These are notes are from a panel presentation session at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto last Thursday. Panelists included Dominique Shelton, Wildmon Harrold, Beverly Hills, CA, Prof. Teresa Scassa, University of Ottawa, Research Chair of Information Law, Ottawa, ON, Dr. Ann T. Greeley, DecisionQuest, and Nicole Black, Rochester, NY . Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own. I welcome your comments and follow-up thoughts!

Dominique Shelton – Overview on what is social media

Social media often involves the creation of “user generated content”, which . . . [more]

The past couple of weeks have offered an amazing ringside view of an unusually public and acrimonious debate over software patents.

First, This American Life aired When Patents Attack, a fantastic expose of Intellectual Ventures, a patent holding company owned by Microsoft’s one-time CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The episode leads listeners to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that companies like Intellectual Ventures are at the root of all that’s wrong with the US patent system. It’s a must-listen for anyone involved in, or merely interested in, intellectual property law.

Then, last week, after losing out on a huge bidding war for . . . [more]

These are notes are from a panel presentation session at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto last Thursday. Panelists included lawyer/librarian Matthew Braun, Legal Reference Specialist at the Law Library of Congress in Washington, DC, Sara Sommarstrom, Program Director, Minnesota Justice Foundation, and Prof. Nanette Elster, Vice President, Spence & Elster and Adjunct Faculty, The John Marshall Law School, Chicago, IL. Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own. I welcome your comments and follow-up thoughts!

This session was made up of three very different presentations exploring . . . [more]

In a recent Slaw marketing column, Is “Humble” in Your Marketing Repertoire? , Steve Matthews noted that although lawyers are often encouraged to focus their marketing on their expertise, it’s counterproductive to actually proclaim yourself as an expert in your marketing materials. As Steve says, “expert status should almost always be bestowed by others, not claimed by you.” He advises that you “let your clients decide that you’re an expert based upon your performance.”

So how do you showcase your performance in your marketing materials without sounding like a blowhard? Instead of talking about your performance, demonstrate it. And always . . . [more]

Here’s the promised post on the iPad apps recommended, or mentioned warmly, by Tom Mighell and Nerino Petro during the ABA session on Thursday that discussed the use of tablet computers in the practice of law. Some of the those identified as “free” also have a beefed up version offered for sale. As I’m sure you’ll understand, there are literally thousands upon thousands of iOS apps now, and it was only possible for the panel to discuss a very few in the time allotted. And, as I’m sure you’ll also understand, all kudos goes to the two expert panelists and . . . [more]

The ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security hosted a panel on Comparative Approaches to National Security moderated by Professor Harvey Rishikof, with Brigadier-General Blaise Cathcart from JAG, and Eneken Tikk of NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia. The panel looked at how different states have tried to resolve the tension of security and liberty in a variety of national security contexts, a topic recently covered by The Star.

Cathcart spoke on the virtue of the whole government approach of obtaining information, and Tikk recounted the challenge of the 2007 cyber attacks in . . . [more]

As a follow up to my post on J. E. McEneaney’s Web 3.0, Litbots, and TPWSGWTAU, here is an interesting and brief piece in Nature on what’s lacking in search engines. Turns out the author, a computer scientist at the U of Wash., thinks it is a machine capable of reading our sentences for meaning, not keywords.

There is a good summary of the article on the NYT blog.

As a side note, the fact that his academic homepage is in Comic Sans has new implications for me, after having read this epic defense in McSweeney’s. . . . [more]

One-term searches in Google will no longer offer a link to Google’s dictionary website. It’s been shut down.

The preferred behaviour is now to have users:

1. Conduct a single-term search;
2. Click on More search tools in the left-sidebar;
3. Click on Dictionary in the left-sidebar.

Or perhaps mildly quicker, include the word ‘definition‘ next to one’s search. The results returned will include a short dictionary entry, along with links to various online dictionary websites.

Some of the responses to this change can be found via the Google search forums. . . . [more]

A couple of years back, I took you to a place in Germany where they were making penguins fly. Today I’d like to take you back there again, because this time they’ve managed to make a herring gull fly. Big whoop, you say. Yes, except that the herring gull is a construct of foam and carbon fibre — and it flies by flapping its wings, something no other human construct has been able to do reliably.

The place is the Festo firm, and the gull is SmartBird:

This bionic technology-bearer, which is inspired by the herring gull, can start,

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/elephant-in-the-room.html

Reece v. Edmonton (City), 2011 ABCA 238

Substitute child for animal in the Alberta legislation involved (the Animal Protection Act, R.S.A. 2000, c. A-41) , call it the Child Protection Act, and assume everything else is effectively the same.

Would the majority have made the same decision and on the same grounds? If not, their analysis is wrong.

If they didn’t see that, they should have.

If they would have made the same decision, imagine the public screaming.

Given that, do you think the decision would still have been the same or would the majority have found . . . [more]

This is a reflection on the technologies we use to read and cite “the news”. For me, that involves both old news and breaking news. In any given week, I’m likely to read this “news” on websites (both open and closed), on newsprint, and on microfilm. I’ll listen to it on the radio and watch it on tv too. Yes, that’s all of the above. For reasons I’ll discuss below, I can’t predict that this complex, multimedia aspect of my reading life will be simplified anytime soon. I’m not advocating any such simplification either, though of course there are things . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles that contributors at Slaw are reading and that you might find interesting. These tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.