The January/February 2010 Law Librarians newsletter put out by legal publisher Westlaw has published an article entitled Law Firm Economics and the Librarian—Bring Value Through Training. The lessons can apply beyond the context of private law firm libraries:

“Bring value through training. That was one message that came through loud and clear recently in ‘Succeed in the New Law Firm Library Reality—Learn the Business Side of the Firm’, a webinar hosted by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the informal group of law library managers of the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC) (…)

“So how can training attorneys help? Here are a few ways:

• Training makes users more efficient and more cost-effective. They can do more work for more clients with more relevant results in the same amount of time, increasing productivity.
• Training limits total use of online services and keeps costs down, which has an impact on future contract negotiations.
• Training brings costs down for clients to whom they are passed along (much less common these days—clients often won’t and sometimes can’t pay).”

“Strauss [administrator at Wiley Rein, a Washington area law firm] stressed that this is an opportunity for librarians to ‘take ownership’ and that our ownership needs to be more visible and measurable. In particular, librarians can do the following:

• Show how the time spent training is reflected in cost savings and reduced usage.
• Talk to your more senior attorneys about the work product they are getting from your trainees. Is it better? If not, find out why not and work on improving your program.
• Survey your users to see what’s working and what isn’t. Elicit feedback and, where appropriate, highlight success to your higher-ups.
• If you aren’t already doing a self-review of some kind or annual report on activities to promote library services, you should be.”

We’re pleased indeed to announce that Yosie Saint-Cyr has joined Slaw as a regular contributor. Yosie was called to the Quebec bar in 1988, where she practised employment and labour law until 1999. For over 10 years Yosie has been the Managing Editor of the Human Resources and Compliance Collection from First Reference and she is the managing editor of the Human Resources Professional Association (HRPA) of Ontario’s monthly member e-newsletter ELAW. She is one of Canada’s best-known and most-respected HR authors, with an extensive background in employment and labour law across the country.

Yosie can also be found on Twitter @yosie23.

Please welcome Yosie Saint-Cyr to the Slaw community.

I don’t make a habit of posting my newspaper articles here – but this one has received more than normal attention on my own blog, so  thought it might be worthwhile posting it here as well.  Its on my blog, and on Canoe

I can’t post it here in full for contractual reasons – but the gist is that a 19 year old student has been sued by the North Face clothing company over his South Butt clothes that mock North Face fleece jackets worn by the popular crowd at his school.

In response to North Face’s tagline, “Never stop exploring”, South Butt adopted “Never stop relaxing.”

The defense itself is quite amusing – athough I understand that the court was not thrilled with that approach.  The claim is here.

Unless it is settled, the case will ultimately be decided on the technicalities of U.S. trademark law.

Since one legal test of trademark infringement is customer confusion, you be the judge: Are the marks confusing enough that customers might think products bearing them are from the same source?

The Canadian Bar Association’s National International Law Section and the National Continuing Education Committee are presenting the 2010 International Law conference on “The Future of Canada-U.S. Cross-Border Relations” on May 6-7 in Vancouver.

The conference program (available in PDF) lists the following plenary events and breakout sessions:

• Legal Lessons in Inter-Jurisdictional Relations from the 2010 Olympics Games
• Cross Border Regulation and Trade
• Labour Movement and Human Trafficking into the Pacific North West
• Corporate Complicity in International Human Rights Abuse – The Search for Effective Remedies (dinner keynote – speaker: Justice Ian Binnie)
• TILMA, AIT, NAFTA, and WTO: Integration or fragmentation of inter-jurisdictional law?
  Trade Issues: “buy American”, border congestion, and “cap & trade”
• A Practical Guide to Cross-border Mediation-Arbitration
• An American Perspective on Canadian and American Legal Cross-border Concerns and Opportunities
• Canadian and American Cross-border Concerns and Opportunities: A dialogue between the legal profession, stakeholders, and government
• Freedom of Expression during International Events
• Year in Review: New Developments in Cross-border business dispute resolution

The registration form is available online in PDF.

The Law Societies of British Columbia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Saskatchewan and Upper Canada (a.k.a. Ontario) are offering accreditation in connection with this conference. Details are available on the CBA site.

CaseStudiesOnline.com is a new web site with hundreds of social media marketing case studies, all fully indexed and searchable. The site was created by Tod Maffin, a well-known strategist, consultant, speaker and thought leader based in Vancouver. The site is currently in beta with more case studies being added each day. Maffin also plans on interviewing both thought-leaders in social media marketing and the people in the trenches who are putting these tools into action.

Here’s a short video by Maffin showing how CaseStudiesOnline.com works:

I took the opportunity to interview Tod Maffin over the phone last week to find out more for the Slaw audience:

Connie Crosby: What inspired you to put this website together?

Tod Maffin: I do a lot of consulting work and presentations for a number of clients, primarily independent professionals such as lawyers, accountants, realtors and so on. I have always been racking my brain to find a really good source of case studies. There are lots of articles on the web where people have said, we did this phenomenal YouTube campaign and wasn’t it great, we had 4,000 views. But 4,000 views don’t necessarily translate into dollars in pocket. So it was really difficult to find true case studies where you could see the bottom line value.

What I had started to do was just collect a bunch on my own. I had originally just bookmarked them, then I built a little bit of a database so that I could just type in a couple of keywords like legal, Twitter and it would pop up with some case studies. And then I thought I built this database now, I might as well let other people use it. That’s where it was inspired.

CC: Are you thinking of creating a business model around it, or are you going to keep it free for everybody?

TM: – I’m going to keep it free for everyone. The business model is that I’m going to be doing some in-depth interviews with folks who have planned these campaigns and I’ll be doing hour-long interviews, sometimes video and I’ll have the complete transcript available. You’ll be able to download it and listen to it as an mp3 and for those ones I’ll charge a small fee for people to download and access. But by far the vast majority of case studies are going to be 100% free for people to access.

CC: I noticed on the site it says “welcome, guest” on the top. Are you thinking of having people sign in to something like a “my case studies online”?

TM: What you see right now is the first phase. There are a couple of things that are coming in the next few weeks. One is a ratings system so that people can flush out the exceptionally good case studies. Another is exactly what you are suggesting which is a “my case studies online” version of the site, where you’ll be able to identify the categories or tactics or demographics that are specifically of interest to you.

In the meantime there will be sort of a sub-version of that where you’ll be able to specify, just by typing in the special URL, you can narrow down specifically to the type of category you are interested in. So, for instance, you’ll be able to type in legal.casestudiesonline.com and it will take you to all the case studies that are around law. That’s not in place yet, but it’s coming. If I could only have the legal case studies there right now! But the same thing will apply for anything, such as moms.casestudiesonline.com or youtube.casestudiesonline.com and it will take you directly to those searches.

CC: What types of case study contributions are you looking for?

TM: I am really looking for examples where an organization did something in the realm of social media and received some knowledge back from it. So there are plenty of websites that you can go to where they will tell you how many hits they got to their website or how many Twitter followers they got. I’m not really interested in that so much as finding out specifically what we learned from that. How will we apply our brand in the future as a result of this marketing campaign that we did using social media?

So I want it to be a little bit more of a rich value. That said, those are harder to come by on the Internet. It’s going to require me and my contributors to do a lot of legwork, interviewing a lot of these folks. In fact, as we’re speaking right now I’m on my way to Toronto to do a bunch of interviews. One of them is with the ad agency behind the Doritos campaign, the one where they did a brand handover and they essentially gave the brand to bloggers and to the public to re-shape as it went. So, to be able to drill down into those specific case studies is where a lot of the value is going to be.

CC: If a law firm or other legal organization wants to contribute something they need to think about what they are willing to share in that regard?

TM: That’s right. There are some industries, the legal industry being one of them, that have in the past been rather sensitive about what they let go in terms of both their successes and failures in marketing campaigns and branding endeavours. I really hope by having some of these things out there it will provide more interest, certainly more value, for a lot of organizations to build that kind of knowledge internally and share it. You know, it’s sort of in the spirit of “co-opetion”. You hear that phrase quite a bit and the idea that you raise the tide and it floats all boats. I’m a really big believer in that.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get more independent professionals on board; my role and the role of my contributors is to provide that knowledge. Now, that said, that’s one approach for getting information and that’s really if I or some of the contributors just stumble upon it online.

There is a secondary way if your law firm or associated kind of company has a good example of something that you want on this website: that’s what some of the revenue model for this site is as well. If you want to appear on the site guaranteed and get interviewed by me and put together one of those packages, then that can be done for a fairly low investment.

Thanks to Tod Maffin for the interview. For more information, please visit the website CaseStudiesOnline.com.

Maybe its because we’re just on the good side of the dead of winter, but my weekly Slaw assignment led me back to an article I wrote in 2001 in praise of a communication model I learned to appreciate in years spent hanging out at the beach.

