Henry George Bohn said in the 1855 Handbook of Proverbs,

An idle brain is the Devil’s shop.

It’s probably just as applicable today, especially with those recently unemployed in the legal profession.

Henry Russell (supposedly a fake name) is a 37-year-old Los Angeles attorney who has just released a new book, Craigslist Casual Encounters: The Hilarious and Disturbing World of Seeking Sex Online. A year after losing his job he decided it was a good idea to start posting fake advertisements on CraigsList, starting with dryer lint and quickly escalating to ads seeking sex.

Often impersonating . . . [more]

I’m pleased to be able to tell you that this coming week we have a firm guest blogger joining us. Bereskin & Parr is a leading Canadian IP firm with offices in Toronto, Montréal, Mississauga, and the Waterloo Region. They’ve provided us with the following description:

Founded in 1965, Bereskin & Parr LLP serves clients in over 100 countries worldwide. With more than 260 people, including more than 70 lawyers, patent and trade mark agents, Bereskin & Parr and its award-winning professionals are consistently rated in Canada as the benchmark for intellectual property law.

The firm has dedicated practice groups

Andrew Weaver, who holds the Canada Research Chair at the University of Victoria’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, launched a defamation action on Monday, naming the National Post and some of its employees and writers as defendants. Dr. Weaver is perhaps Canada’s leading climatologist and has written extensively on global warming. The National Post’s editorial position might be described as that of a warming denier, and the articles of primary concern in the lawsuit were clearly hostile to Dr. Weaver’s position.

I won’t take you through the material here: you can examine the statement of claim for yourself, . . . [more]

As noted in my last Web Law Connected column, the topic I want to address this month is geotargeting within Google’s search results. While I expect some of you would prefer to watch paint dry over reading further, I’m asking you – as a Canadian – to explore this subject. The reason? If you publish a website (or expect to the future) and want that website to be visible within the search results to US audiences – then you are facing a substantial and little understood obstacle. This is an important topic.

What is geotargeting?

Geotargeting is Google’s way of . . . [more]

Huge nod to Sarah Glassmeyer of Valparaiso for producing the elegant graphic below which charts the rise of the three mega legal publishers.

I find it odd that the commentators on this graphic haven’t pointed out the magic date late in the 1990s when the United States ceased to have its own legal publishing industry, all of the three majors having fallen to foreign ownership.

I might quibble about the inclusion of Brad Hildebrandt and David Baker’s businesses when acquired by Thomson. And what does Elite have to do with legal publishing. They are all businesses providing technology products and . . . [more]

In this post , Librarian by Day, Bobbi Newman warns of a recent innovation on Facebook that again raises privacy issues. It will be interesting to see what Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart does with this one, if anything. . . . [more]

The College of Law Practice Management‘s 5th Annual InnovAction Awards are open for business! The Awards, which recognize outstanding and original innovation by a law firm, law department or legal services provider anywhere in the world, are accepting entries until June 1, 2010, so there’s still time for you or your organization to submit a nomination.

The InnovAction Awards, which have been given to small firms, global giants and non-firm entities in five countries on four continents, can cover everything from legal service delivery to legal marketing, from technological systems to client communication, and from law firm management to . . . [more]

As the globe shrinks (the name for a new soap opera?), we’re challenged more and more to speak in unfamiliar tongues. And the problem becomes getting that chunky or deceptive bit of foreign prose out of our mouths with something less than extreme prejudice. How do you say Löwenbräu, risotto, Lech Wałęsa, Eyjafjallajökull, or even Советских, come to that? Heck, most of us can’t even say Moscow properly in English.

You might be adept at decoding IPA, the international phonetic alphabet — and there’s a good argument we all should be — in which case you can learn fairly . . . [more]

In a story from Reuters, A Professor Ishikawa has created a scanner that can process hundreds of pages a minute. Using off-the shelf equipment, it takes 500 photos a second and calculates the curves of the pages, with the net effect that a book can be scanned as someone flips through it. Video here. As the story says,

While the technology has the potential to take paper books into the digital age, it remains to be how publishers will react to people scanning their books while just flipping through them.

On that note, it is worth mentioning that India . . . [more]

Earlier this week, Michel-Adrian Sheppard blogged on Slaw about Google’s new Government Requests Tool (Google Releases Data on Government Requests for Private User Data). I blogged about it as well here. I’m all in favor of pulling this out of the shadows and into the sunlight.

It’s interesting to peruse the numbers and to read the FAQ.

While the information provided raises a bunch of questions, they are very important questions to ask. What are the nature of the demands for customer information? Criminal law or national security? What are the relevant Google products involved? Why . . . [more]

Two BC organizations working to improve access to justice have merged operations. As of April 1st, the Western Canada Society to Access Justice and Pro Bono Law of British Columbia have merged, and will now be known as the Access Pro Bono Law Society of British Columbia – or simply ‘Access Pro Bono‘.

The two organizations have a long history of helping those with limited means in British Columbia. Access Justice was formed in 1990, and Pro Bono Law in 2002. A new website for Access Pro Bono is currently under construction, but should exist soon at www.accessprobono.ca . . . [more]

Happy Earth Day. Today is a good day to think about consumption.

The concept of the paperless office has been mentioned on Slaw in the past: How to Take Your Law Firm Paperless which links to a Lawyers Weekly article quoting our own Omar Ha-Redeye and Revisiting the Paperless Office to name just a few. There is also a great roundup on the Cyberlaw Central blog on “paperless” topics from the 2010 ABA Techshow.

A paperless office may not be universally achievable immediately in an organization but using less paper certainly is. Here are some easy things you can do: . . . [more]