Larry Lessig, noted law prof at Stanford and long-time blogger, has decided to close down his eponymous (I love that word) blog. He’s posted his last entry, setting out his reasons (baby #3, spam comments, volunteer technical support, new research project) which add up to blogger burn-out after seven years. Sad but understandable.

He’s not leaving the public arena, though (…as if…). He says:

This isn’t an announcement of my disappearance. I’m still trying to understand twitter. My channel at blip.tv will remain. As will the podcast, updated as I speak. I will continue to guest

A couple of stories this morning in the Globe and Mail illustrate the changing nature of the internet. One is the report that the blogger “outed” by Google plans to sue Google for breaching its fiduciary duty to protect her privacy (ignoring, apparently, that Google revealed her name in response to a court order). The other is that Wikipedia intends to add a layer of editorial review to its content. Both indicate that in some ways, attempts to regulate the internet are occurring, for good or ill, as needed. . . . [more]

It’s 11 p.m.. Do you know where YOUR employee is?

Hopefully not. But if she’s home connecting to work on her laptop or smart-phone, she may be running up an overtime tab. Along with dozens/hundreds of others in your organization.

Canada has already witnessed the migration of American-style employee class actions across the 49th parallel. Dara Fresco’s bid at CIBC, described in an article in The Star, got slapped down (see Fresco v. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, 2009 CanLII 31177 (ON S.C.). But Fresco’s taking that rejection to a higher Court, according to an article in . . . [more]

According the 2009 Chief Legal Officer Survey conducted by Altman Weil, Inc. [summary, PDF], there is deep skepticism among corporate law departments that their law firm counterparts are equally serious about change. When asked how serious law firms are about changing their delivery model, the answers were in sharp contrast. Only 5% of CLOs assessed law firms as highly serious. 20% gave firms credit for some level of effort. 75% rated law firms between zero and 4 on the scale, indicating little or no interest in change.

“This is a dramatic vote of no confidence from Chief . . . [more]

Class action settlements — perhaps a bit arcane for a blog post, but a gripper if you are defending a class action.

Class action proceedings can be lengthy. The certification process easily adds an extra two years to the proceeding. Not surprisingly, defendants peripheral to the plaintiff’s case often look for an early exit.

In conventional actions, plaintiffs often throw a wide net hoping to find one or more defendants at fault.

Class proceedings have called for different strategies. Plaintiff have the onus of constructing a case with common issues of liability or damages. The common issues must advance the . . . [more]

This is the 26th edition of This Weeks’ Biotech Highlights, which means Slaw has been hosting my ramblings for exactly half a year. Thanks! Other things I’m thankful for:

• Takeda Canada, which opened in Mississauga in March, got the ball rolling with their Canadian business by buying back rights to a diabetes drug from Eli Lilly.
• The National Research Counsel’s IRAP program, which received a tonne of Canadian stimulus money and has been making a lot of biotech investments lately.
• LOM and BioQuest, who created some excitement about Canada’s biotech industry by announcing a new joint

A couple of days ago I was at the Supreme Court to discuss potential improvements to the Supreme Court decision website. Some of you probably noticed that over the last year LexUM greatly expanded the scope of decisions available on this site. We now have everything back to 1949, as well as everything from Ontario and BC back to 1876. If everything continues to go according to plan, all of the decisions ever published in the Supreme Court Report will be freely available online before next spring. With content becoming exhaustive, we are now looking to improve the feature . . . [more]

That’s the lesson from a recent Ontario Superior Court case.

The plaintiff was hired by the defendant on November 28, 2005 for the position of full-time receptionist and was promoted to the position of Executive Assistant in 2008 at an annual salary of $36,000. Her employment was terminated on November 28, 2008 at which time she was presented with a severance package that provided, in part as follows:

You will receive an additional five months pay in lieu of notice of termination as per our obligations under the Employment Standards Act of Ontario.


The Employment Standards Act would have . . . [more]

The IALL 2009 Website Award Competition is now open. Previous winners:

2002 – HeinOnline from William S. Hein & CISG Database from Pace Law School (2 winners)
2003 – Intute
2004 – EISIL
2005 – Peace Palace Library
2007 – GlobaLex
2008 – WorldLII
[no winner for 2006]

Here is the announcement with all the details:

The International Association of Law Libraries’ 2009 Website Award Competitionis now open. This is an opportunity to nominate your favourite legal information website. The winner will be announced at the 28th Annual Course in International Law Librarianship in Istanbul (Turkey), 11th

. . . [more]

In today’s Star, David Olive notes an interesting phenomenon,

A funny thing happened on the way to blogosphere dominance of the global conversation. Many of the most prominent bloggers have hitched their wagons to the traditional mainstream media (MSM). Yes, the same MSM that bloggers, or Internet diarists, ceaselessly ridiculed as slaves to conventional wisdom…

It works the other way, of course. The Toronto Star is in the company of scores of MSM outlets, broadcast and print, in “repurposing” traditional journalists into bloggers. Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman completes the points he makes in his New York Times

I had occasion recently to work with some URLs for legislation and was struck yet again by the peculiarity of fetching and “citing” statutes in this way when on or linking to the internet. I have some narrow, specific concerns, that I’ll talk about in this post; and then in Part 2 I’ll wander a bit in the land of speculation, to see how else it might be done.

Here and now I want to complain about long, illegible URLs, the kind that represent the raw output of queries to a database. This is not the first time by any . . . [more]