I called the article “Windsurfing 101″ and described the four-part model I learned way way back in 1984 when I took my first Canadian Yachting Association windsurfing instructor course. Back then I was taught that a good teacher:

1. Sets specific, clear and measurable learning objectives
2. Divides information into logical chunks
3. Maximizes audience participation
4. Includes an evaluative conclusion

Reflecting on the model over 25 years later, I am reminded how old I am. Yet the good-old CYA model still seems sound and valuable. And while not tailored for oral advocacy, it has concepts that should help the oral advocate. “Chunking” of complex ideas into understandable parts is an obviously useful concept. Proper goal setting also has potential. Consider the benefit of an approach that treats a legal argument as a series of achievable learning objectives. I like it because it should promote focus (as planning generally does). It also creates a path to success that is more actionable than that created by broader, outcome-based goals like “winning the motion” or appeal.

Is there any truth or wisdom that cannot be rooted back to the beach? Read the article here, and please also share links about similar techniques and models below.

I see a change coming on how Alberta Courts deal with costs for computerized legal research. Mr. Justice MacLeod in Aram Systems Ltd. v. NovAtel Inc., 2010 ABQB 152, wrote:

[23] With great respect to those decisions made at an earlier time, I think that the view of computerized legal research as a mere alternative is no longer consonant with the reality of current legal practice. Such research is now expected of counsel, both by their clients, who look to counsel to put forth the best possible case, and by the courts, who rely upon counsel to present the most relevant authorities. Indeed, it might be argued that a lawyer who chooses to forgo computerized legal research is negligent in doing so. This is particularly so given that many law firms and indeed governments are now cancelling hard copy subscriptions to legal resources in favour of the electronic versions. The practice of law has evolved to the point where computerized legal research is no longer a matter of choice.

[24] In response to Justice Watson’s reference to Bob Cratchit’s coal, I would point out that the disbursement claimed in these cases is for access to the legal databases and is based upon the time spent doing research for the particular client on the particular matter. There is no suggestion that the disbursement is meant to reimburse the law firm for the cost of computers as capital assets. In my view, disbursements for electronic legal research are similar to disbursements for photocopying; it is the copies, not the copiers, that are being paid for.

[25] Nevertheless, I am bound by the weight of authority and must therefore refuse to allow the disbursement. Perhaps the time has come for our Court of Appeal to revisit this issue, but in light of the existing authority, I am not in a position to do so.

Emphasis mine.

This is more of a handkerchief floating to earth than a gauntlet being dropped, but still, I see this as a call to action for modernizing how disbursement costs for computer assisted legal research are dealt with. I am certain that if legal research is performed for a matter today, a computerized gathering method is used for some part of that task. I feel confident suggesting that there is a fee paid to someone for a significant portion of the information required.

This issue of cost recovery for has come up on Slaw in the past. See Recovery of charges for searches on online databases redux and Judges and electronic searches and the many comments posted. While these posts deal with disbursements allowed by a taxing officer, similarities exist with reasons for costs in the cause.

Any suggestions from readers on where this issue is headed in 2010?

This is definitely a bargain for firms and individuals using Twitter.

Chris Pirillo’s new e-book 140 Twitter Tips, a 14-page PDF, offers useful and practical hints for all types of Twitter users. Tips include:

• The best time of day to get retweets
• How to effectively respond to debates and criticisms
• Don’t use too much jargon
• Oversharing vs. undersharing

The best part: the e-book costs only $1.40.

See ReadWriteWeb for more information about this e-book and Chris Pirillo.

Date: Friday, May 14, 2010
Time: 8:30 am to 1:30 pm

I am excited to be able to participate in this year’s CBA BC Branch Women Lawyers Forum Education Day event. Along with Elizabeth Watson and Stacey Handley, I will participate on a leadership panel which will be led by Marion McAdam of Fourth Wall Project Management & Consulting. Marion has worked extensively with women who are leaders already or who are aspiring to become one within their own context. In conjunction with this, she has also done a considerable amount of research on emerging and changing trends in women’s leadership.

I have been tentatively asked to speak to “defining success for yourself and making it happen.” My personal conception of what success is and my level of achievement in that regard are both rather fluid concepts, so this should be an interesting exercise.

I am particularly interested in the quotes contained in the draft discussion materials prepared by Marion McAdam, some of which I include here:

“Success has been defined by men all these years as movement high up the ladder. Women have to define success differently. It isn’t necessary to be the top person to be successful…Success is having work in your field that permits you to have a life as well. … A woman’s life is a horizontal journey rather than a vertical climb.”

“Women At Law: Lesson Learned Along the Pathways to Success” Phyllis Horn Epstein

Trying to act like men in the workplace creates a kind of dissonance. We can sense when people are not acting authentically and we don’t trust them. “Women bring a unique set of behaviours to the workplace that are needed, especially in today’s climate. Our tendencies to collaborate rather than compete, listen more than talk, and use relationships rather than muscle to influence are the very same behaviours I coach men to acquire. But it’s all about balance. Just as men can overuse their stereotypical characteristics, so can women.” (p. 62 Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office)

“In order to be effective leaders, women need to be comfortable practicing law as women – in their own way. Women don’t need to practice law the same way that men do in order to be successful.”

It should be an interesting discussion!

This week saw the release of  Canada’s 2010 federal budget.  Maybe next year, I’ll see if blogging qualifies me to join the lock-up; but for 2010 I stuck to web-based review and analysis:

• The budget was fairly popular among the science and innovation crowd — though reaction to the budget followed faithfully the degree to which each constituency’s requests were funded.
• The full list of relevant line items is here; but this post is a good starting point to focus on the top budget items for biotech and other knowledge-based industries, including an increase in basic research funding, a new innovation commercialization program and…
• The demise of Section 116! Section 116 had created an onerous tax filing obligation that generated zero tax revenue, and has been accused of being a major barrier to an influx of U.S. venture capital investments in Canadian companies. If Section 116 was the barrier it has been made out to be, we’ll see a new influx of capital. It would be great to be able to look back and definitively assess the impact of this change, so if anyone can think of a comparator group for a good empirical assessment, please let me know in the comments.

Meanwhile, the rest of the biotech world did not stand still.  Canadian biotech deals and new scientific developments continued apace, and India continued its hot-and-cold approach to innovation.  Catch up on these developments at The Cross-Border Biotech Blog or follow us on Twitter @crossborderbio.

This year’s Legal IT conference, Legal IT 4.0, is scheduled for April 26 and 27th.  Each year the conference looks at information technology and its impact on the law. I was fortunate to attend last year’s conference, and found the audience and presenters to be a stimulating mix of thought leaders and those new to many of the concepts.

The program has largely been set, and the 50-plus speaker roster is being finalized.  The subject areas being covered:

Day 1:

• Cyber crime
• IT in courtrooms
• Tech Showcase – written communications
• e-Discovery
• Early adopters
• Tech Showcase – research and processing results

Day 2:

• Intellectual Property
• Tips and Tricks at the office and elsewhere
• Tech Showcase: cloud computing
• Commercial law
• In-house lawyers
• Tech Showcase: law firm management

The Plenary on Day 1 will be Countering spam by legislative means  in Canada(Bill C-27) by the Honourable Yoine Goldstein Ad. E.  Plenary for Day 2 is scheduled as Controversy surrounding Google Books and the Book Rights Registry by Charles S. Morgan.

Early bird registration is available until March 12th.

Watching Canada win gold in men’s hockey and landing our nation the Olympic record for most gold medals won by any country in winter sports was an unforgettable experience. The national celebration and the pride and the joy we are all experiencing at being Canadian is something to savor.

“Own the Podium” – never liked it. Seemed so un-Canadian, so boastful, so competitive, and yet… how effective. As a brand “Own the Podium” named the dream and captured the aspirations of our athletes and fans.

As we return to life as usual what else can we take from these games? I would suggest the power of dreaming big and naming our dreams.

In coaching we create a space for clients to take time out from the daily routine to rise above and think about what might be possible, what they might want to create, and give name to their dreams.

I am privileged to work with people who have the courage to pursue their dreams. Some of the dreams are simple – like finding the right home for a legal practice, others more ambitious – like the journey from lawyer to corporate CEO.

The most important thing is not the size or scope of the dream but in having the courage to name it and take action and support others in doing the same.

A young woman called me last month to speak about her professional aspirations. She was getting mixed advice from all those close to her, when the bottom line is she knew what she wanted to do and create and simply needed to listen to her own wisdom and ignore the fear of the people around her.

Pessimism isn’t an attribute; it is another word for fear and sometimes comes disguised as common sense. Often when you set a bold goal or determine to make a change it is the people closest to you who will be the least encouraging. Because they love and care for you, they fear for you as well. When I started my own company a large number of well-meaning individuals told me in the challenging first year that I could return to a salaried position. Advice to go backwards was the last thing I needed to hear. It was the people who had confidence in me and assured me I was on the right track that really helped.

Sometimes reaching for an ambitious goal can be uncomfortable. In the space between setting the goal and achieving it there will be challenges, struggles and uncertainty. The more important or significant the goal the more you can expect you will be challenged.

When the stress and tension hit, there can be temptation to return to the status quo – to determine that the pressure isn’t worth it and to abandon the dream. As I once heard Tracy Theemes of Sophia Group advise a young group of lawyers: “stay with the tension.” When job hunting, the temptation can be to take the first job offered. It is so important though not to let your experience of discomfort sway your decision making. Stay with the tension, it tells you that you are undertaking something of great importance.

