I had an interesting experience that reinforced something that I knew but forgot to apply and consequently allowed a situation to drift sideways.

Here’s the scenario. You have an elected Board of a dozen partners who are faced with making an important decision. They have known for some months that this matter was on the table and have had some informal discussions amongst themselves and even amongst other partners in the firm. Each came to the table declaring to the others that they were unbiased and remained open to making their decision in the best interests of the firm.

The . . . [more]

Virtual delight echoed in tweets, posts, and emails in my corner of the web late Wednesday, upon the release of Judge Baer’s opinion in Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust 11 CV 6351 (S.D.N.Y.). Very shortly after its release, Prof. James Grimmelmann posted the opinion on Scribd.

Briefly, for those unfamiliar, the plaintiffs and defendants had each sought summary judgment in respect of the plaintiffs’ copyright infringement claim. HathiTrust and related university defendants saw near-entire success in their summary judgment motions, failing only on a standing question not consequential to the result. The outcome: Fair use protects the defendants’ participation . . . [more]

Yesterday at the Law via the Internet conference, Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody” and “Cognitive Surplus” described how people were using RapGenius.com to do more than explain rap lyrics…they were using it to explain law.

Here’s an example: 

Will “the crowd” develop an interest in annotating the law?

There is a pretty exciting project underway in Quebec that has built a platform for just that purpose.

In the meantime, go here to read more about Clay Shirky’s presentation and to watch the video.

Finally, if you want to try your hand at annotating Canadian law, we’ve . . . [more]

Many of us donate some of our time for a cause – whether it is providing pro bono time to a client, or volunteering on a board. We do this for many reasons – including client development and the promotion of our practices. But if we do it just for those reasons, we will do a second rate job, which will be transparent and won’t accomplish anything. Pick something you feel strongly about, that you find interesting, where you think you can make a difference, or where you might learn something new. It will help the community, broaden your horizons, . . . [more]

Although ODR is gathering much support among consumer associations, governments, and private enterprise, lawyers and members of the judiciary seem to be the most outspoken critics of the use of technology to help litigants reach an otherwise unassisted settlement. If cynics like to point to the fact that those in the legal community might simply be afraid to lose their monopoly on brokering settlements and, therefore, their jobs, we believe that this isn’t the case, but rather that their reservations are linked to an unfounded fear that ODR might contribute to the erosion of the rule of law.

For example, . . . [more]

The Library of Parliament has released two background papers respecting parliaments and gender: Gender-Sensitive Parliaments: 1. Advancements in the Workplace [PDF] and Gender-Sensitive Parliaments: 2. The Work of Legislators [PDF]. The papers adopt the Inter-Parliamentary Union (ITU) understanding of a gender-sensitive parliament as:

a parliament that responds to the needs and interests of both men and women in its structures, operations, methods and in its work. Gender-sensitive parliaments remove the barriers to women’s full participation and offer a positive example or model to society at large.

Part 1 of the report looks at gender sensitivity in the parliamentary workplace (how . . . [more]

The so-called “spanking law” has been challenged and upheld as . . . [more]

We haven’t talked about Wordle for a while. I used some public graphics from Wordle.net in a recent presentation and thought it would be neat to do a Slaw.ca Wordle.

Older versions of Slaw related Wordle graphics:
Slaw Tip on Wordle
November 2010 Slaw Wordle

It is interesting to see how these have changed over time. . . . [more]

UK online newspapers and blogs are buzzing with the proposal outlined by George Osborne, a British Conservative politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the Tory conference yesterday: in exchange for shares given by their employer, newly hired employees would have to give up certain employment rights (see here for The Guardian article). Under this program, employees would be able to waive certain rights with regard to unfair dismissal, redundancy, flexible work time and receive rights of ownership. This employment-ownership scheme would see a large deregulation of the labour market and encourage start-up companies that are concerned with all the . . . [more]

Here are the three most-consulted English-language cases on CanLII for the week of November 14 – 21.

♨ 1. Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571

[1] This Court has developed a new awareness and understanding of a category of vexatious litigant. As we shall see, while there is often a lack of homogeneity, and some individuals or groups have no name or special identity, they (by their own admission or by descriptions given by others) often fall into the following descriptions: Detaxers; Freemen or Freemen-on-the-Land; Sovereign Men or Sovereign Citizens; Church of the Ecumenical Redemption International (CERI); Moorish Law; and

Co-authored by Anh Huynh, the Competitive Intelligence Manager at Davis LLP

To recap from Part 1, you are asked by a lawyer to get everything about a company. We have pretty much decided that this approach is not the most effective. The requestor will simply have too much information and will not know how to proceed. See Part 1 of this article, to get the reasoning for such a statement.

On the other hand, given the same scenario (a lawyer asks: “Find out everything you can on company x), what would you do if you were a CI pro? . . . [more]

In my last post I talked about a case in which Justice Brown noted that the Ontario Court system “lacks modern administrative infrastructure including, for example, proper electronic case management and document filing technologies.”

This week a friend of mine directed me to this interesting link about the state of the internet which got me to thinking, just how technologically archaic is our legal system?

Although (dare I say) most lawyers communicate by e-mail, you can only serve court documents via e-mail on counsel (you can’t serve self-represented parties) and this requires counsel to send back an acceptance of service. . . . [more]