With the end of summer (for most of us), school starting up this week and everyone keen to get back to work and start new projects, I thought it was high time to get this blog moving forward.
When I was a teenager, my Dad thought I should be a lawyer and shared his thoughts with me. Being a rebellious sort and having a picture of law as a dusty old profession, I went my own way for the next decade or so before destiny dragged me back to B.C. to see what Law School was all about. There was some dust but there were a lot of new things too. In the 1980s, there was no Internet for the average Joe or Josephine. Even by the time I had adjusted to word processing on the UBC Law School computers, the UBC intranet email system, and then the DOS-based system at my first firm, there was still no Internet for most of us. The growth of the Internet in the last 10-15 years has been mind-boggling. The first blogs I recall hearing about appeared just about 10 years ago and the increase in the number of people blogging since then has been just as mind-boggling for me. I won’t even mention “tweeting” which is admittedly still a bit of a foreign concept but one I am gradually moving towards.
Unlike the younger generation who seem to have been born with computer savvy, a virtual map of the Internet in their heads and a natural ability to Facebook, text and tweet, for lawyers of my generation (if I may generalize to that extent), it’s been a bit of a blur that we are only recently accepting as a way to connect with people and their legal issues and to make the law more understandable and even accessible. That will be the goal of our Railtown Law blog.
So, if you have a legal question, I invite you to email it to us and we’ll do our best to give you a useful answer. If we think it might be of general interest, we’ll post the question and our answer on the blog (while maintaining and protecting your privacy of course). I look forward to it. Although I may still be old school, it is clear to me that the more interactive a blog can be, the better it will be.
Confucius said: “If there were one word that could act as a standard of conduct for one’s entire life, perhaps it would be ‘thoughtfulness.’” If we can all be more thoughtful as we go through life, we will all be better off. To me, thoughtfulness as a standard of conduct means we are considerate, mindful, and unselfish in our dealings with others. Is the legal view of how we should conduct ourselves different from this standard? Often it is. What our laws require us to do or not do is not always the same as what we know we should or should not do. Law does not and should not control our every action, thought or word. We have a responsibility to ourselves and others to conduct ourselves as we know we should if we are to meet this ‘thoughfulness’ standard. This theme will come up in some of our future postings. We invite your comments and reaction.