There is a saying in the arts that success is due to 5% talent and 95% persistence. While I can’t be sure of the breakdown I do know that achieving success in any profession is very much determined by our ability to withstand the discomfort of making changes and reaching for our dreams by climbing over obstacles, weathering the storms, withstanding the pressure and at times just hanging on.

Why is it so important to name our goals? Naming our dreams and goals helps us to strengthen them. When the pressure is on it is easier to succumb when we haven’t fully committed. When we name our goals we also are able to better the harness the power of our mind. Our greatest brain power of our mind lies in the subconscious. By setting a target and focus we are sending a message to our own brain to be on the alert for opportunities and connections. It can often seem like magic when we set a goal and opportunities start to emerge. With a clear focus we can perceive the opportunities that we were missing before.

Another reason for naming and sharing our goals is that it enables others to help us. When we are clear about what we wish to achieve it enables the people around us to throw in their support and to help connect us with opportunities. “Own the Podium” was successful in part because of the enormous amount of support that the program generated for our Canadian athletes.

The lingering gift of these Olympic Games is that by dreaming the big dream and setting a bold objective we can smash the odds and make it there.

Take inspiration from our athletes – uncover and name your dreams.

I thought I’d draw Slawyers’ attention to a new student-run blog on international law, Legal Frontiers, run by law students at McGill University (my own alma mater). The site officially launched in January, and the content so far looks very interesting. Check it out and post a comment.

There may be stars in your eyes, soon. Google has introduced a search facility that lets you star certain search results, in effect marking them as “faves” the way that Google Reader does. Then those items will show up in a special box at the top of your searches — whenever they’re relevant, of course.

The Official Google Blog uses the example of having “starred” your favourite football teams’ websites. A subsequent search for “nfl,” for example, will bring these up in the star box.

In my view, the idea has merit as a substitute for bookmarks in certain contexts. This, in effect, lets the Google relevance machine manage your “starmarks” for you. They’ll even manage the business of attaching a star to a site when you’re not in a search, provided you have the Google Toolbar installed:

Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature.

(A Google Chrome and Firefox extension would make a lot of sense here.)

Google is rolling the facility out over the next few days. I don’t yet have it on my Google.com searches. And I don’t know whether the rollout includes Google.ca as well.

[via ResearchBuzz]

As many of our readers surely know, Google has been reassessing whether to continue its operations in China following a series of hacking incidents that allegedly originated from that country.

Prof. Ronald Deibert of UofT revealed today that the hackers also attempted to access Google directories, which was not widely reported when the story first broke.  Deibert is one of the experts Google is consulting with on how to respond to the incidents.

Despite the The Investigative Powers of the 21st Century Act (IP21C) that was tabled before the prorogue, Deibert claims that cyberspace generally operates in a policy vacuum in Canada.

His recent paper with the Canadian International Council, China’s Cyberspace Control Strategy: An Overview and Consideration of Issues for Canadian Policy, states,

Like many other countries, Canada depends on economic exchange with China, and is home to a large and growing Chinese diaspora community that can be vocal critics of China’s human rights policies. It is also the home of some of the leading research and development projects on Internet censorship, surveillance and information warfare that, at times, are antagonistically linked to China.

He proposes that Canada:

(1) Take a leadership position in promoting a global, multilateral agenda around arms control in cyberspace. The present state-based cyber security agenda is almost entirely absent of voices or forums dedicated to creating norms of mutual restraint, confidence building and information sharing.
(2) Take a more active interest in the role played by Canadian companies which support China’s vast censorship and surveillance regime.
(3) Lead by example in domestic policy areas, including addressing loose laws on wiretaps, ambiguous oversight of intelligence agencies, shoddy content filtering mechanisms around access to pornography and hate speech, questionable deep packet inspection and data retention practices by internet service providers, and other areas in which Canadian practices provide justification for China’s own domestic censorship and surveillance regime.

As much as I’m for more legislation and discussion over cybersecurity issues, especially for Criminal Code warrants, production and preservation orders, there is some room for privacy concerns here as well. Currently, the technological crime units of CSIS and the RCMP report threats to Public Safety Canada.

The recent Speech from the Throne lists a “cyber-security strategy to protect our digital infrastructure” as a goal to address  “terrorists [who] threaten our country’s security.”  Given the recent history of these agencies in dealing with threats, the IP21C may not have adequate oversight and scrutiny to protect the privacy interests of citizens.

Yes, cyber-security is important.  But enough with the boogie-monsters already.

Lawyer, Slawyer, and newspaper columnist David Canton has teamed up with rtraction, an Ontario IT company, to produce PolicyTool. The notion is that businesses need policies in place to govern a variety of employee practices but can’t always afford the services of a lawyer to devise them; PolicyTool invites you to answer a number of questions and feeds the answers into well-drafted “boilerplate,” resulting in a “comprehensive and informed framework for your legal counsel to quickly create a binding policy.” PolicyTool does the initial drafting; and a lawyer engaged by the user will tweak and approve.

At the moment the only area in which PolicyTool offers its service is in relation to the use of social media by employees. Other policy areas are under development.

The use of PolicyTool is currently free.

It’s been getting a lot of coverage on Twitter and has been bookmarked a couple of hundred times on Declicious. Congratulations, David.

And how are we feeling today?

A feeling might be the most private thing — experience — we have. It seems to happen deeper inside us than our heady thoughts. But very very often, what inside will out. And nowadays that outing of our feelings takes place on the internet, thanks to the facilities of Twitter, Facebook, Buzz and all the usual suspects.

What if someone collected all of those expressions of emotion and made them available to the curious? If someone did that it would look like We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. These guys build a bot that trolls the net looking for “I feel…” and similar precursors to emotional confession. The latest instances are then made available to us, the curious, in a variety of ways.

We Feel Fine is a dynamic visual display of these flecks of feeling. Launch the Flash viewer and see a blizzard of swirling dots, each an atom of emotion from someone somewhere. A click on the dot pops up a precis of the feeling statement and maybe an associated picture. But if everything is too much for you, you can filter by feeling (“sarcastic” “unappreciated”), gender, age, weather (!), and location, until you’re looking at just those instances that interest you. You can also simply call up various displays of current expressions of feeling with the simple menu at the bottom left. (The accompanying graphic — click to enlarge — is an illustration of one such display.)

Even a few dancing dots too much on a Friday? Well, We Feel Fine is also a book. (There: that feels better, no?) You can buy it at Amazon, but the internet being what it is, you can also see (some of) it online or download the selected pages as PDF files. The book, as you might imagine, provides some editorial discussion of emotions in addition to notable excerpts from the rest of us.

So how do you feel now? Curious? Disgusted? Indifferent? Check out We Feel Fine and find out who else has that same private emotion right now.

Every now and then it is “improving,” as the Victorians used to say, for a lawyer to be caught up in the toils of another profession, in order to recapture the client experience of uncertainty in the face of an opaque problem. I’ve had the fortune, recently — I wouldn’t label it “good” — to be in that situation and it has occurred to me, not for the first time, that there is a way to make the experience better for the lay person, a way that is all too seldom taken. My small suggestion is that professionals who deal with clients consider preparing printed material for the clients to take away with them, material that will help them understand what is going on.

There’s a perfect storm of reasons for these “hand-holders,” as I call them.

• The client is dealing with a complex problem with which he or she is unfamiliar, and a carefully thought-out, written explanation will be better expressed than an oral one.
• The professional is always busy, not to say rushed: time is money or scarce or beyond the professional’s control. Hurried explanations often are the result, where much can be omitted.
• The client is likely stressed, typically because professionals are consulted only when there’s a serious problem or plan; and emotional stress does very bad things to clear thinking and to memory. We forget to ask certain questions — forget, even, to consult our list of important questions — can’t remember the answers, or, worse, think we remember but get it wrong.
• The professional has to translate out of jargon and into the client’s vocabulary — or, indeed, into a language other than English. When this is done in the moment, it can be a haphazard matter, and there’s plenty of room to under- or over-estimate the client’s ability to understand.
• The client may well feel inferior because he or she can’t fix or even understand the problem without help. This can lead to faking comprehension and to suppressing questions that might be thought too simple or “stupid.”

In many cases the quality of a professional-client meeting would be improved by being able to give the client something in writing to take away, something, perhaps, even to refer to during the meeting. This “something” might summarize aspects of the client’s situation (all client problems have elements of a routine nature in them), give the client things to think about before a follow-up meeting, point to reliable resources that could help the client get an even better understanding of the problem — and even invite feedback on the meeting that’s just occurred.

Of course, in the case of law, hand-holders would be more useful in areas of practice that deal with real rather than corporate persons; but even with the latter, I can see some real utility in a lawyer’s being able to provide straightforward written material on some standard situations: “contracting for services,” “leasing in a shopping centre,” “developing employment contracts,” and so forth.

There will be reasons why these hand-holders aren’t in use more often than (I suspect) they are. It takes time to distill the essence of a legal situation and to put it into good, clear writing, time that no one is paying for, up front at least. Professionals, understandably, think highly of themselves, part of which entails a belief that they give good meeting, that they’re good at clear explanation in the moment. My guess would be, however, that the last time these sorts of assumptions were checked out rigorously by outside examiners was never. Professionals also focus, of course, on the unique aspects of a client’s situation — that’s where the action might be — and so they may tend to forget that every unique problem rests atop a bedrock of quite stable material that could be laid out in writing for the client.

