As Simon F mentioned on Friday, I had the great fortune to attend the annual meeting of the College of Law Practice Management in San Francisco earlier this month. The topic of the day was at the heart of 21st-century lawyering: innovation. Specifically, why lawyers aren’t very good at it.

One of the delegates made an important distinction at the start. When it comes to actual legal work, lawyers can innovate like crazy. Corporate lawyers have designed some of the most innovative (and profitable) financial instruments around; litigators are always finding new angles from which to argue cases, and so . . . [more]

There’s an interesting post on IT.Can Blog / Blogue de IT.Can on the collection of information by law firms. In two cases, law firms collected credit information on people their clients were considering action against, and the people investigated complained to the Privacy Commissioner. According to PIPEDA Case Summary #340, the Assistant Commissioner decided that the complaints were well-founded and made the recommendations that “the firm[s] implement a policy that prohibits conducting credit checks without appropriate consent, unless for a permissible purpose. The firm[s] responded by refusing to accept the recommendation[s].” The report notes further that:

For both

we are read in the Nederlands

Dank aan onze vrienden in Amsterdam. Wij begroeten allen bloggern.

Iemand zou het posten op Nederlandse wet moeten doen. Misschien Ejan Mackaay in Montreal.

Slaw in Canada . . . [more]

The Beeb has a good discussion of the implications of the latest Pew survey on the future of the Internet.There is a good summary on the wires.

So what did the gurus see happening over the next fourteen years? . . . [more]

Un diner en compagnie du professeur Daniel Poulin et de Frédéric Pelletier, tous 2 partageant la même passion que moi pour le droit et les technologies, m’a permis d’en apprendre davantage sur tout ce que Lexum fait pour nous… et pour le monde entier!

Comme, sans doute, la majorité d’entre vous, je croyais, à tord, que LexUM était “exclusivement” en charge des jugements de la cour Suprême et de IIJCAN. Vous aurez compris la raison pour laquelle j’utilise les guillemets… . . . [more]

Occasionally the Friday Fillip makes you work and today’s is another one of those. But the work is as hard as flipping through a catalogue, which, if done with a refreshing libation at hand, can be merely exhausting for a finger or two.

The catalog through which to flip is Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools website. I know what you’re thinking… (Well, actually, I don’t, which is a nuisance only some of the time.) This is not simply an electronic gadget site, though it can be that if you sincerely want it to be. “Cool” is an expansive term of praise . . . [more]

OneWebDay is a day when users of the World Wide Web are encouraged to show how the Internet affects their lives. The purpose of the event is to globally celebrate online life.

The first ever OneWebDay is today September 22, 2006. The idea was created by Susan Crawford and the name was suggested by David Weinberger.

How has the Internet affected your life, personally and professionally? . . . [more]

Okay, I’ve been silent about this for a few weeks now but it continues to fester within me. The McGill guide 6th ed. is out and Ibid’ing a Supra is now fully proper. I know that many will rejoice but I feel that it is wrong and lazy. The footnote should have a one to one relationship with the original cite, not a one to two to three to the original, when I am reading a paper (online or not) I don’t want to have to go hunting for the actual cite.

I know, I know this is one of . . . [more]

Some of you may have seen this, but it was new to me this week and I think it is great. Unfortunately, I can’t give attribution because I have no idea who is responsible for this wonderful piece of prose. To get the full effect, read aloud.

Why Computers Sometimes Crash

– (with all due apologies to Dr. Seuss)

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort, and the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error . . . [more]

Slaw takes legal information seriously so you won’t find here any discussion of Borat Sagdiyev (Борат Сагдиев) or his silly filmCultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Instead we focus on the announcement in the capital of Minsk today, in connection with a meeting of the Council of CIS Prime Ministers that a draft agreement on the interstate system of legal information exchanges in the established order will be reviewed. This may be of interest if your research needs extend to Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine.

Who needs satire? . . . [more]

Dear Slawyers, we have a treat in store: Jordan Furlong will add his voice to ours as a guest blogger for next week.

As everyone will know, Jordan is Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Bar Association’s National, a magazine he’s completely redesigned. But, as they say on TV, wait, there’s more. Most recently he led the team which published Innovaction, the College of Law Practice Management Ezine on Innovation in the Legal Profession, blogged about in Slaw. This feat led him to be honoured in San Francisco two weeks ago as an Honorary Fellow of the College of . . . [more]

… or Sorry, Honey, I could have sworn it was bigger in the picture!

Can you visualize somethign that is 192 x 45.6 x 32 mm? Me neither. That’s where sizeasy comes in. Just enter the dimensions of something and compare it to other common objects such as a deck of cards, a box of matches, a bottle of wine, etc, so you can see just how big it really is. And you can view it from different angles! Cool! See some examples here.

Now when I’m shopping for gems on eBay, I’ll know when that gorgeous Canadian diamond . . . [more]