The annual Clawbies Awards recognizing the best law blogs in Canada were released on New Year’s Eve 2016.   A few minutes looking over this year’s recipients will demonstrate the fantastic quality of this medium and the great contribution bloggers now make to Canadian legal information and discourse.  Special congrats to Osgoode Hall Law School’s The Court for taking home the Simon Fodden Award this year for top law blog in the country.
Steve Matthews (from Stem Legal) deserves great credit for spear heading the Clawbie initiative for many years now, along with the other judges (Emma Durand-Wood, Simon Fodden, and Jordan Furlong) who volunteer their time.
This year, the Clawbies created a Canadian Law Blog Hall of Fame, and recognized 5 inaugural inductees, including yours truly at the Law of Work!  Here is the announcement, along with links to the Hall of Fame class:
We’re excited to announce the creation of the Canadian Law Blog Awards Hall of Fame! Every year, we will induct into the Hall blogs that have won a Clawbie (not just a runner-up award) at least three
times. Starting this year, these blogs will no longer be considered for annual Clawbies, but they will be recognized with a Hall of Fame badge for their use, as well as a notation of the honour at lawblogs.ca.
Please welcome our inaugural Clawbies Hall of Fame class!
- Avoid a Claim (Dan Pinnington)
- Law of Work (David Doorey)
- Michael Geist (Michael Geist)
- Slaw (Collaborative)
- Thoughtful Legal Management (David Bilinsky)
I’m honoured to be included with these great law blogs.  I received my first Clawbie Award as Best New Law Blog in 2008, which means I am approaching the decade mark of blogging.  When I started this little blog, there were a small and devoted group of law bloggers, and only a couple of blogs dedicated to labour and employment law (Michael Fitzgibbon’s Thoughts From a Management Lawyer is the only one I remember).  Now there are a bunch of excellent practitioner (i.e.  Sean Bawden’s Labour Pains,  Whitten & Lubin, Youth and Work) and academic (i.e. All About Work) blogs in the field which provide timely case updates and insights into the big issues of the day.
My thought back in 2008 was simply to create a platform to allow me to bring ‘real world’ events into the classroom by linking up to media stories, academic papers, Real Pleadings, and asking leading practitioners and academics to write Guest Blogs to provide students with different perspectives.  I never expected the blog would end up being cited in peer reviewed academic journals, Supreme Court of Canada facta, and parliamentary debates.
But here we are. Â Over 1000 posts, 2000 comments, and 1.5 million views later, The Law of Work enters 2017. Â Thanks for dropping by.
Happy New Year, all!
David