Modern technology introduces some factors that could make hand-holders even easier to produce and even more useful. Thanks to the internet, cooperation among firms or lawyers within an umbrella organization is dead easy; producing hand-holders as a cooperative effort would take some of the burden out of it. It’s nothing, technically, to pour general text, then, into firm-branded moulds. Online versions could contain hyperlinks to the chosen resources. And, given the ease of document assembly and printing, a lawyer could even compose a “What Just Happened” hand-holder in five minutes after a meeting by selecting elements from a list that could be ready for the clients by the time they’ve got their coats on.

Serving the client well is reason enough to produce hand-holders. But there’s a return to the professional, too: hand-holders are tangible symbols of the help that’s being given, of the work that has been and will be done on the client’s behalf, work for which the client is grateful each time the hand-holder is read.

Last night UWO Law hosted a presentation by law and undergraduate students of the trial scene from Merchant of Venice. Following the play, an appeal was heard to the Western Law Moot Court, featuring an all-star line-up.

Shylock’s sentence was appealed by Earl Cherniak, QC, and the Attorney General of Ontario Chris Bentley represented Antonio.

The bench in the appeal consisted of Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada, Justice Eileen Gillese of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, Antoni Cimolino, General Director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Professor James Purkis from the Department of English at Western and legal journalist and author Jeffrey Miller.

(Far Left) Irfan Premji, Earl Cherniak (Front) Prof. Stephen Pitel (Back, From Left) Jeffrey Miller, Antoni Cimolino, Justice Ian Binnie, Justice Eileen Gillese, James Purkis (Far Right) Christopher Bentley, Andre Cormier

Prof. Stephen Pitel said,

There are great connections between law, literature, and drama. The common law is based on a strong narrative tradition and the courtroom is often compared to a theatre.  So pairing appellate advocacy and Shakespeare has tremendous potential.

Now I did manage to get some clips of the event, though the resolution is poor and I missed major parts of it.  But I’m working on a student budget here, and I’m still certain that the numerous references to Facebook, Twitter, legal aid certificates, and circumcision (I kid you not), will still leave you amused and entertained. Not only did this event reach its potential, it exceeded it by far.

And without further ado, here is the appeal of Shylock’s judgment, after some 411 years:

Shakespeare in Court: A Play with Appeal – Appellant’s submissions from Omar2 on Vimeo.

Shakespeare in Court: A Play with Appeal – Respondent’s submissions from Omar Ha-Redeye on Vimeo.

Oh, all right: I’m only sidling up to the matter of predicting the technology/internet future, a venture that would have foxed even the greatest classical soothsayers, surely. The current augur of the moment is Google Vice President of Global Ad Operations, John Herlihy, who, according to SiliconRepublic.com, told a conference recently that “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.”

As of 9.30 GMT this morning, this was the top Twitter trending topic in the UK, according to The Independent. (Fortunately or not, it’s since been replaced by #everydayiwakeup.)

Far be it from me to doubt the wisdom of a Google exec about such things. Yet, if he means that laptops and netbooks will also be swept aside in favour of thumbing things, I’ll lodge a small demurrer now. Why, we haven’t even had the iPad wave yet.

As for me, it’s possible, I suppose, that having learned to think with nine digits instead of with a wrist and a right hand gripping a pen, I could learn to think with the two fat fingers as I search, research, and compose — but I’ll likely decline if it comes to that. At least that’s how I see my small part of the future. You?

A recent Out-Law.com tweet caught my eye with the headline YouTube threatened by changes to Digital Economy Bill. The article has some good links and background information, including:

Courts will have the power to block access to entire websites from the UK because of allegations of copyright infringement under an amendment to Government legislation that has been adopted by the House of Lords.

The amendment currently being debated in the Lords deals with injunctive powers to block content rather than the current practice where YouTube removes copyright infringing content when given notice by the copyright owner.

We haven’t talked about the Digital Economy Bill at Slaw, nor do we usually spend time discussing foreign legislation.

There are excellent resources from the UK Parliament – much like our LEGISinfo site – to give background information on the bill, track the progress, and of course, see all of the documentation and latest version of the bill.

The bill makes some very significant chamges to the Communications Act 2003. That act is intended: “to confer functions on the Office of Communications; to make provision about the regulation of the provision of electronic communications networks and services and of the use of the electro-magnetic spectrum; to make provision about the regulation of broadcasting and of the provision of television and radio services; to make provision about mergers involving newspaper and other media enterprises and, in that connection, to amend the Enterprise Act 2002; and for connected purposes.”

Considering the global impact of these changes to UK legislation, should they come to pass, we had best inform ourselves.

If you’re around Toronto on the morning of Tuesday, March 16, you might want to attend the Workshop on Media Suppression: Life and Livelihood that’s being presented by York University’s IP Osgoode and the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. Four panels of experts will address the following topics:

• Digital Rights Contracts
• The Thawing of Libel Chill
• The Role of Internet Giants in Totalitarian States
• Legal Recourse for the Torture, Kidnapping, and Murder of Journalists

The workshop is free of charge and is being held in Room W132 of the Schulich School of Business between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Further information is available online. RSVP requested.

And if you can’t get to the workshop but are interested in the topics, you might let IP Osgoode know, because they’ll be video recording the event and posting the link a few days later on their website. I’m sure they’d be happy to email you to tell you when the link is up.

I’ve always assumed that when it came to lending e-books that Libraries would need to find a method to share the digital files housing the books in question. That the e-book files would distributed to the user’s reader, and then deleted once the lending period was finished. While things may eventually work that way in the future, I’d like to share a very interesting service being pioneered at Oregon State University where the pre-loaded Kindle hardware is the item being circulated.

Students are invited to spend up to $20 on any item in the Amazon Kindle store; items which become part of the Library’s e-catalogue, and gradually indexed using Library Thing.  The total collection is 57 titles, with the Library lending a grand total of 5 Kindles.  Still in the experimental stage? Of course, but it’s also incredibly inspiring in terms of Libraries & innovation.

There were probably two big obstacles to getting this service into operation: 1) complying with Amazon’s guidelines, and 2) budget.  For number one, Amazon doesn’t allow for lending of digital titles, so the Library was smart enough to do an end-around and marry the reader device to the content.  Technology is becoming increasingly disposable, so why not? [As an aside, this isn't the most cost effective strategy now, but one can imagine how dropping tech prices may make this a solid tactic in the future.]

The second hurdle was probably budget – as in, they had little to no budget to get the program off the ground (I don’t know, just a guess).   But if you consider how bootstrapped this service  is, you’ll see how they’ve almost ‘guerrilla marketed’ their test offering into production. What’s the cost here? perhaps two or three thousand dollars?  If budgets were holding back this group, they certainly found a way to get things started.  Once launched, even in (or because of) limited supply, there was almost guaranteed to be a backlog.  Add in a little marketing magic, a growing waiting list for the new service, and presto! You’re tripling the size of your Kindle lending operation.

So smart.

Two Supreme Court stories from me this week:

1) The Supreme Court of Canada has released a special edition of its Bulletin of Proceedings that provides a statistical overview of its activities for the period 1999-2009.

It provides information on leave applications submitted, appeals heard, judgments, and time lapses (time between the filing of a complete application for leave to appeal and the Court’s decision on whether leave should be granted; time between decision to grant leave and the hearing; time between the hearing of an appeal and the judgment).

2)The Court, the Osgoode Hall Law School blog that tracks the Supreme Court of Canada’s activities, recently announced the winners of the First Annual Ozzy Awards (all of this is totally unofficial of course):

“A while back, we promised we would compile a list of our top judgments from 2009 in a number of categories. And so, at the risk of diverting the nation’s attention from our top athletes at the Olympics, we present to you the First Annual Ozzy Awards (named in recognition both of our school and the fact that we’re pretty much ripping off the Oscars).”

“Due to the economy, we decided to forego the red-carpet awards gala we had planned in Roy Thomson Hall with the leading luminaries of the Canadian legal profession in attendance in their finest evening wear (maybe next year).”

There are categories for:

• Criminal Judgment of the Year
• Civil Judgment of the Year
• Charter Judgment of the Year
• Concurring Opinion of the Year
• Dissenting Opinion of the Year
• Most Disappointing Refusal of Leave
• Judge of the Year
• Judgment of the Year

I’ve just come across a Ph.D. thesis from 2007 by Christine Vanda Burns called “Online Legal Services — A Revolution that Failed?” [PDF 729pp]. Dr. Burns looked at what we might think of as the first generation of “online legal products which ‘package’ legal knowledge” and supply it to commercial enterprises, governments, and other consumers of law. As you would imagine in a dissertation, she examined the relevant literature and also did some empirical work in Australia, her home.

