password Safe
http://keepass.sourceforge.net/.
You’ve got a password to log in to your computer, one for your e-mail, one for the local network, one for your home e-mail, one for online banking… you’re not using the same password for all of them, are you? Or, worse, using “password” as your password? KeePass lets you build a database of all your passwords – it’ll even generate random passwords for you, to obtain better security – and then encrypt the database and lock it with a master password. Now all you have to do is remember one master password, and you have access to all of your random passwords. No more sticky notes on your monitor, with the password to your savings account required.
CCleaner
http://www.ccleaner.com/
Computer running slowly? If you’re fairly sure that your computer’s free of spyware – Microsoft Defender (available free to Windows users) or Lavasoft’s AdAware SE Plus for small business ($32) are good choices – check out CCleaner, which removes unneeded temporary files from your computer. Plus, CCleaner will examine your registry – the list of active programs your computer runs through when it starts up – and remove any unwanted leftovers from programs you’ve already uninstalled from your computer that may be dragging your computer down. Use it on a regular basis to ensure your computer’s always up to speed.
Networking is a skill that many lawyers, especially female lawyers, would be well-advised to master. Your web of relationships with other people can go a long way towards helping you find work, helping you develop a potential client base, and helping you re-integrate into the work world after a maternity leave or other period of leave.
Also on CBA PracticeLink: