Columns

Tax law is a strange and mysterious world for many people, even most lawyers. The law is constantly changing, the concepts are challenging and the results are often counter-intuitive, making it a source of frustration for those forced to deal with it. To help businesses and their legal groups can get the most out of their tax advisors (internal and external) in a productive and cost-efficient way, here is a series of three articles on best practices.

It has been exactly one year to the day, as I write this, that COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. From a practice perspective, while some things have stayed the same, others have changed—quite a bit.

Thousands of lawyers across Canada are struggling to find “work-life balance.” But to balance two things, they must first be separate. So they try to split up the two parts of their lives. In my view, widening the gulf between work and home doesn’t solve the problem. It is the problem.

As the world evolves in new and uncertain ways, legal professionalism requires more than meeting traditional principles of high competence and specialized knowledge. We need to be empathetic leaders, enshrining the rigorous ethical and moral ideals, and taking action to connect with and uplift the communities in which we live and serve.

Hiring at the entry level has been targeted in attempts to increase diversity. But, while the diversity numbers overall have improved, the progress has been much slower at the more senior levels. Why is that the case?

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a number of impacts on how businesses operate, including a rapid rise in the work from home (WFH) model, the use of video conferencing platforms and increased access to employees’ health-related data for monitoring purposes. Like many other organizations, the Vancouver Airport Authority’s cybersecurity and privacy team has been taking proactive steps to mitigate these potential risks. Below is some guidance.

“Ethical fading” was not a common phrase until early 2020, when COVID-19 became an international pandemic and remote working became the new norm. Ethical fading occurs when those employees, who were continually reminded of their moral, ethical and cultural behaviours in the office, begin to forget. It is a term that all risk-mitigation groups with remote employees should have top of mind.

What happens to grounds gained for diversity when an organization faces downsizing due to COVID-19? If the priorities baked into the collective bargaining agreement are not aligned with the organizational values supporting diversity, it puts that progress at risk.

A million thoughts swirl in my mind. So much has changed in a mere four months, since the coronavirus began sweeping across the world, upending the stability and excitement of daily life while devastating the global economy. It seems the whole world is on stand-by and the future is uncertain.

I have read a copious number of books, articles and websites on career success and satisfaction, and spoken to many about how they did it. Yet, in the end, the person I really had to talk to was myself.