Interesting, to me, is her conclusion that while there are lots of difficulties surrounding the implementation of such products, most could be overcome with the application of understood techniques; however, the real stumbling block is the problem of acquiring the legal knowledge in the first place, a problem she labels the “knowledge acquisition bottleneck.” It’s worth quoting her at some length on this:

A significant lesson that emerges from each of the lines of inquiry I have pursued is that knowledge acquisition is a very significant impediment to the cost effective development of online legal knowledge products. Codifying legal knowledge and representing it using a technology tool is extremely difficult. This translates to considerable time and expense. The importance of this factor is not reflected in the commentary about online legal knowledge products, suggesting that it has been consistently underestimated. Presumably the lack of interaction between the academic and commercial worlds, and the small number of commercial developers has led to a situation where it is a lesson learned in isolation by each newcomer to the development of knowledge-based applications.

Some aspects of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck are common to all types of online legal knowledge product. For example, legal experts are often poor at articulating their knowledge and it may be the case that much of their knowledge cannot be articulated. This is compounded by the challenge of finding a legal expert who is willing to spend time distilling their knowledge. It is very different to traditional legal work and may hold little inherent interest for most lawyers. In addition, for many lawyers their time can be more lucratively devoted to providing traditional legal services.

. . . The knowledge acquisition bottleneck is a consistent theme of the artificial intelligence and law literature. . . . Knowledge of the relevant area of law must be translated into segments of material that are digestible, can be interacted with and are imparted in an order that results in effective learning. The skill required to do this is frequently underestimated, as is the time required to carry out the process of instructional design. Similarly, the process of converting legal expertise into an automated legal document is demanding. It requires not only legal expertise, but also the ability to create a base document, the ability to deconstruct the base document so that it can be logically assembled later, and the ability to use authoring software to convert the deconstructed document into an automated document.

None of this will come as a surprise to the KM experts, as Burns repeatedly acknowledges. So before we launch into rhapsodies about the (continually) coming revolution in legal services, we should bear in mind that that it’s difficult indeed to decant lawyers’ “knowledge” into any flasks, let alone automated ones. Still, there are systematizers among us — I’m one, at heart — who are (continually) intrigued by the possibilities and will keep chipping away at the problem — and at the “knowing” lawyers.

[via @darrylmountain]

We’ve all heard the saying “there is no such thing as bad publicity” – but of course we don’t take that literally. 

Apparently, though, research has shown that when it comes to online reviews, negative reviews can result in more sales than positive reviews.

That was one of the points made by Mitch Joel during his keynote address on Monday at Fanshawe College’s eMarketing conference.  (I spoke at one of the breakout sessions on “Digital Law”.)

He says there are two reasons for that.   First, people tend to trust the business more as they feel the business is being open and candid.  Second, what is important in a negative review is what is actually said.  The reviewer’s reason may be irrelevant to other buyers.  

That’s not to say its a good thing if every review trashes the product – but a few negative reviews don’t seem to hurt.

Many of us have had clients complain about negative online comments about them that they don’t feel are justified, and reputation management is a growing field.

The message here is that when lawyers are asked to advise on these issues, we need to understand this in order to give the right advice, and to avoid the Streisand effect.

A few weeks back I noted a yet-to-be-published case by Ontario Master Donald Short on proportionality called Moosa v. Hill Property Management. It’s now been published here, along with this bit of visual advocacy:

I’ve heard Eugene Meehan talk about charts in his written advocacy presentation, but haven’t been exposed to much else on visual advocacy. I like this example because it communicates so much meaning so quickly and, moreover, because it’s accessible to those who are not artistically inclined. Does this offend your typesetter’s eye Simon? Other examples anyone? Links?

It’s March. Soon the doors of universities and colleges will be flung open, and a stream of students will emerge. Somewhat pasty, a little dazed from the efforts of final exams and papers, they have only one thing on their minds – JOBS. The University of Toronto’s i-School has already had its job fair. Governments are starting the hunt for summer students, and new grads are looking for that first job. It’s a heady time for students and employers alike. I thought it would be appropriate to offer some reflections and tips for job hunters and employers.

Are you in it for the long or short term?

Job seekers: Think about what you’re looking for. Are you joining the organization looking for stability? Learning opportunities? Promotions? There are no wrong answers to this question, but you should give it thought before you walk into an interview. It’s very likely that you’ll be asked.

Employers: It’s easy to assume we’re always looking for someone we can train and keep forever, but this isn’t always true. The impending retirement of a significant portion of the labour force means that succession planning is (or should be) top of mind. Are we looking for someone we can develop and build into a management role, or someone that we can count in that position for years to come? Is it realistic to think that every applicant is looking to put down roots? It is important to ask the applicants how they see the position fitting into their career strategy. You may not be their ultimate destination, but perhaps you can offer a quality learning experience, while benefiting from their energy and ideas.

Get yourself known

Students have many opportunities to get their names before employers – practica, co-op placements, involvement in student government can all be excellent ways for the profession to find you. Librarianship is more about your ability to make connections than it is about your ability to study. I’m not saying that grades don’t matter, but given the choice between hiring a student with straight A’s and little presence, and a student with a professional presence and A-‘s or B+’s, I’ll take the student with the lower grades. They have already learned the essential lesson – librarianship is not about books. It’s about connection.

In a recent competition, we went looking for a research librarian. In the poster, we highlighted Web 2.0 awareness as one of the qualities we sought. After reading the applications, I Googled the top 20 candidates. My goal was to see how many of them I could find, and what platforms they were using. I also read what I could reach in the public sphere (I didn’t friend anyone). We screened some candidates into the interviews because of the quality of their blog posts. I was impressed by the quality of the thinking, their ideas and the professional tone of the blogs. Others didn’t fare so well. If you must vent, consider doing so by phone, in your diary or in some other private way. You never know who’s watching.

LinkedIn is a must for job-seekers. It helps you create that professional presence, and build networks. For the reasons above, I’m not certain that I would recommend linking your LinkedIn content to your Twitter account.

I’m in a quandary about Facebook. I originally set up my account for purely social reasons, and prefer to keep it that way. But there are so many professional resources arriving in Facebook that it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the divide! I also tried to set up two accounts – one for professional connections and one for personal. That didn’t work. My best suggestion is to make use of the privacy settings in Facebook. You can customize the settings to some extent. Perhaps it would be smart to block your coworkers from access to your photo albums, for example.



Make your case

Employers put a lot of time and thought into recruitment. It’s expensive. It demands resources. You should honour that by putting a reasonable effort into your application. This means writing a cover letter which directly addresses the qualities and experience that I put into ad, and tying your experience to what I’m seeking. Customizing the resume is even more impressive. It shows that you read the ad, have thought about it, and can see how your skills match. In our recent competition, the first thirty applications I received came in the first day – they were all boilerplate, and from only marginally qualified applicants. Not a single one screened in for an interview. The final thirty applications came in two weeks later, in the final days of the competition. They were impressive documents, and reflected real effort by the candidates. Most of the people we interviewed came from this group.

Make the case for yourself, especially if you don’t have precisely the skill set or experience that I’m looking for. Don’t expect me to do the work for you – tell me how your four summers as a barista has given you customer service skills which translate to your new career in libraries (and it does, by the way).

Know your audience

Are you applying to a private company or a government organization? There is a significant difference in how these two groups interview. Government tends to rely on a more formal approach. The HR department often does the first screen of the applications. Make certain to address each of the elements of the ad in your application – experience, training, skills.

If you get to the interview stage, you will likely face a panel of two or more interviewers. They will take you through a preset list of questions, which will be given to all of the candidates in the competition. These questions will be taken from the advertisement. Spend some time studying the mandate and structure of the organization – annual reports are a great source of information, as are planning documents.

Academic institutions are likely to resemble government in the structure of the interview. They may also require a presentation from you, depending on the nature of the job.

Interviews with private companies are not likely to be as formal. Don’t let that make you complacent! Do your homework – read what you can about the company. Try to think about ways in which this job fits into the goals of the organization as a whole, and be prepared to use this information as you explain why you would be a great choice.

LISTEN – what information can you get from the interviewers about the workplace? Is it still a good fit? Think about your career goals, and whether the job still matches your aspirations.

Employers: how do you make that final selection? What weight do you give the factual questions versus the “soft” skills? How successful have you been in determining fit, and how do you do it?

I have a colleague in a firm who prefers to hire new grads and train them in her own methods. What’s your approach? What tips do you have for applicants, and how is the job market looking from your perspective?

Remember Steve Matthews‘  Web Law Predictions for 2010?

Mobile Web Becomes Important: The mobile web made some major inroads in 2009, but I expect it to become a priority in 2010. By year’s end, expect to be sick of iPhone application launches from the legal industry – both from vendors and law firms. Also expect an increase in law firms launching mobile versions of their website, mobile friendly extranets, and hopefully in all this – something innovative and useful!

Earlier today Torys LLP launched a free app for iPhones and iPads:

• get our latest news
• read our publications on current legal issues
• access our directory and profiles of lawyers, IP agents and paralegals
• view and share our videos
• find us via GPS and receive live directions to our offices

In conjunction with their videos which have proved to be an international hit, this might be the first move of its kind by a major Canadian law firm as far as I can tell.

The GPS features might be useful for visitors to Toronto, or the hapless OCI student trying to find their way to an in-firm interview.
The app might even be useful for that cocktail party where you know the lawyer across the room works at Torys, and quite embarrassingly cannot remember their name.  We actually pulled that stunt last night (with a different firm).

I’m not sick of these apps yet, so keep them coming.

