It’s not hard to light up a debate over the digital legal information revolution and its impact on law. There’s plenty of kindling. What’s hard is to pick an issue and keep the blaze contained. And the sources of fuel keep adding up.

Dutch financial giant ING might have struck a new spark with a report last month on social media and how it impacts news reportage. The full title of the ING report is “An International Study into the Impact of Social Media on the Activities of PR Professionals & Journalists, News & News Dissemination.” It has . . . [more]

Lawyers working “in association” need to consider how they may be perceived by clients and the public, since those who hold themselves out as a law firm risk being treated as such by the courts and can expect to be held to the same conflict requirements as a law firm partnership.
That’s according to a recent decision by Justice Stinson, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice [2014 ONSC 3411 (CanLII)]

The facts
The defendant brought a motion to remove the plaintiff’s lawyer from the record on the basis that the lawyer worked in association with another lawyer with whom . . . [more]

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

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

There’s a wonderful new book available that provides a useful overview of linked data principles and concepts that will help you understand and apply the knowledge you’ve been gathering over the past couple of years.

Seth van Hooland (Associate Professor in the Information and Communication Science Department at the Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Ruben Verborgh (Postdoctoral Researcher in Semantic Hypermedia at Ghent University) have written “Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums: How to Clean, Link and Publish your Metadata.”

This entertaining little video sums up the content nicely.

And here’s the publisher’s blurb:

“This

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Library Boy  2. À bon droit  3. Michael Geist  4. Susan on the Soapbox  5. Canadian Legal History Blog

Library Boy

Statistics Canada Article on Police-Reported Crimes Stats for 2013

Statistics Canada has published an article on Police-reported crime statistics, 2013 that shows most categories of criminal offences have . . . [more]

As I write this, Israel is again engaged in defensive military operations in a renewed attempt to dismantle terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian territories. This latest chapter in the vast novel of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict began with the kidnapping and murder of three young Israeli civilians by alleged Hamas terrorists. It spiralled further out of control when a gang of Israeli youth reacted to the murders by perpetrating their own barbaric vengeance against an innocent Palestinian teen who was kidnapped and burned to death. Although the suspects in the murder of the Palestinian were quickly arrested and charged by Israeli . . . [more]

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

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

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

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : La peine de détention pour suramende impayée doit être purgée de façon consécutive non seulement à la peine imposée pour l’infraction qui a entraîné l’imposition de la suramende, mais également à l’égard de toute autre peine que le contrevenant aurait à purger.

Intitulé : R. c. Chaussé, . . . [more]

One Sunday each month OnPoint Legal Research provides Slaw with an extended summary of, and counsel’s commentary on, an important case from the British Columbia, Alberta, or Ontario court of appeal.

JEKE Enterprises Ltd. v. Philip K. Matkin Professional Corp., 2014 BCCA 227

1. CASE SUMMARY

AREAS OF LAW: Procedural law; Chambers; Special cases

~It is not appropriate to proceed by special case where the underlying facts of the case are disputed~

BACKGROUND: The Appellants in this case held time shares in a resort owned by the Respondent. In order to fund substantial renovations at the resort, the Respondent . . . [more]

Around my house we sometimes ask “Do chickens anticipate?”. This is a roundabout way of saying “No way,” of course. It’s one of a number of chicken questions that aim at the same thing, another being “Do chickens have lips?”. Or “Do chickens fly?”. But the answer to that last is, surprisingly, yes. Which fact makes the intro to this fillip somewhat plausible.

It’s a fillip of four puzzlers, brain teasers — simple-seeming questions that have difficult or surprising answers. And the first has to do with a truckload of chickens:

1. A truck transporting live chickens is overweight and will

Gartner recently downgraded their forecast for IT spend in 2014, and it caught my eye. According to Mr Lovelock, one of the reasons for this lowering of projection is how quickly we are moving to what he called, “The Third Age of IT”. Apparently 1980 to 2000 was the “IT Craftsmanship Age” where we were building all those (now legacy) systems and putting together our IT departments. And then from 2000 to the present is what’s being called the “IT Industrialization Age” where we’re currently focused on automating and efficiency. In the legal industry I’d say we’re still very much . . . [more]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg decides thousands of cases every year on an unimaginably vast range of topics. And it has often heard cases on controversial subjects years before Canadian courts have tackled them.

The ECHR has been publishing a series of Factsheets that describe key jurisprudence of the institution broken down by subject.

The ECHR recently added new Factsheets on:

• Persons with disabilities
• Work-related rights
• New technologies
• Gender identity issues

The ECHR hears complaints from individuals living in any of the member states of the Council of Europe about violations of the European Convention of . . . [more]