I’m very pleased indeed to announce that Dan Michaluk has joined us at Slaw and will be contributing on a regular basis.

Dan is a Toronto lawyer who works at the management-side employment law boutique firm Hicks Morley. Dan is known at Hicks for taking a four-year surfing sojourn after his articles and says he’s given up trying to explain that he actually did do some meaningful work in business and technology in his years away from the practice. Back at Hicks since 2003, Dan now represents management in a wide-range of matters, but does a significant amount of work . . . [more]

The front page of today’s Globe and Mail sports a big photo of Ontario MPP Lisa MacLeod attached to the article “Can a busy female politician give reliable evidence? A judge says no” by Jane Taber. The lead paragraph runs as follows:

Lisa MacLeod is a young female politician who commutes to her job at Queen’s Park from Ottawa and leaves her husband, Joe, and four-year-old daughter, Victoria, at home. Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham of Ontario Superior Court said this is a big distraction for the 34-year-old woman and as a result he felt he could not accept

The Register reports that a California lawyer has written to the Chief Justice of that state to object to the state Supreme Court’s practice of passing lawyers’ briefs on to the commercial publishers, LexisNexis and Westlaw, who then sell access to them. It seems from Edmond Connor’s letter to the court that he is principally concerned about the profit-making aspect of the situation as a violation of copyright, rather than about the simple public availability of documents prepared for litigation.

At an earlier time all briefs filed with the California Supreme Court had been copied four times and placed in . . . [more]

Well, I can confirm that this past week conformed to my expectations for excitement, and not just because the Toronto garbage strike ended. In fact, confirmation was in the air:

• Most notably, the U.S. Senate confirmed three high-profile nominees: Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Francis Collins was confirmed as the director of NIH, and David Kappos was confirmed as the director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
• Two other U.S. developments confirmed the trend towards adoption of electronic medical records: 1) The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) was

According to CBC News and The Canadian Press, a newer type of email scam has taken advantage of a Toronto-based medical professional. The fraudster hacks into the person’s email account, changes the password so the person cannot access it, and then sends email to that person’s contacts. The fraudster, posing as the email address owner, claims to be stuck in a foreign city and needing financial assistance to get home. He or she asks for a modest sum, enough to purchase a plane ticket home, and has it transferred via a Western Union account. Out of 400 people contacted . . . [more]

The latest issue of LAWPRO Magazine – Changing Direction: Thinking Differently About Your Law Practice – is in the mail and on the web. Download entire magazine here (PDF format, size: 3.27MB)

Our cover stories this month all ask the question: Which kind of lawyer will you be? Legal guru Richard Susskind describes the five lawyer types he predicts will be in future demand. Karen Bell examines how some lawyers are innovating and resetting the legal services model. This article also contains a series of checklists to guide lawyers on the new skills and tools lawyers can use. In Strategic . . . [more]

Over the next couple days Prime Minister Harper, President Obama, and President Calderon are meeting in Guadalajara [From Arabic, وادي الحجارة , “rocky riverbed”], Mexico for the North American Leaders’ Summit.

The meeting is part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, which seeks to address trade and security issues among the NAFTA partners.

From my vantage point in Guadalajara, the not-so-secret service with earpieces are overshadowed by the armed soldiers in camouflage (literally) hiding in the bushes outside my door. President Calderon is staying in my hotel (“No, yo no trabajo aquí. Soy . . . [more]

Once you remove content publishing from the equation, there are typically four major entry points into law firm websites: the homepage, practice pages, lawyer profiles and regional office pages. For this month’s web law connected column, I thought it might be interesting to offer comments on each of these pages, and issues I’ve seen from a search marketing perspective.

The law firm homepage: The firm homepage is obviously the most important entry point for a firm website and can often be a prime battleground when stakeholders are trying to ensure the strongest aspects of the firm are reflected in . . . [more]

If I were clever, this entry would be the briefest fillip yet. But… I ain’t and it ain’t. So let me go on at just a little length about abbreviation in messaging. See, there’s no real cost to my prolixity: on a blog, no one is charging me for the publication of each word. But if I were texting you I might try to compress things so that my thumbs wouldn’t fall off and your eyes wouldn’t fall out from reading on the teeny tiny screen. This is old news: who doesn’t know LOL, RU, 2NTE, TTFN, etc.?

Curiously, Twitter . . . [more]

Yet another search engine has been launched. Spezify from Sweden is essentially a meta-search tool that presents combined results from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and other sources in a pictorial fashion, thanks to its use of Flash technology. Results are spread across a window that is meant to be larger than your open viewing port, so that to see more results you scroll (or drag) up, down, left or right. The image slice below — the results of a search for Canada and courthouse will give you some idea; click on it to see a full window screenshot.

Clicking on any . . . [more]

A Canadian, a Mi’kmaq, a man wrongfully convicted of murder. Mr. Marshall passed August 6, 2009. The CBC news has good coverage of the story. Wikipedia’s page on Mr. Marshall is also up to date.

The CBC news archive contains good links and summaries of wrongful convictions.

It should always be disturbing when justice is denied, delayed or miscarried. Fortunately or unfortunately, justice is in the hands of humans. Mistakes are inevitable, but will hopefully decrease as humans learn to live with technology. DNA testing, video surveillance, and advances in forensic science offer hope.

Rest in peace Mr. Marshall. . . . [more]

Just drawing our readers’ attention to a brand new Canadian IP law blog, Innovation and Culture.

James Gannon describes his aims as:

to update the blog daily with legal developments that have an effect on, among other things, IP, innovation and culture in Canada. While I hope to keep the focus of the blog on Canadian stories, major International stories will also be reported, especially those that may be of interest to Canadian IP scholars & laywers, authors, composers, musicians, programmers, film producers and creators of all kind.

And while we’re on new blogs, a FAQ-rich blog for SMEs in . . . [more]