Internet Law News today reports on the arrest of four people in the US for fraud and unauthorized access to computers — at least I think that’s what’s going on. Here’s the story:

Four Men Charged In Computerized Online Ticket Scam
Four men accused of using a network of computers and automated software to buy up online tickets to concerts and sporting events and selling them at a profit were indicted on fraud, conspiracy, and computer hacking charges, federal prosecutors said on Monday. They allegedly made more than $25 million by re-selling more than 1.5 million of the “most coveted tickets.” [CNET]

The accused figured out a way to create a computer network or networks, some or all based in Bulgaria, that dialled in massively when tickets would go on sale and enter the Captcha code that is supposed to defeat automated buying. So they bought hundreds or more of the best tickets to a large number of concerts and sporting events, and of course resold them at a large profit.

Is it fraud to violate the terms of service of the ticket sellers (usually but not always Ticketmaster) that would limit the number of tickets per buyer? Is that kind of purchase unauthorized access to a computer? Otherwise what have they done that is illegal?

The story is not clear — and I have not read the indictment, which no doubt I should… — whether the computer networks were created voluntarily rather than by malware. I am not sure how a botnet could defeat Captchas; that’s why one would want to recruit real people. If they created networks by malware, presumably the creation itself may be an offence in the places where it happened — if the law applicable in those places prohibited it — but not necessarily where those networks produce their effects.

Or am I wrong about that? Is it an offence here to create malware that affects only computers somewhere else, if the effect of those computers is to have an impact here? Or must the Canadian impact itself be illegal for the creation of the malware to be illegal?

P.S. The men are not charged with reselling tickets for a profit, since that is not illegal in most of the US (or in most of Canada, where only Ontario and Manitoba prohibit it).

The Obama Administration recently announced the details of its $400 million multi-year Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which will expand access to nutritious foods for underserved urban and rural communities in the US (see the press release from the US Department of the Treasury). To identify communities which currently lack healthy food options, the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service launched a great online research tool called the Food Environment Atlas. This tool allows you to compile county-level statistics on three categories of food environment factors:

1. Food choices (e.g., lbs per capita prepared meals, lbs per capita solid fats, lbs per capita fruits and vegetables)

2. Health and well-being (e.g., adult diabetes rate, adult obesity rate)

3. Community characteristics (e.g., child poverty rate, poverty rate, median household income).

Changes are afoot with the Law Librarians podcast! We have moved to hosting and support by CALI (Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction). We have also taken advantage of this change to rename the show Law Librarian Conversations.

More information is on the website at http://lawlibcon.classcaster.net/. This show was created and is produced by Richard Leiter, is co-hosted by Marcia Dority Baker, and given web support by Roger Skalbeck. It includes a varying group of panelists (of which I am one) and a number of special guests.

We are now recording live twice a month (the first and third Fridays of each month, at 2:00 p.m. Central time). Information on accessing each show live will be posted on the website. Live chat for audience members during the show is also available on the website. Past episodes are available from the website and from iTunes.  Discussions on Twitter about the show may be tagged #lawlibcon.

Next show:

March 5, 2010,  2:00 p.m. Central

Margie Maes, Executive Director of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA), and regular panelist on the podcast, will join us for a discussion about LIPA’s involvement in many important initiatives and projects to insure the longterm access to legal materials.

Additional details and register to attend.

I’ve been a faithful follower of Cryptome for quite some time. Cryptome has been posting very interesting and controversial content on the internet since 1996. It was the first WikiLeaks. Recent readers would note some publications that are very interesting for those who are interested a look at the level of cooperation of between internet service providers and law enforcement. Some of the reaction has been overblown, in my view. Nobody should be surprised that service providers hand over customer information in response to warrants and subpoenaes. Where the law requires it, banks do it, pharmacies do it, libraries do it and credit card companies do it. I think it would be shocking if service providers didn’t have policies and procedures for this. What would be more troubling would be the extent to which service providers hand over information in the absence of a lawful requirement.

Most recently, Microsoft served a DMCA notice on Cryptome and its hosting provider, demanding that their Global Criminal Compliance Handbook be removed. Cryptome countered and Microsoft ultimately caved. My personal view is that service providers should make this information public so that customers really understand their digital footprints.

So if you want to see what Facebook, AOL, PayPal, MySpace, AOL and Skype will provide in response to a lawful demand, check out Cryptome.

And for lawyers, these documents will tell you what you can expect to get in response to a lawful demand.

The latest Radio Berkman podcast has Dave Weinberger interviewing Carl Malamud about his efforts to make US law more accessible and copyright free.

The ABA Legal Technology Resource Center blog posted a warning this morning that all of us should pay heed to: Be Careful! Twitter Phishing Catches Lawyers, Too

What is “phishing”? Email messages (or even tweets) that trick innocent users into entering their account information (for any account: a Twitter account, an email account, a bank account etc.) into a fake log in page, effectively handing control of their account to a malicious third party.

In the case of these recent Twitter phishing attempts, the usurper then uses the innocent individual’s Twitter account to send out spam, malware, and more phishing attempts via Twitter’s “direct message” (DM) feature.

Don’t think you won’t be fooled. While I don’t know of anyone hit in the latest round of Twitter phishing, last year one of my more tech-literate friends was tricked into revealing his MSN account login info (the people in his address book then got a message asking them to send him money so he could get home as he was stranded in a foreign country after having his wallet and passport stolen). And, an otherwise very bright lawyer I know was recently tricked into disclosing his bank account access info.

A phishing message will get your attention because it will play on the fear of your account being hacked. The phishing message and the fake login page will look very real. It is all too easy to be fooled by these scams. There is good advice on how to recognize phishing and how not to get tricked in the LTRC post. Please read it!

Cross posted on Avoid A Claim.com

The University of Ottawa’s Centre for Law, Technology and Society is hosting a conference on Friday, March 5 entitled Taking Stock of Tech: Reflections on Law, Technology and Society. The keynote address will be given by Harvard law prof, Yochai Benkler, who is also the Faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The conference program and registration information are available online via the link above.

Slaw contributor Ivan Mokanov, Deputy Director of LexUM, has an interesting and informative post this morning on VoxPopuLII entitled Environmentally-Friendly Citations. He discusses Canada’s neutral citation, its history and structure, and the extent to which it has been embraced by practitioners, the judiciary, and other tribunals. He also discusses CanLII and the mechanics of RefLex, CanLII’s citator. Cheers to Rob Richards, editor in chief of VoxPopuLII, for the heads up.

According to a report by Richard Liebrecht of the QMI Agency:

Alberta Musing Online Election Voting
New election rules have cleared the way for Internet and electronic voting, which could come to Alberta as early as 2013. “Obviously that online voting is something that’s on the forefront of people’s minds … people say, ‘I can do my banking online, but I can’t do my voting online’,” said Brian Fjeldheim, Alberta’s Chief Electoral Officer.

The Chief Electoral Officer went on to say “Once it has been proven to be effective, that the votes can be certified, all that security stuff can be looked after, I certainly see that as something that’s coming.”

How easy is looking after “all that security stuff”?

Is the parallel between e-voting and e-banking valid?

A few years ago (“Electronic Voting and the Law“) I suggested (unofficially, of course) a few reasons why Internet voting is not like Internet banking. Was I unduly pessimistic? Or are people in fact a bit too blasé about the security of e-banking?

[via Internet Law News]

Collaboration is a constant theme for biotech companies, from inception to exit: researchers work together to generate novel ideas, young companies work with development and formulation partners, and collaborations between pharmaceutical companies and biotechs are the classic final phase of drug development. 

That’s just the tip of the iceberg:

Foundations work together: foundations formed by the families of patients can be the most ardent advocates for getting drugs to market, but that is an expensive process.  One solution is for multiple foundations to pitch in to fund the same project.  That was the story with CureDuchenne and the Foundation to Eradicate Duchenne each awarded grants of $250,000 to Nasdaq-listed AVI BioPharma to advance its drug development program.

Genes and the environment work together: the more we learn about genetics, and the more genomes we sequence, the harder it is to remember that our health is not fully predetermined.  Studies in prominent journals recently have shown that for heart disease and type 2 diabetes, genetic markers aren’t as good for predicting risk as some had hoped.  Particularly for complex traits and diseases, how you are raised and the choices you make will continue to be at least as important as what you inherit.

Canadians and Americans work together: hard as it may be to remember today, we collaborate all the time with our neighbo(u)rs to the South.  This past week saw a great success in that mold when Ception Therapeutics was bought by Cephalon, sending some portion of the money North to Ception investors Lumira Capital.  McMaster University also benefitted along the way, having performed some of the clinical work on Ception’s products that piqued Cephalon’s interest.

This coming week should be exciting as well, with the federal budget showing up on Twitter.  Keep an eye on the Cross-Border Biotech Blog and @crossborderbio for an analysis of this year’s government-sponsored crop of innovation initiatives.

One aspect of the Olympic Movement I had never heard of before is the Olympic Truce. The concept was started in Ancient Greece, when countries would call a truce to allow athletes to travel in peace to the Olympic games and back. The concept was re-instituted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1992 as a platform of peace. The IOC launched the International Olympic Truce Foundation and the International Olympic Truce Centre in July 2000. From the olympictruce.org website with regard to supporting this ideal:

The Olympic Truce call

At the dawn of the 21st century, the Olympic Truce once again calls upon humanity to lay down its weapons and work towards building the foundations of peace, mutual respect, understanding and reconciliation.

