The Australian government has just started a public consultation on the desirability of ratifying the UN E-Communications Convention in that country. The page containing the public notice also offers a link to the consultation paper in PDF or Word.

The American Uniform Law Commission (formerly NCCUSL) has a Committee to study implementation of the Convention in the US. The working group met recently to discuss options for implementation.

In Canada, there appears to be little action since the Uniform Law Conference meeting on the topic in August. Professor Gautrais’ paper on the impact of the Convention on Quebec law . . . [more]

I posted on the CALL KM blog today about Mumboe. Mumboe got some press recently on Read Write Web and Technolawyer.

Mumboe is another service in the cloud. The premise of it and other contract managment tools is to take a document that a lawyer uploads, automate the indexing and extraction of critical data (times, parties, other things you ask for) and create actionable business data out of those details.

Tools like this blur the insubstantial lines between document management, knowledge management, and data mining. I wonder what other niche products will appear as cloud computing apps in . . . [more]

Slaw is experiencing some technical difficulties at the moment. All of the posts and comments from yesterday are acting coy, but we’re working on teasing them out of hiding. Until things look to be running smoothly again, we’ll likely not make any further posts today.

We’re sorry for this hiccup.

UPDATE: I’ve reposted the missing entries in the order in which they were originally posted. Apologies to those who follow us on RSS: you’ll be getting these once again in your feed. I’m now working on reposting comments.

UPDATE 2: I’ve now restored the comments. The site appears to be . . . [more]

I know there are a bunch of us Firefox fans here at Slaw, so I thought I’d pass along the fact that our favourite browser went over 20% market share point this past month.

Given that Firefox is not the default install for any of the major operating systems, and that users must adopt because of personal choice, hitting the 20% mark can’t be considered lightly.

Most less-savvy computer users will tend to keep the default program installed, IE for Microsoft, or Safari for Mac. And for those of us in the legal industry, with our obsession of all things . . . [more]

Former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci has been asked to help mediate the dispute that has paralyzed the work of the Truth And Reconciliation Commission that was set up earlier this year to deal with the historical legacy of the Indian residential school system.

Over the years, thousands of aboriginal students were subjected to physical, sexual and emotional abuse by personnel working for the church authorities that ran the boarding schools on behalf of the Canadian government.

Last month, the work of the Commission was derailed after its head, Justice Harry LaForme, resigned, complaining that he could no longer work . . . [more]

Nothing legal here, but even so, perhaps on this historic day I can have some off-topic license to give you this snippet of a story that I find heartwarming:

Khoi Vinh, who is the Design Director for NYTimes.com, runs a blog, Subtraction. As he reports there, he noticed today while at work that a line was forming outside the New York Times building, people queueing to get a copy of that day’s paper announcing Obama’s victory, and he proceeded to take some (beautiful) photos of the lineup. He says:

I ran down to a lower floor where I

I just read a column from yesterday’s National Post by Duncan Stewart, “Microsoft will be stung by Intel’s Atom“. It talks about the “netbook” market in low-end laptops, some running Linux. I’ve been thinking that my next computer would be something like this. I’m curious to know if any SLAWyers have experience with these, particularly in conjunction with a Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Stick. . . . [more]

Google has pulled out of its proposed advertising deal with Yahoo! due to fears of government antitrust litigation. Details are available here on The Official Google Blog. . . . [more]

Further to Simon’s introduction of Dan Pinnington as a contributor to SLAW, I see from this month’s Law Practice magazine that Dan has a great article on Blackberry tips. There is an HTML version available here.

I thought I knew most of the tips but Dan has mentioned a few I did not know; his article is one of the more extensive on this topic. . . . [more]

♬ Do I know you
Do I know you…♬

Words and music by: Delon Dotson, recorded by:Realtime.

The New Client ID and Verification Rules are coming into effect across the country. In some cases, they are already in effect. These new Rules place new professional obligations to lawyers to ‘know the clients’ for whom they are acting.

Surveying the implementation of the model rule as put forth by the Federation of Law Societies [PDF] sets forth the following: (all dates taken from the respective Law Society’s web sites):

Newfoundland – Rules came into effect Oct 31, 2008: http://www.lsuc.on.ca/link.cfm?lid=12052

PEI: . . . [more]

Further to an earlier SLAW posting on blogs by library technicians, I wanted to mention the Library technician dialog blog by colleagues Brenda Wong and Karen Sawatzky that I had previously overlooked. Recent posts cover such topics as lifelong learning, Twitter (on my “to do” list, long overdue, but I remain skeptical) and library operations and procedures. Thanks Brenda and Karen for your perspectives. . . . [more]

WikiBooks was mentioned here sometime ago on Slaw.

I recently stumbled across the site and see that there is some more development, including some law-related books.

For example, an “Introduction to Canadian Law” has been started here (but is still very bare) and there is a start on Canadian legal citation here.

There is more US content, and some topics tagged with a “green box” indicate comprehensive coverage/treatment. There were 3 such titles:

US Copyright Law

US Patent Law

US Trademark Law . . . [more]