At this moment, Apple’s iPad is without question the tablet that is defining the category and vastly outselling any competition. But it is too soon to write off competition from Android tablets. And Microsoft just yesterday officially unveiled its new Windows 8 operating system at a build developers conference. They gave away Samsung windows 8 tablets to everyone at the conference. Windows 8 is not ready for consumption yet – it will be some time in 2012 before it is ready for use. If you are keen to try it now, you can download the developer preview edition from the . . . [more]

Lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights have filed a complaint on behalf of SNAP, a survivor support group, at the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging that senior Vatican officials – including the current Pope – have committed crimes against humanity on the basis that “Vatican officials tolerate and enable the systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes throughout the world.”

The 84-page complaint is available here (PDF) and makes for interesting, if not depressing, reading. Included in the complaint as part of the factual background is an overview of the abuse that has occurred in . . . [more]

My experience to date with legal knowledge engineering has consisted of using decision trees to automate legal documents in a field known as document assembly. I have never done hard coding or played with expert system shells. Indeed, there are not many of them to play with. The only ones I am aware of are those developed by Neota Logic (formerly Jnana) and RuleBurst (since acquired by Oracle).

So it was interesting to meet Dr. Pamela Gray, a legal knowledge engineer from Charles Sturt University, and her son Xenogene Gray, a computational physicist. Together they have developed a legal . . . [more]

The Ontario Court of Appeal affirmed the convictions of Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb but reduced their sentences by a total of two one years, each.

The reasons in R. v. Drabinsky 2011 ONCA 582 were posted on the ONCA website this a.m.

The reasons are “by the Court”. What comes through clearly (at least to me) is that the judges on the panel were not impressed by any aspect of the content of the appeal arguments. I emphasize content, not manner of presentation.

For those who care, I’ve pasted some highlights in the body of the message after the . . . [more]

It’s arguably the most important thing on your law firm’s website, the whole reason why it exists. Yet it’s usually parked in some distant corner of the site, and a challenge for visitors to find quickly and use easily.

What is it? It’s your “Contact Us” functionality.

A prospective client, having reviewed a firm’s website in detail, often decides to reach out and speak with one of the firm’s lawyers. This contact is typically established using one of three methods:

1. Phone us
2. Email us
3. Fill out and submit this online contact form. 

Many firms use all three contact methods, while . . . [more]

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal: more and more employers are using some form of pre-hiring assessment, such as personality tests. This is done in the hopes of better pinpointing candidates who will fit into the company’s culture. This article also clarifies that many companies do not rely solely on these tests; the test results can simply add another layer when evaluating a candidate with whom the employer has already met.

As this article states, honesty is the best policy when doing these assessments. Both the prospective employee and the employer will eventually lose out if the . . . [more]

Back in May, David Whelan wrote an excellent column on the pressures law firms experience because of consumer technology products titled The Core of Legal Technology. This month, the Law Society Gazette (UK) contained an article titled Technology in law firms transformed by ‘consumerisation’. Today I found a clever way to get the alternate spelling into the keywords of this article. Clever keyword content is not what I want to write about though.

I want to share three ideas to help law firm technology departments cope with the issue of consumer (and by this I mean Partner) demand . . . [more]

The study of law is very intriguing, for someone like me who came to it via the back route. Since I work in a law firm library, and haven’t been to law school, I am very aware of my limitations when it comes to legal research. I like to think that makes me more observant and diligent. One of the things I’ve observed is the way the law overlaps. A few years ago, I was helping an associate sort out where he’d find the answers to a question involving dangerous driving. He ended up needing three separate pieces of legislation: . . . [more]

The lengthy judgment of Lord Justice Lloyd in a decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales released 9 March 2011, contains the following tantalizing sentence:

“For the reasons that I have given above, in my judgment the principle known as the rule in Re Hastings–Bass… is not a correct statement of the law.”

These words are all the more tantalizing because the courts of England and Wales have applied the rule in Re Hastings Bass consistently since it was handed down in 1975. (The rule essentially allows trustees, in certain circumstances, to attack their own decisions and . . . [more]

The following article appeared in the new Fall 2011 issue of LAWPRO Magazine.

Don’t be a dupe: That’s the advice from those who were fooled.

In the months of July and August alone, hundreds of lawyers (from across Canada, the U.S., and even elsewhere in the world) have provided LAWPRO with emails seeking to retain them on bad cheque frauds. The most common scenarios are loan or debt collections and spousal support payments. (If you get obviously fraudulent emails, please forward them to fraudinfo@lawpro.ca) Dozens of Ontario lawyers have called looking for help in determining whether a matter they . . . [more]

E-mail’s days as a communication medium that offers a “reasonable expectation of privacy” may be numbered.

The ABA’s newly issued Formal Opinion 11-459 revisits the topic of e-mail security, and offers the following concluding paragraph:

A lawyer sending or receiving substantive communications with a client via e-mail or other electronic means ordinarily must warn the client about the risk of sending or receiving electronic communications using a computer or other device, or e-mail account, to which a third party may gain access. The risk may vary. Whenever a lawyer communicates with a client by e-mail, the lawyer must first consider

PR? What does it mean? I search around and wonder if it’s Public Relations or Press Relations (or rather media relations). But the two, although not unrelated, are not the same and that makes me think if, in that environment, there is more art than science applied; perhaps more faith and belief than evidence. In fairness, those within that trade seek to communicate their purposes and objectives, e.g., at the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations website, where, usefully and unsurprisingly, they offer a “jargon buster”.

Mostly, whether it’s one interpretation or another doesn’t bother me. The use of PR . . . [more]