Implementing Truce means:

• Valuable time for constructing bridges of communication between adversaries
• Providing humanitarian support to children and adults in conflict-torn regions
• Helping to protect the damaged natural environment and contributing to the replenishment of vital natural resources
• Allowing the youth of the world to participate peacefully in the Olympic Games.

Beyond these, the Truce promises to create the necessary infrastructures for the continuation of dialogue and for the renewal of hope for reconciliation, both during the duration of the Games and throughout the four-year period of Olympiads.

According to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Truce information:

As part of commemorating the Olympic Truce, it is the tradition for the Host Country to present a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for a truce during the Olympic Games. It is also tradition for the Organizing Committee to install a truce “wall” in the athletes’ village.  As an extension of these program elements, VANOC has a number of initiatives to maximize awareness and engagement in the Olympic Truce, with particular focus on youth.

To support our direct engagement with youth through the Vancouver 2010 Make Your Peace initiatives, VANOC is honoured to have Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada as the Patron of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Truce.

Particularly moving is the Olympic Truce Northern Outreach Project to help create the spirit of peace and competition for Canada and encouraging sport in youth of northern Canada, described in the video below.

Originally published in the 6th issue of the Black Law Students Association (BLSAC) magazine.

In the West African culture, historical tradition is passed down orally through what are known in the Western world as griots.  The griot is a repository of knowledge, and ensures that the lessons of one generation are passed down to the next.

It’s our pleasure as BLSAC members to be your griot, and share what we’ve learned from our experiences.

The Mende people refer to a griot as a jali, which comes from their word for “blood.”  Make no mistake; there will be plenty of blood, sweat and tears during your time in law school.  But there are some ways to make it easier.

Most famously is what is alternatively known as Condensed Annotated NoteS (CANS), or more simply, summaries.   These notes will outline the main points you need to know for the course, including key facts and decisions of cases.  There are important research and reading skills you need to develop in law school, and you should not miss out on those opportunities.  But your sleep and peace of mind will also become increasingly important.

You may also find that many of your peers already know lots of law before they even arrive at law school.  Some started studying over the summer, or even earlier.  Others have parents or family members that are lawyers and judges.  They grew up around the law.  You could even say it was in their blood.

Many minority students just don’t have those family backgrounds, simply because the legal community is already underrepresented by diversity.  You can’t compete with these students directly in memorizing the law.  What you can excel in is developing the skills mentioned above, including analytical thinking.  As Albert Einstein said, “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”

Another way to distinguish yourself is through mock-trial competitions called “moots.”  Some require significant research.  Others may require you to submit written arguments.  But what makes moots great is that you are evaluated based on your oratory skills, something that may come naturally to students who may not otherwise have a natural background for.

The reason you need to distinguish yourself to begin with is that law school is incredibly competitive.  And essentially what people are competing for is an articling position, which is where you work for a law firm for about 8 months before becoming a lawyer.  There are usually more law students than there are articling positions, which results in some very frustrating situations.

And then I’ll break it to you that minority students generally fare worse than others, even when the candidates are similar in all other respects.  The reason?  An elusive thing called “fit,” usually used as a euphemism to exclude others of different socio-economic or cultural backgrounds.

Competitiveness does not end with articling positions.  There is already an incredibly high attrition rate in law firms, and getting hired back every year means you need senior lawyers in a firm to champion your cause.  Somehow you have to make sure you “fit” their bill.  This means connecting with them with something other than the same legal material that everyone else is working on.

The Wolof people call griots a guewel, from their word for “circle.”  Griots would often tell their tales to people seated in a circle around them.  To succeed in law you need to expand your circle of influence, before you even graduate.  Law school can be a very exclusionary place, even hostile at times.  You will invariably face some form of bigotry or intolerance.  But you’ll still have to play within this circle without leaving it for an entire three years.  Make the best of it.

One of the best ways to network is through professional associations. Provincial bar associations host events across the country, which can enhance your knowledge of a specific area of law, and put you in direct contact with experienced practitioners.  Staying involved in community and helping people through a legal aid clinic, pro bono projects, or other advocacy issues, helps maintain relationships which could turn into potential clients down the road.

There are also interest-based legal associations which can offer all assistance.  You still need to do your part, as outlined above, but they’re there for a helping hand.  It’s why most of us are involved in the Black Law Students Association of Canada (BLSAC), and continue to give back in the same way people once gave to us.

Mark Liberman raised an interesting question on the Language Log yesterday: Why is it, he wonders, that “the laws and practices dealing with the recording of human interactions seem to be so different for video compared to audio?” We penalize recordings of conversations without proper consent but think nothing of videoing millions of interactions daily.

Here in Canada, too, Criminal Code provisions concerning privacy seem directed at speech. Section 184. (1) provides that:

Every one who, by means of any electro-magnetic, acoustic, mechanical or other device, wilfully intercepts a private communication is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.

And while this speaks of a “private communication,” the definition of that is:

any oral communication, or any telecommunication, that is made . . . under circumstances in which it is reasonable for the originator to expect that it will not be intercepted by any person other than the person intended by the originator to receive it

There are a number of answers to Liberman’s question, I suppose. One would be the observation that when it comes to privacy our societies are concerned about “communications,” rather than, more broadly, interactions; it is the former that have political or other substantial content, we assume. It is the privacy of our information rather than our “selves” that is important to us, it seems. Here, Liberman points out that sign language (e.g. ASL) would not be covered by provisions such as our s.184, at least, not without some creative interpretation.

Another answer would be one Liberman suggests himself, which is that “wiretapping” and the rules surrounding it, came into existence before we imagined the ubiquity of CCTV. Our privacy laws haven’t yet caught up with the times — and may never get there, given the supposed importance of these video cameras for the prevention of crime or the apprehension of perpetrators of crime.

All this is not to say that there aren’t means in various provincial or federal acts that could be found to provide some protection against “e-peeping,” as it were. But it is interesting to observe in a general way our bias in favour of the aural/oral when it comes to privacy.

♫There’s a Long, Long trail a winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams.
There’s a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I’ll be going down
That long, long trail with you…♫

Lyrics by Stoddard King, Music by Zo Elliott, “There’s a Long, Long Trail” (WWI song).

This is a co-operative Canadian weblog on things legal. I thought that, as a Canadian who is observing firsthand an interesting event taking place here in Vancouver, I would take a moment and blog about it. Contrary to what you are probably thinking, this post is not about the Olympics, but rather what the Olympics seem to be doing for Canada – and Canadians. After all, being “Canadian” is, itself, a legal designation, but it is more – much more.

Stephen Colbert (of the “syrup-sucking, ice-hole” fame) came to tape his show here. What did he find? Canadians lining up…queuing…to see his show. No one asked them – it was rush seating – yet he found Canadians politely lining up well in advance of the show and respecting those who had come earlier.

What else is apparent? Vancouver is swimming in a sea of people wearing red and white surrounded by flags hanging everywhere.

In speaking about Canada and the Olympics, the Vancouver Province Newspaper on Sunday Feb 21, 2010 quoted from the The Chicago Sun Times, USA:

[It’s] a country whose top two character traits seem to be politeness and reservedness. But these Olympics have brought out a patriotism that apparently can’t be held down by shyness. Canadian flags are taped to windows all over Vancouver. Canadians are walking the streets clad in red Team Canada clothing. They’re singing the national anthem in train stations. Unheard of…Some are calling these games the worst in Olympic history and you want to say: Really? Worse than Munich?

The British tabloids have gone particularly over the bend because that is what they do. But something is happening here, something new and fresh, and you can feel it. It’s a people embracing its identity and being vocal about it.

“These are not Canadians looking for attention. These are Canadians looking at each other in wonder”

To the writer, this appears to be the latest step in a long line dating from what happened at the battle of Vimey Ridge and leading to Vancouver. According to Wikipedia:

The battle was the first occasion when all four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force participated in a battle together, and thus became a Canadian nationalistic symbol of achievement and sacrifice.

We have another battle taking place in Vancouver, one fought on sports arenas and ski hills. But beyond the medals, there is a growing national recognition of a place called “Canada” and its place in the world, built on the achievements and sacrifice required to not only host the Olympics, but to participate fully in those Games. It is apparent in listening to “Oh Canada” after the nightly fireworks out on street corners – in both languages. Being “Canadian” is no longer just a legal distinction. It is now a movement. It has been a long long trail waiting for our dreams to come true.

The 140 character limit on Twitter may be a constraint for some, but it lets others go retro.

On February 20, an antique Commodore VIC-20 (circa 1981) at the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario was used to send a tweet. There was a CBC report on YouTube the day before, and the event itself was recorded for posterity here.

The program had to be loaded into memory from a cassette tape. Talk about constraints!

It’s a big freebie today, a big filmic freebie: HotDocs, the great Canadian documentary film festival, has opened its online library to us all. I count 171 movies for you to choose from, some as short as 6 minutes, others a full hour-and-a-half.

