Next week Benchers of the Law Society of Upper Canada will (hopefully) decide on the future of articling in the province of Ontario. So, rightly or wrongly, one piece of the legal training puzzle in Ontario will be determined.

The elephant in the room however is the law schools.

Many will say that law schools are there simply to serve the purpose of providing a legal education that students are free to use in whatever fashion they choose; ensuring students become lawyers is not the role of law schools.

This is naïve. And it would only be the most hard-hearted . . . [more]

Sharing a WiFi access point among too many devices can shut down access for everyone. At some point, the high congestion levels overload the WiFi router, making it in effectively useless. This isn’t a common problem for home networks, but it does occur (frequently?) for events such as legal conferences or when you stay at a hotel.

An interesting software solution from NC State Engineers looks to be on the horizon. It’s called WiFox and based on tests of 45 concurrent connecting devices, reported a 700% speed improvement, and a 30-40% reduction in network latency. The performance increase comes from . . . [more]

The 19th-annual Disability Awareness Week began on November 12, 2012. Fittingly, on November 9, 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered a landmark decision in...

I was sorry to miss the 2012 Law via the Internet conference held earlier this month at Cornell. Happily, many sessions are available for viewing on the conference website. I was particularly interested to watch Clay Shirky’s keynote address.

Shirky is the author of the recent popular titles Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus. At LVI, he questioned why there is so little shared annotation of the law. He reported on a couple of examples that have popped up on social media. For instance, the State Code of Utah has been included on Github, a site for . . . [more]

I spent today at London’s 5th annual DIG (Digital Interactive & Gaming) Conference along with about 1500 others. The conference is divided into 3 tracks. One for game developers, another for web developers, and another for students interested in game development.

Here are some random things from the conference.

The concept of an independent device lab, which is a place where various devices are available, such as iPhones, iPads iPad minis, android phones, android tablets, windows 8 phones, surface tablets, xboxs, etc. The idea is to provide hardware for independent developers to test their apps and web pages on. Larger . . . [more]

I’ve just emerged from a few weeks of first-year law student legal research instruction. During that immersion—that is, when I didn’t have time to read it—I came across an interesting post on the RIPS Law Librarian blog: Michele Thomas’s “Guiding Principles for Enhancing Classroom Experiences.” The principles arising from the author’s reflections are sound and broadly applicable, in my view.

Our teaching team happened to implement this year or have in place some of these, at least in some form. I expect we’ll look at more of these, or others, next year.

My favourite tips are Ms . . . [more]

Here are the three most-consulted English-language cases on CanLII for November 1 – 13.

♨ 1. Teva Canada Ltd. v. Pfizer Canada Inc. 2012 SCC 60

[1] This appeal involves a challenge to the validity of the patent of the Pfizer respondents (“Pfizer”) for Viagra, a drug currently on the market for treating erectile dysfunction (“ED”). The appellant, Teva Canada Limited (“Teva”), claims that Pfizer’s patent application did not meet the disclosure requirements set out in the Patent Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. P-4 (the “Act”). Pfizer, on the other hand, submits that it complied fully with those requirements.

[2] The

. . . [more]

Law student groups at the University of Ottawa are at it again. Those pesky students are demanding respect from their peers and the communities and institutions they participate in.

Last week the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) Ottawa Chapter took to the internet, local media, and held a press conference, to speak out against the racist graffiti found in the men’s washroom at the Faculty of Law.

In his interview with the CBC Radio the President of the Ottawa BLSA chapter, Christian Levien, said that the graffiti is reflective of a tension that is generally on campus. He . . . [more]

Butterworths Canada that is.

One notable Canadian publishing anniversary that has largely passed unnoticed is the hundredth anniversary of Butterworths as an incorporated Canadian company. Given the company’s recent accomplishments, this is truly regrettable.

Butterworths and Company (Canada) was incorporated on November 14, 1912. From the outset, it was a bumpy ride. According the the History of Butterworths: History of a Publishing House, the launch was done initially done in secret because of expected litigation from Canada Law Book regarding the rights to sell and distribute Halsburys Laws of England in Canada. As expected, a writ arrived soon after . . . [more]

Because law is a matter of words and because multicultural, multilingual Canada has a bilingual legal system for the most part, I think you might want to take ten minutes to watch a particular video from Microsoft. It shows Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid on a stage in China demonstrating their latest voice recognition, machine translation, and machine speech technologies, all working in concert.

Simply put, Rashid, speaking moderately slowly, has his talk perfectly accurately transcribed as he talks in English; then towards the end of the video the written English is translated as he speaks into proper written . . . [more]

Turn away from e-mail and pick up the phone.

Lately I’ve found myself starting to draft a lengthy e-mail, and then realizing I ought to just make a quick phone call instead. It may sound silly, but if you’re like me, when times are extremely busy and I am racing from one deadline to the next, a phone call feels like a luxury.

I’ve recently discovered that I’ll go too long before I speak with or visit a client. Sure, the work gets done and clients are happy, but e-mail alone does not deepen a work relationship.

We rely heavily . . . [more]

Picking up on a recent post by Prof. David Doorey on his blog, I thought this week that I’d highlight a recent decision by an Ontario court to sentence an employer (the director of the company) to 90 days in jail for repeatedly violating the Ontario Employment Standards Act (discussed also in the Huffington Post) He was also fined $280,000. In a press release, the Ministry of Labour explained as follows:

Between March 2007 and October 2009, 61 employees from six companies, operated by Blondin filed claims with the Ministry of Labour for unpaid wages. An investigation

. . . [more]