You’re off for a week’s holiday to Halifax. You’re on a five-day business trip to Vancouver, L.A., and then Chicago. You’re headed to Rio on the spur of the moment and a last-minute cheapo ticket. And so you’ve got to pack some . . . stuff: clothes, shoes, reading matter, a discreet pharmacopeia, tablet computer with associated wires and adapters, and then that small collection of odd things such as your eye mask, your alarm clock, your hotel door stopper . . . . The mound grows. And the question presents itself: what do you pack it into?

Carry-on is . . . [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.

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I am a big believer in lawn chair thinking. The expansive, blue sky imagining that can take place on summer holiday sitting by the lake, by the pool, or simply somewhere nice. For a moment a space is opened up in life and there is time to contemplate.

I also greatly appreciate the thinking that takes place under the conscious surface of the mind when we are otherwise occupied with other tasks and which announces itself with a “eureka” splash and at other times with a gentle slide into awareness “ahh”.

Margaret Wheatley, a leading writer and thinker about . . . [more]

The July 2012 issue of Connected is available online.

The bulletin covers news about the impact of new social media such as Twitter and Facebook on court proceedings, the ethical implications of judges and court staff using new media, and court policy issues relating to these technologies.

It is published by the Virginia-based National Center for State Courts and the Conference of Court Public Information Officers.

Most of the stories are about the United States, but there is occasionally material about non-US matters. One of this month’s items is about a mistrial declared in a New Brunswick murder case because . . . [more]

As we legal writers drag ourselves through the dog days of summer, we sometimes hit lulls in finding topics of interest. Lucky for me the United Kingdom continues to provide fodder for those exhorting North Americans to change the way legal services are delivered. And I count myself fortunate to have been able to connect with a number of players who are truly shaking up the legal services industry across the Atlantic.

While the spotlight on innovation is focussed primarily on the private sector, one municipal in-house legal team is starting to cause a sensation.

Geoff Wild has written a . . . [more]

A recent Ontario Court of Justice decision has declared that briefly handling your cellphone while behind the wheel should not get you a ticket under Ontario's Highway Traffic Act distracted driving provisions.

The UK summer of sport was to be my topic this month, but Michel-Adrien has done a far better job than me recently in SLAW, so I take this opportunity instead to shamelessly promote three resources our staff provide for the use of the global legal community. The services are indexes to legal information which may be difficult to locate in other ways. The first is an index to the title, author and subject of legal dissertations written around the late 19^th / early 20^th centuries, which we call our Foreign Dissertations Database.

The second is an . . . [more]

As social media expand they bring lawyer stuff with them to bedevil the previously innocent denizens of the world, rather as missionaries were carried along with waves of colonialism to people who were just fine without them. The latest site for the social-medium-IP-dance is nail polish, of all things. Ciaté, a British cosmetics company, was in the process of trade marking their latest nail polish, Caviar Manicure — a product that has you sprinkle coloured beads onto your glue-spread nails. Bloggers began to write about this caviar manicure process; and some of them got a shirty email from Ciaté, instructing . . . [more]

Here are the three most-consulted English-language cases on CanLII for the week of July 23 – 31.

♨ 1. Ivens v. Lesperance 2012 ONSC 4280

[3] The defendant seeks an order or declaration that the plaintiff’s claim for non-pecuniary losses is barred by s. 267.5 of the Insurance Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. I(8). This section of the Act stipulates that the owner of an automobile is not liable in an action for non pecuniary losses, unless the injured person has sustained “a permanent, serious impairment of an important physical, mental, or psychological function”. The defendant therefore submits that the plaintiff’s

. . . [more]

Marketing is hard work, especially when you are constantly trying to get new clients in the door. One way that lawyers can get “new” business is by concentrating on their existing and former clients. People like to work with people they know, like and trust. It takes time to reach that point. Your existing and former clients have used your services in the past, or are using them now. They already know you. A level of trust has been established. It will be much easier to get additional work from those clients than it will be to get work from . . . [more]

Every two years for the past few years I’ve written something before the Olympic games about the IOC’s social media and web rules, which are overly controlling, out of touch, and behind the times. This year is no exception. Even though we are just a few days in, there have been several stories vying for the most outlandish social media excess medal. For example:

Carmi Levy wrote an article just before the games began entitled The IOC’s social media anti-lesson for business that starts off with:

As the final hours tick down until the 2012 Olympic games get started in . . . [more]

[Sean Dwyer assisted in the preparation of this column.]

Like many others, we have, on this blog and elsewhere, claimed that online dispute resolution (ODR) platforms and processes constitute an extremely useful tool for conflict resolution. This being said, it is unfortunately possible to assert that a majority of attempts to create a system for ODR have fallen short of expectations, making our assertions seem somewhat difficult to defend. However, we remain convinced that the fault doesn’t lie with the technology or the concept, but rather that ODR’s failure is in large part due to the absence of obligation . . . [more]