The basic site lets you browse the films sorted by title or by year (1951-2009). And there’s an alternative version of the site done in Flash that lets you filter by subject, time, date and language, or a combination of these facets. As well on the Flash site you can create your own playlists.

What do I recommend? I’ve only just started working through the trove, so I can’t help you out too much here. You might start, though, with one of the short ones — The $4 Haircut — then if you like jazz, there’s Divine Brown at The Rex — and have a look at the charming Daddy Tran and his 3D photography hobby — or just go with the flow and see a list of the most popular films.

London may still be for the moment the “libel tourism” capital of the world for affronted folk, but Paris has its strong points, too, if the case of Professor Joseph H. H. Weiler is anything to go by. A professor of law at NYU and the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of International Law, Professor Weiler was summoned to appear in French criminal court to defend himself against a complaint of criminal libel lodged by Dr. Karin N. Calvo-Goller, a senior lecturer at the Academic Center of Law & Business in Israel. The basis for her complaint? Professor Weiler approved the publication of a review of her book, The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court. ICTY and ICTR Precedents, written by Professor Thomas Weigend, Dr. jur., Professor of Law, Director of the Cologne Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law and currently Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cologne, a review with which she disagreed and which Professor Weiler declined to withdraw upon her complaint to him.

Yes, that’s right: a bad review — which actually was not as bad as all that — by a German, published by an American of a book written by an Israeli has led to action in a French court.

The story is all over the academic blogosphere, as well it might be. But you can find a quick summary in the polemic on Opino Juris, and a brief speculation about the connection to France in a piece on Conflict of Laws .net (Dr. Calvo-Goller was born in France and may be a French national). But for the full story you couldn’t do better than to read the editorial [direct link to PDF] by the accused in the EJIL that the accused publishes: it is a model of a fair and full exposition of the facts, given that they all happened in print, published or otherwise.

Here you’ll find, first of all, a link to the review, itself a mere four paragraphs long! Then there follows the exchange of letters, involving, among other things, an offer by Professor Weiler to publish a statement by Dr. Calvo-Goller alongside the review, an offer she declined. Finally, Professor Weiler makes an appeal for financial assistance. As you can well imagine, an appearance in a foreign criminal court — even one destined to be brief, I hope — will prove to be expensive.

These days, it’s a given that within its collection of web properties, a law firm must have its own website. Every year, the legal industry spends a pretty penny hiring consultants, designers and copywriters to produce a website that will serve as the firm’s online headquarters. 

Much attention is given (at least we hope it is…) to the aesthetics: colour and font choices, graphical images, photos, etc. And if the firm is smart, the actual content of the website is given just as much consideration.  But what about the site’s most basic, fundamental element: the domain name?  How much thought is given to the URL that firms hope their potential clients will click on in their search results? 

This article will address some of the common issues lawyers and firms face when deciding on a domain name, as well as some more sophisticated tactics that may be taken advantage of. A little time spent considering domain name options up front can often result in benefits down the road.

The Top Level Domain (TLD)

Top level domains are the end part of the URL: the .com, .ca, .org, .net, etc. Perhaps the most common issue most Canadian firms will encounter is whether to choose a .ca or a .com domain.  

Generally speaking, a .ca domain is given some preference in the search results for those searches conducted within Canada’s borders. Thanks to Google’s geotargetting algorithms (the next Web Law Connected column will focus on this topic), choosing a .ca domain tells the search engines that your site is self-defined as Canadian content. 

While having a .ca domain gives you a definite advantage in the Canadian search results, the other part of the equation is knowing  if your audience is distinctly and exclusively Canadian. 

What if you’re a bigger firm that hopes to attract the attention of international searchers? In this situation, you’ll want to consider whether a .com domain will help make your site more visible to searchers outside of Canada. Usually, the answer is “yes”.

The Domain Name

Now that you’ve chosen an appropriate TLD, the fun part: the domain (the principal part of the URL). Most often, this will be the firm’s name, or an abbreviation or acronym for the full name – the “stemlegal” in www.stemlegal.com. 

The best advice at this point (if the domain name is available) is for firms to lock up their brand name. Identify a reasonably short name variation – drop a couple name partners if necessary – and register both the .com and .ca.  Budget restrictions aside, the .org, .net and .info would also be $30/year well spent. 

But we often see keyword-based domain names, too, such as www.newjerseycriminallawattorney.com. This is especially common with blog URLs. 

The advantage of these types of domains is that they naturally rank quite well for the search phrases they include, without a lot of work on the webmaster’s behalf. Because of this, endless variations of geographic/practice-based domains are snatched up pretty quickly. Opinions will differ on this next point, but I would suggest keyword domains are most appropriate for:

• boutique practices; 
• solos and small firms; or
• content-based web properties like blogs or microsites.

If you do decide to go for a keyword-rich domain, be warned: concise, accurate domains are becoming much harder to get. Look for a domain that has your desired search term targets, in the same keyword order, ideally, and three words or less in length. 

How do you figure out what your desired search term targets are? The Google Keyword Research tool tells us how many people are searching for a given keyword or phrase every month. This tool is free, insightful, and you should use it! 

If you can find an appropriate phrase with a relatively high volume of searches, and the equivalent domain is available for a good price, it may be worth registering or purchasing from another party. Even if you don’t use it for your firm website, you could keep it handy for that blog you’ve been wanting to start.

Valuing Domains: Whether to Register (or Purchase)

Brand-oriented domains are pretty straightforward for me. Find an acceptable budget for protecting the firm’s IP, and then lock them down long term. For important domains, I’d suggest at least 10 years, and even consider Network Solutions long-term registrations. 

Keyword-rich domains are particularly valuable if they: 1) accurately reflect the practice area and geographic location of your services, and 2) the phrase is actually one that people type into the search engines!  

I put a lot of emphasis on factor #2. Having search volume is extremely important when considering the value of any domain name.

Other factors:

Gauging your market: Every market is different — just because of disparity in populations, search volumes in say, Saskatchewan will be significantly lower than volumes in Ontario. To get a better sense, compare phrases with the same words but in a different order; or compare phrases with broader or narrower geographic terms (replace City references with Provinces).

When to Buy –vs- When to Register:  Deciding whether the price is good is an important question. A basic .com domain registration can be had for about $10/year – a drop in the bucket and something you shouldn’t waffle over. But a more valuable, desirable domain – often owned by another party -can cost much more than that. 

In the end, you must decide whether a business case can be made for the investment of a pricey domain.  Personally, I don’t advise lawyers to purchase domains from third parties unless all other alternative names (singular vs. plural terms, for example.) have been considered.  Even then, Lawyers should consider using an anonymous negotiation service over direct email communication – having a JD or LLB after your name screams $$$ to domain speculators. 

Conclusion

One final point on domain names is the importance of sticking with your choices once you’ve made them. Aged domains and the corresponding incoming links to your website can be valuable trust factors for the search engine rankings. That doesn’t mean that firms can’t move their principal domain, but that they should seriously weigh the drawbacks before doing so. If you’ve spent 10 or 15 years building up that location, even with the appropriate redirect technology, I wouldn’t expect that success to be replicated overnight. 

Statistics Canada has released a study of how often immigrants who studied outside Canada for “a regulated occupation” wind up working in that occupation. Of the various regulated professions, law admitted the least number of foreign-trained immigrants. According to the full report of the study, which used 2006 data,

Immigrants who studied law outside Canada had the lowest match rates of all fields of study leading to a regulated occupation. While 69% of the Canadian-born who studied law worked as lawyers, the corresponding figure was 12% for immigrants, making the Canadian-born with law degrees almost 6 times as likely as immigrants to be working as lawyers.

Health professions generally had the highest “match rates.”

Of all those in Canada who had studied law at the time of the research, 96,865 were Canadian-born and 29,120 were immigrants; of this latter group, 10,955 studied in Canada and 18,165 studied abroad. (See the chart of data for all the professions.)

The National Committee on Accreditation, the profession’s gatekeeper for all jurisdictions but Quebec, provides some statistics for the last decade — Summary of Evaluations 1999-2009 [PDF], Certificates of Qualification Issued 1999-2009 [PDF] — but they are shockingly badly labelled and explained, proving to be nearly useless. What they would appear to show is that England is the largest source of foreign-trained lawyers admitted to practice here, with 22.7% of the total (trebling in number over the decade, by the way), with the United States second at 19.6% (more than trebling in number) and India a close third at 17% (more than quadrupling over the decade).

Facebook appears to let you list only a single website or blog on your profile page.

Of course, many people have a website and a blog, and loads of us have connections with multiple websites and/or blogs.

With this simple trick you can list multiple sites on your Facebook profile page: Simply list the URLs for multiple sites in the Website textbox and separate them with a comma. They will display properly as separate links on your Profile page. Not sure if there is an upper limit, but I currently list 5 websites and blogs on my Facebook profile.

Previously posted on LawyerSuccessTips.com

The WSJ has an interesting question,

Is more plaintiff-side work on the horizon for BigLaw?

The query stems from an observation of substantial profits by large U.S. firms using alternative billing arrangements for plaintiff-side antitrust cases.  They don’t foresee doing personal injury or products liability plaintiff work, but tax and customs cases using contingency fees may arise.

Although the diversity of litigation might make for a more interesting workplace, it would be one heck of a headache for conflicts checks.