As the global demand for lower cost and efficient legal services grows, we will see new innovations in the delivery of these services. Integreon, a global provider of outsourcing services recently announced the opening of its legal process outsourcing (LPO) onshore UK delivery centre.

The facility in Bristol will provide a full suite of LPO services, including document review, contract management, merger and acquisition (M&A) due diligence and compliance support.

This is an interesting turn of events in the LPO space. The whole premise of LPO services is the significant cost advantage of the service (amongst other benefits) over local . . . [more]

Blogger Attempts to Protect Content by Country: Redirects .com Blogs to Country-Specific Domains

I vividly remember the salesperson coming to our home as a child, brandishing the 32 shiny, leather-bound volumes. “This,” he said, “is the Encyclopedia Britannica.” Although we had the Vic-20, we simply didn’t have the same access to information online that we do today. As an insatiable bookworm who already professed an encyclopedic knowledge on everything I claimed to be right about, I was completely enthralled.

We ended up settling for the Britannica Children’s Encyclopedia. As I recall it met its eventual demise being cut up into pieces for its pretty pictures for use in elementary school projects in . . . [more]

The recent St. Patrick’s Day publicity, most of which seemed to involve drinking, put me in the frame of mind to notice this development from the home of St. Andrew, where the Scottish government has introduced a bill that would fix mandatory minimum prices for alcohol. The Scottish National Party’s first attempt in the prior parliament was defeated. However, SP Bill 4^* has this time received approval in principle and will proceed on through the legislative process.

There is a basis for concern about the consumption of alcohol in Scotland. The government has set out the argument in favour . . . [more]

Congratulations to newchoir on a great little promotional stunt on behalf of Tourism Ireland in downtown Toronto yesterday!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. Sláinte! . . . [more]

Those of you who read the Globe and Mail may have seen in today’s paper the report by Jeff Gray, “Yes, Virginia, this is a rant from the bench,” reporting an edited version of what Justice David Brown had to say from the bench, Thursday, about Ontario’s paper-based document management system. I might not have called it a “rant,” which suggests a lack of control; rather, it’s a scathing and at times sardonic denunciation by a judge fully in control of his facts and his language. It concludes:

[17] If some may consider such criticism un-judicial in

. . . [more]

Here’s a good review of the law on shrink-wrap, click-through and ‘browse-wrap’ contracts . I expect the law of New York is much like the law in at least common law Canada on the topic. The comment is inspired by a recent dispute about Facebook’s ability to enforce its forum-selection clause. The author says that most lawyers would have thought that FB’s sign-up process was ‘bullet-proof’, but the court still made a thorough analysis of it.

The process required the person signing up to click on the terms of service to see them, In other words, the assent to those . . . [more]

I’m uneasy about the creeping commercialization of Google results, and its privacy policy revisions since Larry Page took over directing the company. That impression seems to be confirmed by this widely read description of the new culture at Google by James Whittaker.

Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions.

[…] . . . [more]

First, the “listen.” And for that, there’s no one better in the world than Canadian composer and soundscape maven R. Murray Shafer. All his life he’s been working to have us pay attention to the sounds around us. Here he is in a short film from the NFB entitled — what else? — “Listen”:

Then, take your ears over to the British Library’s online Sounds division, where you’ll find a quantity of aural candy (and potatoes, and brussel sprouts) for your delectation. I’d recommend that you start with Touch Radio, and perhaps program #41, “The Honey Bees of . . . [more]

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles 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.

. . . [more]

These are ominous days for law librarians in the United States. On Thursday, February 23, I spoke at the sixth annual ARK conference on law libraries in New York City. The conference was attended almost exclusively by law firm librarians, with a sprinkling of academic law librarians and vendors sprinkled in. Jean O’Grady of the law firm DLA Piper was the lead organizer. I have known Jean for a long time; she is smart, funny and business-savvy. Her firm made news by signing on to the new Bloomberg Law service, making her even more interesting. For details check out Jean’s . . . [more]

GPO Access, the online disseminator of official U.S. government publications, is shutting down permanently tomorrow, March 16th. It has gradually been replaced over the past two years by the new FDsys or Federal Digital System.

FDsys offers authentic, digitally signed PDF documents from dozens of different collections of U.S. Federal Government information (Congressional, Presidential, judicial and federal agency materials)

Some of the new system’s highlights:

• Information is preserved for permanent public access
• Search multiple publications at once
• Conduct complex searches
• Narrow, sort, and filter search results
• Access documents in multiple file formats
• Access metadata in standard XML formats

. . . [more]