China China China. 

It’s the mantra of global business & finance and following their lead comes the legal industry.

The flood of international law firms into the Asian region to service the new opportunities in an ever expanding legal market over the last decade has been phenomenal and in 2010 there’s a new gold rush for law firms with china connections for this year’s huge IPO boom

Where the law firms go, so go the feeders, all of them desperately hoping for a piece of the pie.

The region’s two leading locations with a rule of law based on the . . . [more]

I don’t know if this letter is a significantly new version – I haven’t seen it before and am too lazy to check the scam information sites – but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. It’s worth a read and giggle. It’s the version of the scam that involves scammning the mark by warning him or her that there are scams out there. In this version, the mark is explicitly told that he or she has to travel to Nigeria to get the money. . . . [more]

Many of you will launch the same group of sites each time you start your browser at the start of a the day (i.e., email, LinkedIn, Facebook, SLAW, New York Times etc.). Firefox has a great feature that will help you do this more easily.

Notice that the bottom of each folder in the Firefox bookmarks list has a “Open All in Tabs” option.

Create a bookmarks folder called “Startup” and add bookmarks to the various sites you want to launch at the start each day. One click on the “Open All in Tabs” link will open all the sites . . . [more]

A recent English court case, Football Dataco Ltd et al. v Sportradar GmbH [2010] EWHC 2911 (Ch), has held that at least for some purposes, the jurisdiction of a court over Internet content should be based on where the server was located, and not where the information online was read or used.

This seems to me to be half right. Jurisdiction should not be based on where the information was read or received, unless there is some separate activity going on there. But the location of the server should be irrelevant too. It is the location of the business . . . [more]

Plain language — the written kind — has been of interest here on Slaw recently, with John Gregory’s post “Enforcing Plain Language” and Simon Chester’s post announcing the (October) Educaloi conference, “Telling the Law to the Public. Are There Better Ways?“. I’ve got a couple of things to offer here.

First, I thought readers might like to be reminded of The Legal Writing Institute and, particularly, its open access journal. (You should also have a look at volume one of their Monograph Series: The Art of Critiquing Written Work, which comprises 15 articles.)

There’s . . . [more]

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

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

Many outsourcing contract negotiations start with customer’s paper. While this may not necessarily be objectionable, both parties must understand and remember what the objectives of the deal are. The problem in using a party’s standard template agreement is that those standard clauses may have little relevance to the outsourcing deal. While some customers may believe it is always “better” to get the supplier to agree to “more favourable” terms and conditions in the contract, the reality is that the customer is always the one who ends up paying for such additions.

For example, it is not unusual to see extensive . . . [more]

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

From the Step Two Designs announcement:

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

An American magistrate judge (sort of like a master) has ruled that a plaintiff suing a company for improperly sending a takedown notice under the DMCA has waived a number of heads of attorney-client
privilege by discussing the details of her legal case too broadly by email and on a blog (Eric Goldman blog (per Venkat))

So it’s not just lawyers who have to worry about waiving privilege – the clients can do so too. It’s not that the media of communications were insecure in themselves, it’s that they left traces that could be
found (not surprising, for . . . [more]

The Superior Court of Justice applied Grant v. Torstar in Vigna v. Levant, released on Thursday, where Giacamo Vigna, a lawyer for the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, sued Ezra Levant for allegedly defamatory postings on his blog.

Dan Michaluk said that Grant v. Torstar was the top information and privacy case for 2009, and Matthew Nied had already described how this could affect bloggers.

Facts

The facts are set out by the court as follows, . . . [more]

An Ontario private member’s bill, the Cell Phone, Smart Phone and Wireless Technology Transparency Act, 2010, requires among other things that future performance contracts (a term defined in the Consumer Protection Act), “shall be expressed in plain language that is clear and concise.” (s. 3(1))

Are there judicially recognized standards of plain language that would allow this provision to be enforced, and that would allow someone drafting such a contract to know that he or she had met the standards? I know that there are books and articles around about plain language, but does something have . . . [more]

A growing number of recent decisions in courts across the globe have commented on the concerns raised by the explosion in social media use by jurors in trials.

Recently England’s most senior judge commented extensively on the concerns in a trial where an overzealous juror posted details of the case, closing her summary with the question, “Did he do it?”. Now I’ve felt somewhat humbled by having to make life-altering submissions before a panel of twelve of my client’s peers, but pleading my case to the entire internet? That’s an audience that could overwhelm even the savviest advocate.

The judge . . . [more]