Twice this morning I saw a parent telling a child that saying the right word would make the traffic light turn green, and twice I saw the look of wonder and delight in the child’s eyes as the spell worked. That double sighting was a sign, I think, that this fillip should be about magic, which, after all, is not that different from some law: the words must be exactly the right words, and must be written not spoken, sometimes to the accompaniement of flames and hot red wax, whereupon things (often invisible) are ipso facto! changed. And we who . . . [more]

As I take a moment from battening down the hatches here on the East Coast today, I simply want to ask a question of Slaw-ers out there. What is the Quota of your institutional or company email account?

Not your gmail, hotmail, yahoo or whatever interweb service, but the email account supplied to you by your employer or institution. Here at Dalhousie I have a 97.66mb limit and after being on a little hiatus recently, I had to fight to get my inbox under control but also to stay under the quota. So I’m just curious as to what the . . . [more]

Susan Raridon Lambreth of Hildebrandt publishes a survey on Monday providing a glimpse into the largest survey yet conducted on associates in law firms around the world.  It’s electrifying because it punctures a number of myths about new generations who supposedly don’t share traditional attitudes and work ethics. 

Susan’s Report is being released on Monday – but here are a few insights:

• Overall associate satisfaction is somewhat higher than expected.
• Associates are not the unhappy collection of unfulfilled employees portrayed in the media. As a group, they are engaged, interested, and happy with their compensation. Very few show any

In today’s issue of IT Management, an interview with Pamela Jones the editor of Groklaw.

Groklaw is a blog and website devoted to covering and explaining legislative and jurisprudential issues of interest to the Free Software and Open Source communities – Ms. Strong recently won a Knowledge Trust Honors award, which honours the best of the best in information and library science and information technology. . . . [more]

The current issue of the New Yorker has an article by Anthony Grafton called “Digitization and Its Discontents” that discusses the ongoing “tension” between the traditional print library model versus the Google Book projects of the world. The article is well written and provides an excellent general overview of the issues. . . . [more]

Joel Alleyne’s Extreme KM column this past week on Everything is Miscellaneous – A Must-Read Book enouraged me to move forward my plan to read the book. I read it last night and agree with Joel that it is “must reading.”

As Joel mentions, David Weinberger’s central premise in the book is that the “power of the miscellaneous comes directly from the fact that in the third order [note: what the author of the book means as our current era of digital information], everything is connected and therefore everything is metadata” (p. 105).

My initial cynical reaction to the book . . . [more]

The NY Times Technology section has been revamped, principally by bringing the Blogrunner technology stories into the page and giving it central place — literally in the middle. Blogrunner is the aggregator that the Times bought last year and that culls material from various blogs on a wide range of topics. This is the first time that the Times has incorporated stories from outside sources directly into its publication.

The Times Technology section cum Blogrunner, unlike TechMeme, doesn’t rely soley on an algorithm to choose pieces automatically, but rather on a combination of machine and human decision-making.

Relevant links are: . . . [more]

Steve Matthews, Slawyer and the person behind Stem Legal Web Enterprises, has once again shown his technical chops. Now that the Canadian legal publishers have finally come into this decade by putting out RSS feeds, thanks in large measure to his and Connie Crosby’s chivvying and chiding, ((See, e.g., Canadian Legal Publishers – RSS Feed Update)), there’s some interesting publisher data to work with.

Steve has taken advantage of the various tools that are out there now on the web to mix and to gather the feeds into one place, LegalPubs.ca.

There you’ll find an aggregation of . . . [more]

The Web Marketing Association just announced the winners in the 2007 WebAwards for excellence in the use of the Web for Marketing.

The best of the legal category came from Womble Carlyle, which has a wonderful and updated stable of blogs ((Though their podcasts are looking somewhat dated.

For the record here are all the legal prize-winners. . . . [more]

The October 2007 issue of Statistics Canada’s publication Education Matters looks at how the Internet is being used by Canadian students. The article “Learning online: Factors associated with use of the Internet for education purposes” reveals that students mostly use the Internet for researching asssigments and distance education:

• An estimated 4.2 million adult Canadians (two-thirds or 66% of those who went online for education purposes) used the Internet for finding information for projects/assignments
• Just over one-quarter (26%) went online for distance education
• Residents of rural and small-town areas are more likely to use the Internet for distance education

The Supreme Court of Canada has published an executive summary of a client satisfaction survey of recent Registry Branch customers. The Registry Branch is the administrative arm of the Court.

The survey was done in the spring of 2007 by the firm Phase 5.

299 counsel, agents and self-represented litigants who had appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada in 2006 were invited to participate in an online survey. The response rate was 60%.

Highlights:

• Information related to appeals was the most commonly accessed service area by respondents (93%), followed by information related to applications for leave to appeal (85%),

Today’s Bar Talk in The Globe & Mail suggests that the Canadian Lawyer Magazine is soon to formally launch its new magazine aimed at Associates (and to be called by the same name?). So far, there only appears to be “blog-like” postings on the website and it is not clear to me when the formal magazine launch will take place. Since most of the large Toronto law firms are doing student recruitment interviews next week, I thought the posting on the “Google Effect” by Donalee Moulton was timely – as per one of the persons quoted in that . . . [more]