Legal IT 3.0 is coming up on April 20 & 21 in Montreal. Dominic Jaar is once again heading up the organizing committee and has put the program together along with Xavier Beauchamp-Tremblay.

It is the largest and the most important event of the year in Canada on information technology for law. Dozens of experts from Canada and internationally (United States, France and Australia), including the keynote speaker Ronald J. Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, will be there. You will also see some Slaw folk speaking including Simon Chester, Steve Matthews, me, and of . . . [more]

ABA TECHSHOW 2009 is quickly approaching – April 2-4 in Chicago – and as the earlybird registration was just extended to March 6, you have a few more days to save up to $400 on registration fees.

After several years on the organizing committee, and as Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2007, it could easily be claimed that I am a tad biased about this conference. I won’t deny that – but I think this conference speaks for itself.

ABA TECHSHOW, now in its 23rd year, is the world’s premier legal technology CLE conference and expo. The conference offers more than . . . [more]

Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, Patrick Monahan, has accepted the invitation of the President of York University to become York’s new Vice-President Academic and Provost. President Shoukri has indicated that the search for a new dean for the law school will be thorough and will take some time. Osgoode Professor Jinyan Li has agreed to become interim dean, during the search process. . . . [more]

One of the great wonders of the web is the ability it affords us to glimpse the world from different perspectives by reading current papers from around the world.

Starting with today’s Hindu, a great paper from Chennai, we find the following stories:

Bloggers not entitled to any special protection for expressing critical views, Supreme Court of India holds:

Bloggers may no longer express their uninhibited views on everything under the sun, for the Supreme Court said they may face libel and even prosecution for the blog content. Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justice P Sathasivam refused to . . . [more]

This evening I returned from the 18th Annual Black Law Students Association National Conference in Halifax, N.S.

Although the conference was filled with interesting panels on various issues, including legal topics related to the long-standing black community in that province, a session on oral advocacy was of particular interest to me as a law student.

Oral advocacy is not something that can be purely taught in the classroom. It has to be practiced and refined, over and over again, which is why the previous day I had participated in the 2nd Annual Koskie Minsky LLP Diversity Moot. I’m pleased to . . . [more]

Interface design matters. More and more, usability and user-focus are central themes in website design manuals such as Krug’s Dont Make Me Think, King’s Designing the Digital Experience, and Goto and Cotler’s Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works. These successful popular works rely on a lot of serious user testing of the Jakob Nielsen variety, which tracks eye movement and identifies typical scanning patterns and optimal designs based on them.

If you have wondered why, then, the interfaces at WestlaweCarswell and Lexis-Nexis QL are so difficult to use, Julie Jones of Cornell has the answer for . . . [more]

The folks at the Toronto law firm Hicks Morley are leaps and bounds ahead of most other firms in their wiki use. They are using the wiki-based platform ThoughtFarmer as their whole intranet. This has had advantages, including being quick to set up and cost effective compared to other intranet or portal platforms.

In October Knowledge Management Specialist Heather Colman made a presentation to both the Toronto and New York Legal KM Groups, and we subsequently invited her to present at Toronto Wiki Tuesdays. These were her slides: . . . [more]

With the renovations progressing here at the DMP Law Library, most of our print has moved off site, and is harder to get. To compensate the students, I’ve been giving some instruction in electronic-only legal research, and even though I’m immersed in this topic every day, it is still surprising to me just how much can be accomplished online. Generally, of course, Legislation that has any historical aspect still requires the print for most jurisdictions, though CanLII’s new point-in-time functions are great, and some jurisdictions offer this sort of detail online.

For Canadian case law, just about anything you want . . . [more]

The National Law Journal [sorry, subscription required] reported today there are fewer licensed lawyers in Illinois:

The Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission, an agency of the Illinois Supreme Court, booted 587 active attorneys from the state’s so-called “master roll” this year when they failed to file the paper work showing they had completed 20 hours of certified legal training between July 1, 2006, and June 30, 2008. The lawyers were officially removed from the roll after being sent three reminder letters late last year.

Illinois conceptualized mandatory CLE in 2005 with an initial scaled in requirement of 20 hours.

There

As part of the Ontario Bar Association‘s 2009 OBA Institute (continuing today) the Privacy Law section held a program yesterday entitled “What Every Lawyer Needs to Know About Privacy”. Dan Michaluk has blogged about his session in which he was a panelist with Professor Avner Levin from Ryerson University; their focus was on workplace privacy issues that came out of the Ryerson study The Next Digital Divide: Online Social Network Privacy. . . . [more]

In one ear we hear the news that thanks to the recession firms are laying off lawyers and hiring fewer; and today in the other ear McLeans tells us that Canada needs more lawyers than its law schools can produce. According to the article, “Where’s a lawyer when you need one?” by Kate Lunau, Canada has fewer law schools for its population than any other Commonwealth country. Lunau explores some of the constraints — provincial refusal to fund new law schools being prime among them — and depends on Vern Krishna’s analysis to a large degree.

It might be that . . . [more]

Those Slawyers in or near Toronto might like to know that Richard Susskind, author of “The End of Lawyers: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services,” will be speaking at the National Club on Wednesday, February 11 at 5 p.m., courtesy of the Canadian Bar Association. Those wishing to attend can let the organizers know here. The first chapter of Susskind’s book is available on the CBA site in PDF.

The CBA announcement of his impending talk also said that Susskind

has recently agreed to share his expertise with the Canadian Bar Association in the role of Special Adviser. He