According to the Times Online legal blog Law Central, Fasken Martineau has added six lawyers to its London contingent of 50 “fee-earners” (!) and gets praise for bucking the “doom and gloom” mentality in which Britlaw seems mired.

I note that the Times calls Fasken’s an “international” firm, with nary a whisper of Canada or Canadian in the brief piece. Something we said?

In addition to its offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City, Fasken Martineau has an office of six lawyers in Johannesburg.

The firm has also added three senior lawyers to its . . . [more]

Data about individuals can be a valuable resource. Organizations holding personal information often aggregate or anonymize that data in order to gain valuable information on various trends. From a privacy perspective, that’s perfectly acceptable, as individuals can no longer be identified. Or can they?

The caveat is that is has been known for some time that it is not as easy to anonymize individual data as one might think. Reidentification of individuals by comparing anonymized data to other sources of data has been surprisingly easy in some cases.

Slashdot points to an ars technica article that talks about a paper . . . [more]

It was just over 2 years ago I was boasting here on SLAW about attending the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Alas, I will not be attending TIFF 2009 this month but note there are a few law-related movies this year that sound interesting:

– Presumed Guilty (about injustices in the Mexican prison system)

– Google Baby (about issues surrounding surrogate pregnancies)

– Cleanflix (about movie copyright and censorship involving attempts by Mormons to edit racy Hollywood movies)

– Copyright Criminals: This is a Sampling Sport (about copyright issues involving music sampling [good Wikipedia article here on the legal . . . [more]

This is a great time to be a Canadian labour and employment lawyer, but Canadian law schools now employ fewer full-time labour and employment professors than they have in decades. This post highlights the issue and invites comment about the relationship between our law schools and the maintenance of a vibrant and well-qualified labour and employment bar.

The declining faculty issue first caught my attention when, in February, York University professor David Doorey published a blog post entitled “Employment Law Practice is Booming, But Someone Should Tell the Law Schools.” Professor Doorey noted the significance of labour and employment issues . . . [more]

Just when you thought every niche had been filled, up comes an area of practice to remind you that this is a more wrinkled world than we are typically aware and the practice of law is a force second only to life itself, perhaps, when it comes to occupying all imaginable spaces: there is a law of algae.

It occupies a website, too, of course, which, appropriately is LawOfAlgae.com, a.k.a. Stoel Rives LLP, a Minneapolis firm specializing in renewable energy. Which is where algae comes in. Evidently it is an up-and-coming source of biomass from which to make . . . [more]

The Canadian government has been holding this summer a public “copyright consultation” on proposed legislative changes to the country’s copyright act, with the consultation period, featuring town hall meetings and online submissions and comments, now drawing to a close on September 13, 2009. For the most sensible of approaches to copyright reform, many of us simply turn to Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He is currently running, as a public service, a Speak Out on Copyright site. A recent posting cites Industry Minister Tony Clement’s announcement that, following . . . [more]

I’ve talked before about how important outreach and consultation are to the Law Commission of Ontario. We try to reach professional organizations and groups (lawyers, of course, but others, too, such as engineers, architects and accountants so far) and community-based groups (the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, and the Council on Aging Frontenac-Kingston, to name two of many), as well as legal clinics which are a bit of a hybrid. Now we’ve allocated additional resources to this commitment. . . . [more]

The August 2009 issue [pdf] of the Ontario Bar Association’s magazine Briefly Speaking/EnBref has an article by David Whelan, Manager, Legal Information for the Law Society of Upper Canada on using free and inexpensive legal research tools called “Right Size Your Research”–see pages 24 and 25 [pdf]. I like that he emphasizes texts as a starting point, and of course endorses use of law libraries as a helpful resource. This is a nice round-up of resources for those looking to economize, especially for legal researchers who do not already have flat rate subscriptions to major online legal research . . . [more]

If I had to guess, I think that most Slaw readers use Mozilla Firefox as their primary personal browser, even if their workplaces may well mandate Internet Explorer as the browser on their work desktop. Three years back Simon (the other) reminded us of the benefits of an old favourite Opera – which I recall was my own browser of choice a long time back, when Netscape finally gave up the ghost. . . . [more]

Angela Swan makes a number of thought provoking comments regarding the features of the modern law of contract in her treatise on “Canadian Contract Law”. If anything, the comments should be required reading for the followers of legal print and online publishing in Canada.

Among other things, Angela asserts that recent developments in legal publishing have had a significant impact on substantive law. Specifically she says that the established “principles” of the law of contract have been undermined by two connected developments in the world of legal publishing:

first, by the proliferation of specialized law reports; and,

second, through the . . . [more]

Thus far I’ve successfully resisted the charms of Kindles 1 and 2, such as they are, and of the Sony Reader as well. Though I’m someone who reads a whole lot of text on a screen, I’m still a committed bookist when it comes to, well, books.

It is possible that the promised Eee Reader from Asus might be a game changer for me. For one thing, as with the netbook that the Taiwan company launched, this device would be cheap — perhaps $200, according to reports. Then, as you can see from the image, which is an imagined . . . [more]

The decision that has the law world buzzing this weekend is the release this Friday of Abdullah Al-Kidd v John Ashcroft.

The Plaintiff is an American-born citizen who converted to Islam while he was a running-back at the University of Idaho. He was arrested in Dulles International Airport and transferred to several facilities for interrogation for a total of 13 months, leading to the termination of his job and subsequent difficulty finding employment when he was finally released.

Most employers are not too keen on hiring people that are treated by the government as a common terrorist.

The problem . . . [more]