Last week LAWPRO e-blasted 20,000 Ontario lawyers in private practice with a warning about a bad cheque fraud scam targeting lawyer trust accounts.

That e-mail blast prompted several Ontario lawyers to call us and we have gathered further information about these frauds. It now seems clear to us that there is an organized scheme underway to defraud Ontario lawyers in and around the Greater Toronto Area using matters involving small business equipment loans. These matters all share the same basic timeline and circumstances, and in some cases, the same purported individuals or entities (a lender from Halifax or Montreal). These . . . [more]

Evernote, the great cross-platform, syncing, note-taking tool is now available for BlackBerry users. I’ve been using it on my desk machine and on my iPhone, and I’m a fan; so if you like the idea of taking notes (via photo, sound recording, or text) anywhere and having those notes available anywhere, get yourself this app. You’ll be glad you did. . . . [more]

Okay – here are all of the dates that have been successfully identified by the contestants in the Slaw Scavenger Hunt, designed to see if we could supplement the entries in the World Digital Library. We listed fifty dates, and in two days our readers have spotted over half. . . . [more]

Did you ever do these visual word puzzles in school? Well, here’s the style over substance edition of This Week’s Biotech Highlights:

Style:

• The Globe & Mail revealed a preference for Doom & Gloom over good news, giving Page 1 treatment to a southbound scientist, but short shrift to new Ontario genomics funding.
• In light of increasing evidence that this round of Human Swine Influenza is not that bad, interest has turned to deciding what to call it. Pork producers don’t like “swine flu,” Mexico is not a fan of “Mexico Flu” and “H1N1” is just plain

The European Journalism Centre has put together a Custom Google Search engine that will search all of the pages of Europa, the portal for the European Union. Search Europa lets you refine your search to pages related to law, to blogs, and to documents in PDF or Word. . . . [more]

I just came across the CBA PracticeLink article A Recession Coping Guide for Canadian Law Firms by Janice Mucalov (April 2009). I like the thoughtful, careful, but yet strategic approach taken in this guide. The focus is on the client relationship, keeping up morale within the firm, and thinking long-term. Here is item #4 on keeping up morale:

Feeling uncertain is inevitable. But rumours, job anxiety and money worries can impair productivity. Reassure your lawyers that you are doing everything prudently possible to lead the firm through this recession.

Remind people how your firm weathered the last downturn – provide

I have posted on SLAW before about this, but as the June 1 deadline is approaching I thought another post was warranted. Also posted on LawyerSuccessTips.com.

Is your law practice or firm one of the profession’s leading lights of innovation? Have you or someone within your firm with vision and courage led a groundbreaking effort to practice law differently? Have you developed a new and better way of serving clients, a breakthrough way to find new business, a truly innovative way to value and sell your services? If so, then you deserve the recognition of lawyers and clients . . . [more]

As Slaw approaches its fourth birthday, we thought it might be fun to challenge the research skills of our readers, contributors and lawyers and librarians around the world. Ten days ago, Simon F told us about the World Digital Library.

Paris, Washington D.C.—The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and 32 partner institutions today launched the World Digital Library, a website that features unique cultural materials from libraries and archives from around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints and photographs.

Where it becomes interesting is when one examines the list of items that . . . [more]

I like repetition. I enjoy multiples of things that are pretty much the same. Give me clusters of like objects.

See?

Now if you take similar things in very great numbers and play with them, you can produce some pretty, well, pretty effects. Which is what this fillip will offer. I have two illustrations to show you. The first is an office trick that you should, perhaps, not try at the office, and it uses that most humble of office supplies, the sticky note. EepyBird (whoever/whatever that is) has massed masses of sticky notes and set them to falling in . . . [more]

Following on from Steve Matthews’ post about the new Kindle that he can’t get in Canada, I’m going to introduce you to the next thing you’ll likely want badly and won’t be able to get here in Canada, Novatel’s MiFi. The New York Times has the full story and a video of the thing in operation.

Despite the size of the photo above, the thing itself is about the side of a fat credit card. And what is it? It is a portable WiFi router that uses the 3G network. And unlike the cellular modems you can get now that . . . [more]

Well, if relying on commercial publishers to uphold scholarly standards was ever among your naivetes, consider yourself disillusioned. Starting three weeks ago in The Australian, and this week twice in The Scientist (free registration required), it has been uncovered that Elsevier produced a number of publications that had the look and feel of peer-reviewed publications, but were in fact marketing tools:

Elsevier is conducting an “internal review” of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the “journal” was corporate sponsored.

The allegations involve

The Philadelphia Bar Association has issued an advisory opinion (PDF) concluding that it is unethical for a lawyer to have a third party “friend” somoene on Facebook for the purposes of getting information about that Facebook user.

Facebook lets users fine tune their privacy settings, allowing a user to lock down all their info so it is only visible by friends or subsets of friends. I’m personally of the view that if a user has locked down their privacy settings, they are explicitly expressing an expectation of privacy in the material that is posted. But if someone voluntarily friends someone . . . [more]