A lot of lawyers and consultants out there have built profiles and reputations as “innovators” by promoting alternative billing as the answer to much of what ails the legal profession. I’m confused about what is so ground breaking.

Everyone seems to love to hate hourly billing these days. People argue that hourly billing values quantity over quality and repetition over creativity. Perhaps. But it also endures for good reason. It is simple to administer and easy to understand. Further, the marketplace corrects pricing irregularities and rewards efficiency. A law firm which can provide quality and creative solutions at a more . . . [more]

From time to time here we’ve added to your information on information overload, a problem that seems particularly to bedevil lawyers — but then, when time is money, attention is costly and, so, to be jealously guarded. (One “pays attention,” after all.) Too, lawyers are by a professional deformation attached to the old ways, and therefore it may happen that their stare decisis becomes a stare inventiis. But lawyers aren’t the only ones, of course, who shake their heads (briskly) at all this newfangled twittering away of our lives; and some worriers step back a metaphorical league or two . . . [more]

The issue of e-mail management is now old hat for anyone involved in the practice of law. Rather than asking whether lawyers use it, it is a story when lawyers choose not to use it. The world has grown more complicated, though, as we try to figure out where to place our energy integrating new technologies, like Twitter or Google’s Wave, into our work. Even our choices about how to use e-mail have expanded.

E-mail often reminds me of books. It is a technology that, for all its faults, remains a tremendously useful way to share information. More importantly, there . . . [more]

While I bounced back and forth between Toronto and New York this week, a lot of other things were bouncing around in the world of biotech:

The U.S. stimulus funding to promote adoption of electronic medical records bounced across the border to Ontario, where a new program was implemented through the Ontario Medical Association. The Ontario program provides an amount of cash per physician comparable to the U.S. funding, plus it offers consulting help and provides funding for upgrades.

Novartis bounced $1 billion of its R&D efforts to China, and in the same breath called India’s upcoming decision on a . . . [more]

One common misunderstanding about copyright is that online content is not protected by copyright. Not true! Even if the content is posted without a copyright notice or other copyright information, that content should be presumed to be protected by copyright.

The same copyright principles apply to photographs posted on Flickr. In a recent situation, Toyota U.S.A. posted some photos on one of its Web sites — photos it obtained from the photography site, Flickr — without permission of the photographers. Toyota has now made a public apology and has removed the photographs. Lesson for all: get permission when using content . . . [more]

Not sure if YouTube is your thing? Alabama trial attorney Lew Garrison has created a YouTube-like site for law-related video, called LegalTube. According to Law.com, the site was launched on September 1st after four months of development. It is billed as a video directory for finding lawyers, but in addition to advertising video, there is legal humour, courtroom stories, and a “webisode reality series” called Law After Dark. The site also has a news alert video series on drug recalls and class action lawsuits.

And in case you were wondering, LegalTube has its own channel on . . . [more]

Still doubtful about video as a marketing vehicle? A few recent milestones from YouTube, the leading site for video distribution, be it entertainment-related or professional:

• as of October, YouTube is now up to over a billion views each day
• as of May, at least 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute
• Increased high definition (HD) resolution is coming to YouTube starting this week. 1080p HD will be the new maximum resolution, up from the previous 720p HD. This is in response to the increasing resolution of consumer cameras. See the blog post for comparative examples.

Although tweeting from a courtroom remains controversial, tweeting the content of a live webcast should be rather conventional, but is still a useful enterprise.

I was in the middle of a take-home midterm when I realized that the Omar Khadr hearing at the Supreme Court of Canada was on CPAC. After a few searches on Twitter, I realized that although people had posted that it was occurring, nobody in the legal community was covering the contents live (or almost live – a Senate broadcast delayed it).

I gave it a go, although the proceedings were well under . . . [more]

CNet reports that a couple of US universities have decided against using the Kindle as a replacement for textbooks, on accessibility grounds:

“The big disappointment was learning that the Kindle DX is not accessible to the blind,” Ken Frazier, the University of Wisconsin-Madison director of libraries, said in a statement.

Said the National Federation of the Blind:

[The] “menus of the device are not accessible to the blind…making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle

One of my continuing Slaw quests is to prove the axiom that everything has a legal connection. While this bit of proof is not exactly a new item it is timely, in some parts of the country at least. In a move that strikes me as something that is somehow quintessentially Canadian, Quebec has mandated by law that all passenger vehicles must be equipped with winter tires. The Highway Safety Code, R.S.Q. c. C-24.2, s. 440.1 states:

Between 15 December and 15 March, the owner of a taxi or a passenger vehicle registered in Québec may not put the

Omar Khadr’s lawyer is currently arguing before the Supreme Court of Canada (you can watch/listen to it live). He just now (10.10 a.m.) announce to the Court that he learned an hour ago that the U.S. Military Commission prosecution of Khadr, which had been stalled, is to continue. . . . [more]

What is it that Slaw does not do, lawyers do only discreetly, and everyone else does pretty much all the time?

Advertise, of course. And what’s one of the big names in that trade?

ساعاتجي.

Saatchi, that is. Well, Saatchi and Saatchi, actually: brothers Maurice (the Baron) and Charles (Mr. Nigella Lawson). This isn’t about their careers in advertising, however — though that’s an interesting tale all in itself. No, it’s a fillip about a small portion of the home page of Charles’ Saatchi Online site, which is an offshoot, so to speak, of his Saatchi Gallery of contemporary art. . . . [more]