Microsoft has done some good things. Even as an Apple fan boy I can say that. One such Good Thing is Slate magazine, founded in 1996 (and a strong influence in my naming of Slaw, as it happens) under the auspices of Microsoft's MSN. In 2004 Slate passed into the hands of the Washington Post, under whose umbrella it still shelters today. But even a simple encomium to this news and popular culture magazine would be too . . . earnest, perhaps, for a Friday fillip. So it's to Slate's Vault that I want to point you today.

The Vault, . . . [more]

Do you know of any means by which prosecutorial documents – like a notice of compliance or notice of laying of charges – can be delivered electronically? If a regulator, for example, wanted to require one of its regulated bodies to appear at a hearing, how can it ensure that the addressee has received the notice?

The regulator would have an email address of the regulated body, but assume that there is no contract or statute that allows for ‘originating process’ to be presumed to be delivered if delivered electronically.

I am aware that the Rules of Civil Procedure allow . . . [more]

One of the big themes running through many of the workshops at this week’s CALL conference in Montreal was the redesign of products, platforms and processes. The conference ended yesterday.

The Monday session entitled “Please Don't Make Me Think: User Testing a Faceted Search Engine” was about how the Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (CAIJ), Quebec’s Courthouse Library Network, conducts user testing sessions to validate the ergonomic and design aspects of many of its tools, including its new faceted search engine JuriBistro UNIK.

I served as a guinea pig at the session. I volunteered to go up on stage . . . [more]

The Law Society of Upper Canada (“LSUC”) held its annual general meeting last night. The meeting garnered more attention than it otherwise might have due to the mysterious last minute pulling of a motion that was received on March 28, 2013. This motion dealt with a study to enlarge the paralegal scope of practice. You can read the motion here.

There has not yet been an explanation behind the pulling of this motion–a motion that was proposed well in advance of the meeting.

So we are left to speculate.

It has never made any sense to me as to . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site's contact form.

The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis
Steven J. Harper
New York: Basic Books, 2013

Excerpt from the Introduction chosen by the author.

INTRODUCTION

When I applied to law school in 1975, the nation was recovering from a severe and prolonged recession. Even so, I always assumed that I’d be able to make . . . [more]

Though my column focuses on legal information, in the United States legal education is intimately bound up with the trends in legal information. LEXIS and WESTLAW maintain a stranglehold on the marketplace by heavy investment in law school training. By putting boots on the ground in the form of dedicated training representatives, student advisors and, of course, free access 24/7 to the relevant systems, the big commercial data bases win hearts and minds. New law students are highly energized and very impressionable. What they find upon arrival in law school is, as far as they see it, the way things . . . [more]

The National Self Represented Litigants Project headed by University of Windsor prof Julie Macfarlane has released its report, "Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants.". There is also available an executive summary of the report.

The Project interviewed 283 self-represented litigants from Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, as well as 107 providers of advice or other legal service.

Despite the presence of a large amount of online information relevant to their legal issues, a large number of the litigants became confused and overwhelmed by the tasks involved in self-representation, finding the online material not helpful in addressing . . . [more]

What do readers think about wearable computing? Is it cool or creepy? Where is the technology headed? What legal or other issues might arise from it?

I'm thinking about this because I find the intersection of technology and law interesting, and I've been asked to speak about it this fall. Google Glass privacy concerns is a popular topic today, especially around the issue of the ability to record and save images and video, and what might happen with all that. In addition to Google Glass we are seeing the debut of the smartwatch. The Pebble was a very successful kickstarter project, . . . [more]

I did a quick and unscientific bit of research a couple of days ago, comparing use of the terms non-lawyer and non-doctor in the Twitter-verse.

It seems that for the most part (on that day, at least), recent tweets referencing “non-doctor” were focused on the television serial, Doctor Who. I noted a few exceptions, pointing to other related professions, especially physiotherapists, but those tweets were from tweeters who did not appear to represent the medical profession, and in fact, appeared to be part of the client-group.

On the other hand, I found references to “non-lawyer” only in tweets from lawyers, . . . [more]

Canada is far from perfect when it comes to its domestic human rights record. Obviously the scale and gravity of concerns do not compare with tragedies unfolding in countries like Syria or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the threat to survival faced by so many of Colombia’s Indigenous nations or the relentless discrimination women endure in Afghanistan. But the concerns are nevertheless very real and longstanding, ranging from the alarmingly high and entrenched levels of violence experienced by Indigenous women to punitive new immigration detention laws; from the failure to tackle homelessness in the country to national security practices that . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For the week of May 1 – 8:

Dr. Sonia Lupien, a neuroscientist, shared 60 minutes on understanding the beast of stress. Her premise is that if you understand someone, you can deal with it.

I understand stress from the user perspective. Like using a computer, I didn't know what the silicon in the chips was for. Dr. Lupien gave CALL Conference attendees useful information in a humorous way.

First: Stress is not time pressure.

If stress was time pressure, it would not exist when you have to go to the dentist or if we have someone close to us dealing with an illness.

Second: Stress has nothing . . . [more]