The biggest question I’ve been getting lately from clients and potential clients is why they need to bother with things like organizing documents or content, and why taxonomy and metadata needs to be applied. Why can’t they just drop in a search tool like Google to work its magic instead? Why bother spending time cleaning out irrelevant stuff and getting the useful material into good order?

I tell them essentially it is things like the structure, organization, and metadata such as keywords, taxonomy, author names, dates created and modified, that help the search engines do their job. The better things . . . [more]

The Cyberjustice Laboratory of the Université de Montréal has been developing a courtroom management software application for one year now. Initially, the project, called ISA – a french acronym for « Interface de salle d’audience » (courtroom interface) – had the sole purpose of developing a streamlined interface facilitating the management of the Laboratory’s state-of-the-art technological courtroom software infrastructure.

However, due to the great potential of this software and to the enthusiasm of its first users, a web-based version of ISA was quickly designed. Our main objective behind its development is to extract the management functions from the courtroom’s physical . . . [more]

At a hacker conference in New York earlier this month, security expert Jonathan Zdziarski presented a paper which should raise some eyebrows for lawyers.

Zdziarski noted the considerable developments Apple has made to ensure its iOS devices are secure, to the point where the iPhone 5 and iOS 7 is more secure from everyone. Everyone, that is, except for Apple itself.

Although third party documents on Apple devices are encrypted, the library and caches folders are typically not. What this means is that an unlocked device allows access to data which would normally be encrypted. There is currently no way . . . [more]

From Saturday’s Guardian – here is the complete transcript.

The NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.

No matter how careful you are from that point on, no matter how sophisticated your source, journalists have to be sure that they make no mistakes at all in the very beginning to the

Here’s another post under the “social media law” umbrella—this time about what intelligible advice, if any, lawyers can bank on when it comes to directing their own clients to “clean up” social media accounts. It’s not the first time this has been canvassed here on Slaw, as John Gregory’s post from earlier this year attests, but since I recently prepared materials for a webinar on social media as evidence, and in the course of that started a trial run of X1 Social Discovery (which is what the Department of Justice, RCMP, and at least two major Canadian law firms are . . . [more]

Today’s New York Times has started a new feature, taking the more outrageous elements of the US litigation system and dramatizing them.

This is quite wonderful – stick until the end.

They take verbatim (word for word) legal transcripts into dramatic, and often comedic, performances. Here you will find re-creations of actual events from the halls of law and government. You, our readers, can help us find material for future episodes. Have you come across court trials, depositions or government hearings that you think are surprising, bizarre or baffling — and lend themselves to performance?

Hat tip to Stan Freedman . . . [more]

Today marks the unofficial end of the school year around here with the last exam being written this morning. It has now been several years since we have adopted exam writing via computer and it is a now the standard. With that standard there are a few changes from the traditional scribbled examinations. Firstly, faculty members far prefer marking word processed exams as they no longer have to obtain special qualifications in hieroglyphics in order to mark exams. That alone is enough of a plus in the eyes of most and it is not really necessary to extoll the virtues . . . [more]

Technology, particularly legal technology is supposed to make the delivery of legal services more convenient. However, sometimes lawyers get in the way and muck things up. Teraview is a perfect example.

Back in the day, anyone could walk into the local registry office and register any document they wanted. Since the mid-1980s registration documents were not witnessed, nor were signatures checked. The system was one of openness and accessibility.

Then along came Teraview – which allowed registration from anywhere in Canada via the internet. A seemingly great idea that would make real estate transactions faster and smoother. However, everyone forgot . . . [more]

This article provides more details on the following comment that I posted (April 10^th) to Dan Pinnington’s article of April 8^th, “Ontario Judge Strongly Pushes for Greater Use of Technology in Courts and Orders E-Trial”:

My Comment, excerpted:
Make the preparation work of a lawyer making production comparable to that of an accountant. The client doesn’t give the accountant 100,000+ records and say, ‘here, you make up our financial records and then do the audit.’ The litigation lawyer should be able to work the same way, by combining the searching and reviewing into

Microsoft will no longer be supporting Windows XP SP3 (Service Pack 3) and Office 2003 (SP3) as of April 8, 2014. After this date, there will be no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, support or online technical content updates from Microsoft for these products. Your computer will still operate, but if you continue to use Windows XP or Office 2003, you will become more vulnerable to security risks and malware infections. Undoubtedly, cyber criminals will target computers that are still using these programs.

For this reason, you should immediately start planning to migrate to more current versions of Windows and . . . [more]

Press Release from London this morning

London, United Kingdom: 1 April 2014 – Janders Dean is pleased to announce the launch of the ShockLaw© wearable time management technology solution for law firms and lawyers – featuring the Bill-IT© bracelet with LawyerShock© vibration technology, the ShockLaw© Server, and associated mobile device monitoring apps.

In an age when the ‘Internet of everything’ is dominating technology development, Janders Dean is leading the market with the introduction of the ShockLaw© wearable platform – and showing true thought leadership with the product’s integration both across the lawyer’s workplace surroundings, and also across software applications being . . . [more]

Earlier this month Microsoft’s privacy policies became the focal point of a controversy about the right of cloud providers to access their customer’s data. The controversy, and Microsoft’s subsequent response, may create a precedent that will influence terms of service for cloud providers going forward.

Briefly, the controversy erupted when it was revealed that, in the process of investigating a potential leak from one of its employees, Microsoft accessed the Hotmail inbox of a blogger that it suspected was the recipient of the leaked, internal Microsoft documents. While Microsoft was within its rights to do so under its terms of . . . [more]