Our firm guest blogger this month is Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, who have kindly provided us with this firm profile:

At Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG), It Begins With Service.

BLG is a leading, full-service, integrated national law firm focusing on business law, litigation and intellectual property solutions for our clients. With more than 750 lawyers, intellectual property agents and other professionals in Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Waterloo Region, clients turn to us for assistance with their legal needs, from major litigation to corporate finance and patent registration.

Our goal at BLG is to provide our clients with

Simon makes a very good point. Some footnotes from this week’s internet eye:

How difficult is it to disappear, now that most routine life events require a login? Wired article:

Financially he was beyond overextended. A gadget lover whose spending always seemed to exceed his income, he had begun shifting his personal expenses to his corporate credit card — first dinner and drinks, then a washer and dryer, then family vacations. In early February, when an Eaton official emailed to inquire about his expense reports, he felt everything closing in. He began devising a plan to escape.

Even . . . [more]

The internet is a panopticon. Not the prison that Bentham designed (“a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”) — that charming role has now fallen to CCTV, thankfully not on the public internet and not so widespread in Canada as it might be. No, I’m thinking of the humble, ubiquitous webcam. Thanks to those little devices and hundreds of thousands of volunteer computers, we can see pretty much whatever we might wish to, from wherever we might be: tourism as voyeurism (if it wasn’t that to begin with).

The very first . . . [more]

This is just a quick note to say that I’ve added announcements of recent Supreme Court decisions to the roster of Twitter feeds at CanCourts (cancourts.ca). As with announcements about court of appeal judgments from Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec, these are provided by the RSS feed from CanLII, and so they are a week or more behind the actual release date.

I should mention that this link between the RSS feeds and Twitter depends upon a free service provided by RSS2Twitter.com. They depend on donations, so if you use these feeds you might feel like supporting . . . [more]

♬We’re talking ’bout manners, nice manners,
Manners make you feel good
Manners, nice manners.
Manners make you feel so good,
They make you feel so good.
They make you feel so good.♬

Lyrics and music by Cathy Bollinger, “Manners”.

Perhaps it is a factor of growing older…perhaps it is a recognition that social etiquette (along with ethics) are not just welcome but necessary, or perhaps it is just a fact that I seem to have an increasingly striking resemblance to a certain disgruntled elf in Snow White (as an aside, if ‘disgruntled’ means grumpy, what does ‘gruntled’ mean????? Was . . . [more]

The BBC reminds us today that Microsoft’s PowerPoint (love it or loathe it) is twenty five years old.

Two Slaw contributors (Dan P and Simon C) have a sideline as the PowerPoint Twins and have illustrated the best and worst of the programme to audiences in three countries. We can dazzle you with the absolute worst slides you’ll ever see in two minutes,

Here is the handout from a presentation in Mexico and Simon F’s ambiguous relationship with the pervasive presentation tool.

Notwithstanding Edward Tufte and David Byrne, PowerPoint is here to stay.

Of course what every PowerPoint . . . [more]

Tom Shumate has a good article up on Law Practice Today titled Computers, Tequila and Hand Guns: Controlling Technology So It Doesn’t Control You. The tips he offers on managing technology are all good reminders of taking a common sense approach. See the section headers for those recommendations:

• Double-Check Everything
• Slow Down
• Set boundaries
• Schedule it
• Monotask

The funny part for me is that I’ve met Tom at some of the LPM section events, and he’s as polite as they come. Almost Canadian. So for him to lead with a quote about “tequila and hand guns”; and then . . . [more]

The Christian Science Monitor reports today that a number of URL shortening services have agreed to cooperate by sending data to a common storage mechanism created as an archive for this purpose.

There has been a good deal of discussion — and concern — recently about the fate of shortened hyperlinks should another shortening service close down, as tr.im did not long ago. The hope is that this archive, currently hosted and managed by Gnip, will preserve crucial linkage between long and short URLs even despite the failure of a service.

The CSM reports that “Bit.ly, Twitter’s default link . . . [more]

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman declared in his book that “The World is Flat,” by which he meant that globalization had levelled the playing field so that all countries might now compete on more or less the same terms. Since its first publication four years ago, technological changes have only made the world flatter yet, as anyone who has taken a look at legal outsourcing to offshore jurisdictions must realize.

Flat World Knowledge, a publisher of texts, wants us to see how technology can make books more readily and cheaply available to college and university . . . [more]

How do I monitor things, let me count the ways. The many, many, many ways.

Twitter, Google Reader (yes, I switched), Facebook status updates, LinkedIn groups, internal firm communications, and very significantly print that comes in the mail.

One item that I used to monitor in print is the Canada Gazette. I made a decision to monitor it in print years ago because I was afraid of missing something if I had to remember to go to a website to retrieve it. This unfortunate choice of media nearly caused me to miss the proclamation of the . . . [more]

The Ontario Human Rights Commission today released its annual report for 2008-2009.

This has been the first year under a new structure and mandate.

On June 30, 2008, the Human Rights Code Amendment Act, 2006 came into effect.

From that date, all new complaints were to be filed with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. There was a transition period during which people who still had complaints with the Commission after June 30, 2008 could either continue with this direction until December 31, 2008, or could opt out and file an application directly with the Tribunal up to June . . . [more]

The New York Review of Books has a series of podcasts online, one of which is of legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin interviewed by Hugh Eakin of the NYRB editorial staff. Dworkin addresses the formulaic nature of the hearings and particularly the notion, much mooted at the time, that a judge’s personal opinions should be irrelevant and her only task ought to be to faithful to the law.

Dworkin says at one point:

There’s a great myth abroad in America which is that a judge can decide cases by just saying I will apply the law whatever it is and my