The Indian legal press was full of reports last week of the launch of M K Ghosh and Co’s Legal Research and Analytic Services which is bringing a sophisticated set of digital search expertise to finding Indian law. The Times of India’s description will sound familiar to many researchers outside India:

Companies, law firms, lawyers and individuals have to go through a large number of case laws and judicial decisions to identify or retrieve information necessary to support legal decision-making or finding something relevant to their case. Corporates and business houses are also required to know various changing provisions of

I haven’t seen any videos in the conventional legal press in Canada. So congratulations to Law Times for letting us see some of the highlights of last week’s Borovoy roast. Alan Borovoy is a legend in Canadian public advocacy. You can read about his life in a Toronto Star profile, here and here.

Forty years is an incredible contribution. Forty-one actually.

. . . [more]

I spent a good chunk of this past week at BioFinance in Toronto, where I spoke about public market strategies for cleantech and blogged about the keynote address by Scott Gottlieb, an ex-FDA official now at the American Enterprise Institute, who talked about follow-on biologics, comparative effectiveness, and the regulatory environment at the FDA.

In the real world, Swine Flu continued to spread but turned out not to be as virulent as we first thought, at least for now. We also learned that the party is over for medical imaging in the U.S. and for . . . [more]

Following the April 24th Federal Court of Canada decision, the Canadian Bar Association have again urged the Prime Minister to repatriate Omar Khadr. This time, they have addressed the plea to the U.S. President as well. From the CBA’s April 24th press release:

The CBA, which earlier this year called for Mr. Khadr’s repatriation following President Obama’s order to close Guantanamo Bay, is urging the two governments to immediately expedite the return of Mr. Khadr to face judicial process here.

From the CBA’s letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama (PDF):

We work to promote

The government of Alberta (Ministry of Culture and Community Spirit) proposes to amend that province’s Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act by requiring school boards to inform parents when the curriculum deals with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation. The provision in question reads as follows:

11.1(1) A board as defined in the School Act shall provide notice to a parent or guardian of a student where courses of study, educational programs or instructional materials, or instruction or exercises, prescribed under that Act include subject-matter that deals explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation.
Bill 44 [PDF]

Essentially, a parent may . . . [more]

Professor Larry Lessig’s recent book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, has been released under a Creative Commons license and is available as a free download from Bloomsbury Academic. You can, as well, purchase a hardback version and an e-book version.

The book is divided into the following chapters (a more detailed TOC is available on the book’s website):

Chapter 1: The Cultures of our Past
Chapter 2: Cultures of our Future
Chapter 3: RO [Read-only], Extended
Chapter 4: RW [Read/Write], Revived
Chapter 5: Cultures Compared
Chapter 6: Two Economies: Commercial and Sharing . . . [more]

Nothing like a pending crisis to get law firms to focus on critical issues. No doubt a pandemic has the potential to interrupt many a law office – everything from sending a few staff home sick to entirely shutting the office down for a few days or weeks. Here are some resources to help you and your firm prepare for the eventuality of a pandemic:

• Pandemic Preparations for the Workplace is a great article just published by The Colorado Bar Association in its Colorado Lawyer Magazine
• The ABA Division of Bar Services has a posted a good list of pandemic

The nature of current awareness is changing. It has become increasingly easy for us to read newspapers from other cities, to retrieve transcripts or recordings of television and radio programs. We can monitor the progress of legislative debate without the need to read every word in Hansard. The blogosphere is a source of commentary and analysis. The “current” is more like a tidal wave than ever before.

Librarians are used to providing media monitoring and environmental scanning services. We’ve gone from clipping the local paper and photocopying tables of contents to harvesting RSS feeds, searching global newspapers on the web . . . [more]

Just posted on the web is a recent discussion between Mark Harding, Group General Counsel, Barclays and Professor Richard Susskind, OBE on “The End Of Lawyers?”.

If you didn’t listen to Professor Susskind’s ABA TECHSHOW keynote, here is another chance to hear his take on what the future holds for lawyers. The topics covered include:

• Market predictions and changes – technology and commoditisation
• Law firm management – new approaches for the future
• Innovation and R&D – rethinking the delivery of legal services
• Change management for clients – new ways of working
• Market competition and external investment
• Collaboration – more

Well there’s no getting around the fact that the variously euphemized swine flu is among us, spreading and causing us all to have something of an attention span. It occurred to me that as a public service I might dedicate this fillip to the sneeze, that potent source of contagion. And what better way to begin than with this flu-shot video from Australia showing a number of handsome folks indulging in unconfined sternutation all lovingly captured in ultra slow motion. It’s enough to make you do the elbow thing with those 40,000 droplets. [Click on the image to see the . . . [more]

Macleans is law-baiting again. This time the object of their attention is the country’s law societies, or at least some of them, and the theme is the same old “who will guard the guards themselves?”. The title of the piece by Kate Lunau — “Law societies under fire” — gives the impression that all across the country benchers, or their local equivalents, are hunkered down in bunkers, whereas the body of the article gives us nothing new, nothing that hasn’t been mooted many times before respecting self-governing professions.

Essentially the article points out that in England and Wales, . . . [more]