Various Canadian Privacy Commissioners have taken the position that car license plate numbers are personal information, and thus subject to privacy legislation. That comes up, for example, in the context of Google street views, where Google has been told they must blur license plate numbers. 

Various Privacy Commissioner decisions have also limited the use of driver’s license information. For example, a store may ask to see a driver’s license as identification for someone returning a purchase as a fraud prevention measure, but the store is only supposed to look at it, not record the information on it.

Those principles are . . . [more]

Myth #1: I don’t need life insurance because I’m single and have no dependents.

Fact: Everyone leaves behind expenses when they die. In addition to funeral costs, there may be medical bills and personal debts that have to be paid. While your estate could be liquidated to cover some of these costs, it takes time and may not be enough. Life insurance relieves the financial burden of your death on your family or executor by creating instant tax-free cash. 

Myth #2: I have enough life insurance through my employee benefits.

Fact: Most employee life insurance benefits are designed to provide . . . [more]

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

– Marshall McLuhan

In 2011, the University of Alberta will host the Herbert Marshall McLuhan Edmonton Centenary. Being the city of McLuhan’s birth, Edmonton boasts a special connection to the Canadian icon, even though others are also celebrating.

I offer you this link as tribute to Marshal McLuhan – the 1971 convocation address when the University of Alberta awarded him with an honorary Doctor of Laws.

Considering the number of times he has been mentioned here, I wonder what Prof. McLuhan would say about . . . [more]

CLIC made a difference

In the late seventies and early eighties, the Canadian Law Information Council was the key player in the effort to create a vision for accessing legal information online. CLIC was the idealistic, innovative and somewhat eclectic creation of the federal and provincial governments, that ran out of steam well before the new order it foresaw, came to pass. In its relatively short life, however, CLIC played a valuable role as prophet, educator and motivator in preparing the legal information community for the dramatic changes that were to come.

CLIC was “right on the money” in projecting . . . [more]

LAWPRO has seen a significant increase in bad cheque frauds targeting lawyers all over North American over the last two months, and over the last week several new names are being used on the ongoing collaborative agreement frauds. We are also seeing more activity in the last few weeks on frauds involving a real estate purchase deposit and a settlement of an employment related personal injury claim. Over the last few months several hundred lawyers from across North American have reported to us that they received various versions of these messages attempting these frauds. See below for more details on . . . [more]

Un peu difficile de choisir la session quand il y a trois sujets thématiques parallèles..! C’est le cas d’ailleurs aujourd’hui toute la journée, sauf pour les plénières. La session en rubrique est populaire la salle est comble! C’est vraiment un sujet d’actualité qui intéresse beaucoup les participants.

Nicolas Vermeys, de l’Université de Montréal, a ouvert la session avec une mise en contexte. Nicolas mentionne que plus de 7,000,000 de Canadiens sont présents sur facebook, selon le Commissaire à la vie privé, rendant ainsi ce site le plus populaire au Canada. C’est pourquoi sa présentation est principalement axé sur facebook et . . . [more]

Last week TechCrunch featured a terrific guest post by Mark Suster about Why Startups Need to Blog (and what to talk about …). In reading Suster’s blog post, it occurred to me that many of his recommendations for startups apply equally well to law firms.

The kinds of questions I constantly hear from lawyers about blogging – “what should I blog about?”; “who is my audience?”; “where should I post?”; etc. – are the same kinds of questions many startup company bloggers-to-be ask about blogging. Suster’s article provides insights that bloggers from any industry can benefit from.

A few . . . [more]

Gordon Ross, Vice-President of ThoughtFarmer, opened his 13:30 session today by asking: “Is knowledge loss really an issue?” The annual average industry turnover rate is 35.7%. When staff leaves you lose both what they know (technical knowledge) and who they know (social knowledge). Intranets are not good for retaining knowledge and enabling users to find it, in one intranet survey asking “does your intranet search usually help you in finding what you are searching for”, 85% of professional respondents answered “No”.

Typical problems arising from knowledge management include:

• Just because it is captured does not mean it will be

Moving on to the 10:45am session this morning in Montreal, at the LegalIT 5.0 Conference, James F. Ring from Fair Outcomes tackled the topic of managing and resolving legal disputes online.

James introduced the problem with some thought provoking facts:

• only 5% of cases make it to trial
• the vast majority of cases settle within 30 days of the first day of trial, and
• 80% of cases that do settle do not settle until the day before the trialuntil they are in a “30 days before the first day of the trial” window.

One explanation for the long . . . [more]

Technical work in the library–largely done behind-the-scenes–is key to ensuring things go smoothly on the client-facing side such as reference and research. One tedious and time-consuming tech task is shelf-reading: checking each book on the shelf to ensure it has been signed back in and is in the correct place. Without doing this on a regular basis (such as once or twice a year), books that have been mis-shelved become impossible to locate.

A library shelf-reading prototype using augmented reality technology–technology that adds to an image of physical space with a computer-generated overlay–is being developed out of Miami University’s Augmented . . . [more]

Blogging live from the Legal IT 5.0 Conference in Montreal, I am attending the session on crowdsourcing and the law which started at 9:30am, frankly, because I was intrigued by the title… Crowdsourcing the law?! Marcel Naud, from ROBIC, opened the session by defining crowdsourcing as:

The act of taking a job traditionally performed by a specific agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call

Blogging live from Montreal at the LegalIT 5.0 Conference, the Conference opened with a plenary session on the subject topic, by Richard S. Granat, Co-Chair, eLawyering Task Force, American Bar Association, launched in 2001. Richard founded one of the first virtual law firms in North America and is well chosen to speak on topic. . . . [more]