On November 16 at 10am PST the people at Adobe are putting on a free e-seminar to review the top new features of Acrobat X. It will include demonstrations of the top new features of Acrobat X Pro that will interest legal professionals, including:

• The new, easier-to-use interface.
• How to accurately save scanned documents directly to editable Word and Excel files.
• How to improve optical character recognition (OCR), even spot and correct OCR errors.
• The enhanced Redaction capabilities that help save time and improve productivity.
• How to automate, standardize, and share multi-step tasks for PDF production— using the new Action

At last week’s second annual MILOfest, the official Macs In Law Offices conference, I was pleased to have the opportunity to share the results of Clio’s inaugural Apple in Law Offices Survey.

The Apple in Law Offices survey was undertaken as an attempt to quantify what seems to be a rising trend of using Macs, iPads, iPhones, and other Apple products in law offices. While the number of anecdotes of PC users switching to Macs, BlackBerry users opting for iPhones, and iPads being embraced is no doubt on the rise, there is a lack of hard data to . . . [more]

The Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Toronto Chapter is holding its first full-day conference at the Four Seasons in Toronto on November 30, 2010. Called “The Changing Face of Legal Marketing,” it’s intended for lawyers as well as law firm marketing staff. The two keynote speakers are Mitch Joel and Adrian Dayton, both experts in online marketing. Another highlight is Nat Slavin, who will be speaking at the end of the day on Five Things Clients Want You to Know and Do in 2011.

Registration and program details are available online, of course. . . . . [more]

This is the second of three contributions focusing on certain peculiarities of Quebec’s civil law legal environment within North America (Part I can be found here).

While outsourcing and sophisticated professional IT services agreements typically deal with quality and performance issues through mechanisms such as service levels, penalties and credits, warranties and other related concepts, one will occasionally come across a client request to have the vendor commit to using “best efforts” to achieve a certain desired result. Vendors typically bark at this as they fear that such a commitment might be open-ended and require the deployment of resources . . . [more]

The big news from London is that Norton Rose is taking over Deneys Reitz, one of South Africa’s largest firms – and African firm of the year in 2006 – and the Canadian firm Ogilvy Renault. The expanded firm will fly under the Norton Rose flag.

The two firms will formally join the Norton Rose Group on 1 June 2011. This will raise the firm’s head count to over 2,500 lawyers spread over 38 offices.

Norton Rose Chief Executive Peter Martyr commented

This is a very exciting move…Canada and South Africa are increasingly influential economies for our clients

If you are a law firm starting from scratch looking to build an intranet, what would you do? Would you emulate many of the big US and Canadian firms and implement MS Sharepoint? Or look for a different solution? So often firms look over each others’ shoulder to see what the other is doing. But with intranets one size does not fit all.

I am currently in Washington, DC for KM World 2010 and was fortunate to have a good discussion with Gordon Ross, Vice President of Open Road Communications Ltd., web consultants and creators of the social intranet . . . [more]

Although two of my columns have already been posted on this blog, I never really officially introduced myself to the readers. As the youngest columnist in the Slaw family, I’d very much like to share my background and the road I travelled to date on my professional journey! 

The Early Years 

My story begins in the summer of 2002 when I left my family and moved to Montreal from Haiti to begin my postsecondary studies. I immediately enrolled to College Jean-de-Brébeuf and quickly developed a particular affinity for science and the law. This affinity for both those fields would stay . . . [more]

A few days ago Google released a very interesting tool: Google Refine 2.0. For anyone who’s ever had to sort through messy data to try to turn up a meaningful treatment, and who hasn’t, this tool is a godsend. You may never need to utter another regular expression.

It offers a suite of functions that allow a person to clean up the data (detect and remove inconsistencies), to transform the data into formats suitable to the final destination (such as html), and even tools for finding and adding more data from disparate sources.

There are three 6+ minute videos . . . [more]

When I was a kid I used to make models of airplanes. I could spend hours gluing together oddly-shaped bits of grey plastic, anticipating the beautiful flying machine that would emerge from all this bricolage. (I now know that a portion of the charm may well have been the appealing… odour of the glue fumes.) Then I progressed to model train layouts, and built miniature suspension bridges and other nifty stuff. And now I don’t make models of anything, but instead have to contend with life-size (or 1:1, as it’s known in the craft world) objects that are considerably less . . . [more]

The Parliamentary Information and Research Service of the Library of Parliament has released a series of brief background papers on the Canada–European Union trade negotiations that began last year and that are aimed at achieving a “Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement” (CETA). There are ten papers in the series, as follows:

1. Overview of Negotiations [pdf 175kb]
2. Market Access in Agriculture [pdf 170kb]
3. Non-Agricultural Market Access [pdf 163kb]
4. Trade in Services [pdf 164kb]
5. Investment Protection [pdf 166kb]
6. Government Procurement [pdf 157kb]
7. Technical Barriers to Trade and Regulatory Cooperation [pdf 157kb]
8. Intellectual Property Protection [

On September 26, 2010, the New York Times ran a front-page story concerning outsourcing public libraries to private corporations. This article chilled me to the marrow of my bones for several reasons. First, the library that triggered the article is in Santa Clarita, California. This is not a city that is drowning in deficits and grasping for straws. It is a city that is in the black. Santa Clarita’s move is made in the clear light of day, for purposes of future planning.

Second, Frank Pezzanite, the director of Library Systems and Services, the corporation which, if taken as a . . . [more]

It seems appropriate today, Remembrance Day, for a law blog to reflect for a moment on the laws of war. These seemingly prime examples of a contradiction in terms have taken a beating in recent years. The Economist, in an article entitled, “Unleashing the laws of war” published last year, gave a sad summary of fate in practice of these peculiar norms in an era of insurgencies, terrorism, ethnic violence, and superpower techno-war.

Yet much of the world continues to expand and refine the laws of war. I’m speaking now of the Hague and Geneva conventions, those legal . . . [more]