Unless the technology makes buyers’ lives dramatically simpler, more convenient, more productive, less risky, or more fun and fashionable, it will not attract the masses no matter how many awards it wins…Value innovation is not the same as technology innovation.
–W.Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy, page 120.

This is a column about legal technology, but sometimes legal innovation involves creating new business models that have little to do with technology. One such business model is called Lawyers Real Estate.

Peter Mericka is a Melbourne-based lawyer who is revolutionizing the sale of real estate in Australia. . . . [more]

We’re very pleased to announce that Jack Newton is joining Slaw as a regular contributor.

Jack is the co-founder and President of Clio, an important provider of cloud-based practice management software. He writes and speaks frequently about the security, ethical, and practical aspects of cloud computing and how practice management systems can be used to help lawyers practice efficiently.

If you’d like to see Jack in action, take a look at a video of an interview he gave at the ABA TechShow in 2009, where Clio was awarded “Best in Show.” Or listen to him on a Legal IT . . . [more]

Monterey College of Law in California is partnering with BARBRI, a law exam review/prep provider, to bring iPads to students in their first year law program this season. Students in their law school program tend to be older (average age 38), and the iPad is meant to help them better keep up with readings and study for bar exams.

From the August 25/10 article in Campus Technology:

“Many of our law students work the equivalent of three jobs. Between law school, work, and family, it is a constant challenge for them to set aside enough time during the

Ontario Regulation 34/10 to the Insurance Act became effective on September 1, 2010, along with several other significant changes affecting personal injury and motor vehicle collision practice in Ontario.

The Law Society of Upper Canada and the Ontario Bar Association hosted a session to discuss these changes, The New Auto Insurance Regime – Practical Strategies for Radical Change, with John A. McLeish and Dale V. Orlando of McLeish Orlando LLP. A paper provided by Patrick Brown and Rikin Morzaria, also of McLeish Orlando LLP, outlined the changes.

Roger G. Oatley and James L. Vigmond of Oatley, . . . [more]

There was an amusing Federal Court of Canada decision last week covered today by The Star. In Mackay v. Canada (Attorney General), Justice Harrington ruled that a thesaurus is an educational textbook or supply not subject to the $1,500 limit on personal property for inmates.

Here are the best parts:

[1] “Don’t make a federal case out of it!” means “don’t make a mountain out of a molehill” or don’t make a “big deal” of a small matter.

…

[20] According to Lewis Caroll, “[w]hen I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it

I usually don’t pay attention to when Paris Hilton gets arrested.

Last Friday she was charged with a felony drug possession for 0.8 grams of cocaine when pulled over while her boyfried Cy Waits was driving. The Las Vegas Law Review Journal claims that Waits’ attorney Richard Schonfeld is challenging the legality of the stop.

Of course she claimed the drugs wasn’t hers, nor was the purse in which it was found, even though she acknowledged ownership of her asthma medication, credit cards and $1,300 in cash also found inside the purse. According to Hilton, she was carrying the bag . . . [more]

The Open Net Initiative has new internet censorship maps up identifying which popular social media sites are blocked and partially censored around the world. I did not know, for instance, That Mexico censors Flickr and Youtube.

This complements their more general map, which tracks a number of broad categories of censorship.

About the ONI:

The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership of three institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and the SecDev Group (Ottawa).

Our aim is to investigate, expose and

I spent most of this week in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. Yellowknife is a beautiful city and I really enjoyed spending time with all the people there.

I learned some things that might be useful to Slaw readers who practice in smaller centres. Most of these things are perfectly logical.

Patience is a virtue.
In a smaller centre there are probably only a few people who can do things like repair network cabling. This is not a problem that can be solved by anything except patience. Just accept reality and try not to get grumpy.

Be prepared.
Assuming that technology will . . . [more]

What goes “ninu ni ni no ni no“?

Give up?

Answer: a siren in Catalan. Yup, that’s the noise that a cop car makes in certain parts of Spain. Same car, though, goes “pin pon,” if it’s in France and “wang wang wang” if it’s hurrying through the Philippines. This is onomatopoeia, folks, which lovely long Greek word means the making of words from sounds.

It’s always fascinated me that using the same aural apparatus folks can come up with such different-seeming words for the same aural stimulus. The Wikipedia article on Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias . . . [more]

In honour of the McGill Guide 7th ed I’ve decided to write this entire post without any periods For the sake of simplification I have; however, retained commas, hyphens, semi-colons and capitalization at the beginning of sentences for the sake of clarity, at least until the 8th ed is published (I will admit, though, that I had to retain the periods in my links or they would not work; I’m unsure if that can be used as metaphor) As many are aware Nova Scotia and the Maritime Provinces have a sudden and acute interest in canceled TV sitcoms this weekend . . . [more]

I love a good sports analogy, so I was thrilled to see Frank Houdek’s article in the July 2010 issue of the AALL Spectrum, “Introducing the AALL Hall of Fame.” Ooh, I thought, what would be the law librarian equivalent of the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s 300 wins, 500 home runs, 3,000 hits, and similar measurable longevity and career athletic achievement stats? And did any of my foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarian colleagues make the AALL Hall of Fame?

For the AALL Hall of Fame, “a nominee…must be or have been a member . . . [more]

We’re used to thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) as a tool for law firms’ general web presence. But a growing opportunity, still under many firms’ radar, lies with a slightly different approach: practice group SEO, tailoring SEO tactics for specific practice areas within the firm. In many respects, practice focused SEO has the potential to be substantially more effective than the firm’s larger SEO strategy, which is often (necessarily) broad and less aligned with the services provided.

Let’s look at an example of how practice groups typically use search engines to improve business development. A patent law practice group, . . . [more]