The annual Consumer Electronics Show is about to start in Las Vegas. The CES officially runs from January 6 to the 9th, but there are several press conferences today for new product announcements. The show is huge – 2700 exhibitors, and over 100,000 attendees. Most of the major electronics brands will be there showing off their latest computers, cameras, TV’s, home theatres, and accessories. (With the notable exception of Apple.)

One of the hot items this year will be tablets. As I’ve mentioned before, (and I’m certainly not the only one) tablets will forever change how we consume . . . [more]

At this time of year many legal bloggers are busy making predictions about what major trends, technologies and shifts we’ll be seeing in the legal space in the coming year. Here’s a roundup of what some of the legal blogosphere thinks is in store in 2011:

• What Surprised you in 2010 (and What Should Lawyers Expect in 2011)? by Adrian Lurssen on the JD Supra Scoop Blog
• 10 Legal Tech Predictions for 2011 by David Bilinski at Thoughtful Legal Management
• 2011 Tech Trends for Lawyers by Niki Black at Sui Generis
• 10 Legal Trends for 2011 by John Wallbillich at

The Florida Bar Association has recently published a professional ethics opinion on the duty of lawyers to ‘sanitize’, i.e. erase the memory of, storage media such as printers, copiers, scanners and fax machines.

The opinion explains why such devices even have memories; some of the older among us may not think of them as that smart! It also notes a duty to supervise staff whose job it may be to clear out the memories of these devices before the devices are returned to lessors, or sold, or even just scrapped.

I see that the Law Society of Upper Canada’s ‘technology’ . . . [more]

London is slowly getting back to normal today after effectively being shut down for 2 days due to a massive lake effect snowstorm. Depending on where you are we have had between 2 and 4 feet of snow since Sunday night. You know its bad when I made a trek yesterday from home to the local convenience store pulling a toboggan to get gas for the snowblower and milk. And when UWO, Fanshawe, schools, malls and banks close, Canada Post stops delivery, and the city stops bus service. Some of those remain closed today. While the main roads are clear . . . [more]

Need gift ideas for a geeky lawyer? Or, perhaps, are you a geeky lawyer looking to subtly pass on suggestions for a gift via, say, a pointer to a blog post? Look no further: here’s a tech-inspired list that any geek (lawyer or not) would be happy to receive:

BookArc for iPad. The BookArc for iPad provides the perfect stand for your iPad. Four positions let you position the iPad in exactly the position you want, and the device makes a perfect combo with the Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad.

StealthArmor for the iPhone 4. Add a bit of . . . [more]

Google announced today they are launching a new plugin for Microsoft Office called Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. The plugin will allow Microsoft Office users to collaborate with each other seamlessly, affording the same benefits Google Docs currently delivers, such as the ability to share and edit documents simultaneously among multiple users, all within the confines of Microsoft Office’s well-known interface. The plugin is available for the Windows versions of Office 2003, 2007 and 2010.

Cloud Connect offers a bridge from Microsoft’s desktop-based productivity software to Google’s cloud-based offerings, and will offer a way for millions of Microsoft . . . [more]

Congratulations to Bennett Jones LLP, 2010 Platinum winner of the Intranet Innovations Award from Step Two Design, announced Wednesday at KMWorld 2010 in Washington, DC. They won for a number of innovations on their intranet BenNet. Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), their intranet includes features such as an improved Precedent system, a “find the children” feature that locates documents using the parent precedents, and BenNet Books.

From the Step Two Designs announcement:

Bennett Jones, the 2010 Platinum Award winner and the first law firm to win this award, has created a highly sophisticated site that

On November 16 at 10am PST the people at Adobe are putting on a free e-seminar to review the top new features of Acrobat X. It will include demonstrations of the top new features of Acrobat X Pro that will interest legal professionals, including:

• The new, easier-to-use interface.
• How to accurately save scanned documents directly to editable Word and Excel files.
• How to improve optical character recognition (OCR), even spot and correct OCR errors.
• The enhanced Redaction capabilities that help save time and improve productivity.
• How to automate, standardize, and share multi-step tasks for PDF production— using the new Action

At last week’s second annual MILOfest, the official Macs In Law Offices conference, I was pleased to have the opportunity to share the results of Clio’s inaugural Apple in Law Offices Survey.

The Apple in Law Offices survey was undertaken as an attempt to quantify what seems to be a rising trend of using Macs, iPads, iPhones, and other Apple products in law offices. While the number of anecdotes of PC users switching to Macs, BlackBerry users opting for iPhones, and iPads being embraced is no doubt on the rise, there is a lack of hard data to . . . [more]

If you are a law firm starting from scratch looking to build an intranet, what would you do? Would you emulate many of the big US and Canadian firms and implement MS Sharepoint? Or look for a different solution? So often firms look over each others’ shoulder to see what the other is doing. But with intranets one size does not fit all.

I am currently in Washington, DC for KM World 2010 and was fortunate to have a good discussion with Gordon Ross, Vice President of Open Road Communications Ltd., web consultants and creators of the social intranet . . . [more]

Today’s New York Times is reporting on a Federal labor relations board decision last week to proceed with a complaint against a Connecticut ambulance service, American Medical Response, that canned an emergency medical technician for breaching a company policy that bars employees from depicting the company “in any way” on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.

This is the first case in which the US board has stepped in to argue that employees’ criticisms of their companies or bosses on a social networking site will be a protected activity and that employers would . . . [more]