It doesn’t matter whether you’re a young lawyer hanging out your own shingle or a partner in a Bay Street law firm, professional survival depends on your ability to find and keep clients. James Careless has some tips for doing so, starting with what should be your new mantra: Always be selling.

Four out of every five Ontario lawyers – that is 80 per cent – will be sued for malpractice at least once in their careers.

When Mikaila Greene graduated from law school in 2012, she was overwhelmed by the debt she had accumulated.

When she started practising law after her 2009 call, Gowlings associate Monique Roberts quickly realized that the traditional billable hour model “encourages inefficiency and just didn’t make business sense.”

Writing can be one way for the young and ambitious lawyer to set her- or himself apart from the crowd – and depending on the writing, it can be a good way or a bad way to do it. Kim Nayyer, a law librarian and adjunct professor at UVic, talks about how you can use writing to promote yourself, and how to avoid setting traps for yourself with it.

If you thought the legal profession would offer clear sailing once you’d passed the bar – well, reality bites, doesn’t it? Turns out there are shoals and riptides and all kinds of other obstacles for the unwary navigator. Fortunately, there is help as well. Carolynne Burkholder-James, a new associate in British Columbia, outlines some of the resources available to keep you out of trouble.

Clients expect more of lawyers. They are aware of their rights as consumers, and their power of choice. In this context, a partnership model may be a useful alternative to the classic supplier model. Specifically, the lawyer may shift from reactive dispute resolution to proactive dispute avoidance.

On January 1, 2004, new federal and provincial laws came into force that change the standards lawyers in private practice must meet when they deal with personal information in their practices.

In a continuation of a series of articles on the things you can do with a law degree beyond the same old same old, Kim Nayyer, law librarian and adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, talks to two lawyers who happily answered the call of Canada’s foreign service.

Masters and doctors – they’re lawyers, oh my! How can a PhD in biochemistry help your career? How about an MBA? We talked to a few lawyers whose footholds in completely different fields helped give them a step up in their legal careers.