Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, appeared yesterday before the House of Commons access to information, privacy and ethics committee. 

The Commissioner would like PIPEDA to include stronger penalties for privacy violations as an incentive to comply. PIPEDA currently has no financial sanctions. If a violator does not conform to a decision of the Commissioner, the recourse is for the Commissioner to take it to the Federal court, which has powers to order compliance and grant damages.

In part this seems to be driven by “…the apparent disregard that some of these social media companies have shown for Canadian privacy laws.”  . . . [more]

As of four days ago, websites wishing to set cookies for UK viewers are required first to obtain permission to do so. I talked about the largely neglected 2009 EU directive to this effect a year ago on Slaw, when the UK, needing to move on the matter, gave businesses a year’s grace to grapple with the law. Now that grace period is over.

The terms of the directive are spelled out here, in an excerpt from my post of a year ago:

The cookie law is paragraph 66 of Directive 2009/136/EC [PDF] and essentially mandates that computer users:

…be

Recently while sitting in a packed courtroom in Newmarket agonizingly waiting for my brief ‘speak-to’ matter to be called, I began to question one of our statutory traditions and the grace towards our elders that it mandates.

Don’t get me wrong. Since I was a child it has been ingrained upon me to honour and respect my seniors. I’ve crossed my share of streets hand-in-hand with little old ladies and vacated countless seats on sardine-stuffed subway cars but something about watching counsel be called in order of their year of call smacks of anachronism and inefficiency.

Although not applied in . . . [more]

The vast majority of web searches continue to be conducted through Google, estimated at about 66.4% of all searches in early 2012. Google is understandably concerned about losing its market dominance. In December 2011, Microsoft’s upstart search engine Bing surpassed Yahoo and become the second most used search engine worldwide.

The only way Google can retain its lead is by continuing to provide the most relevant information to users, so it constantly rewrites its code, as with the new Penguin update that I mentioned here. Although Wikpedia has over 365 million readers and is ranked one of the top . . . [more]

Among the top dozen creditors of Dewey & LeBoeuf which filed for bankruptcy yesterday were some familiar names:

Thomson Reuters $2.363 M

Lexis Nexis $1.413 M

Wolters Kluwer $653 K

I find the relative scale of the debts interesting, as well as the fact that the three publishers must have been prepared to continue to extend credit long after the newspapers were spreading word of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s troubles far and wide.

We’ve had scant experience of law firm insolvencies so I don’t know what has traditionally happened to the library when a firm closes its doors. Or in today’s . . . [more]

Coming up in June, Commonwealth Legal is assembling a three city Canadian legal tech conference tour; landing in: Toronto (13th), Calgary (21st) and Vancouver (27th).

Session topics covered include:

• Litigation Management on a Global Scale
• 360° Review Management
• Technology Assisted Document Review
• Cloud Computing for the Legal Profession
• Social Media: The New ESI Frontier
• Data Reduction and Culling Techniques
• Shifting Technology Paradigms

Visit their website — technologyinpractice.ca — for full session details, speakers, and conference pricing. . . . [more]

I have recently had the opportunity to take up a sessional teaching position at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. Anyone who engages in this type of sessional or adjunct teaching in Canada knows that it is not done for the money (of which there is very little) but for the love of teaching and the opportunity to engage with bright young minds. As I have managed to navigate a successful transition away from the strict practice of law an additional benefit I receive from teaching is a steady stream of students who seek my thoughts on career planning . . . [more]

I am spoiled. I admit it. My brothers used to call me Precious – I am sure they were being facetious. This character flaw leads to severe disappointment when tools that I like to use are delayed or disappear.

One of my favourite, and hopefully to reappear soon, tools is the Daily Bill Activity Reports of the Alberta Legislature. Following this link, you may think, “There is a 2012 document at the site, why is she complaining?”

The daily activity report doesn’t include the 28th Legislature. We started the 1st Session of this legislature on May 23, 2012, and . . . [more]

openparliament.ca — “This is not a government site. Not even sort of,” says the tagline at the very bottom of the page. And one way you know it’s true is that it’s easy to use. We introduced openparliament.ca back in 2010, a successful volunteer effort by Michael Mulley to make access to data about the doings of MPs as easy as possible.

Now Mulley has added access to the work of parliamentary committees. As you’d expect, everything’s laid out clearly. You pick the committee that interests you, then go to the meeting by date (unless it was in . . . [more]

This time I thought I would talk a bit about digitisation being done by libraries, specifically the Bodleian. This is not exactly related to law or legal materials, but it is about using technology to release manuscripts, books and documents that once were the exclusive preserve of specialist scholars and making them available to the world. The Bodleian has been digitising some of its earliest treasures for many years now, and as always, these projects go ahead when funding is available.

In recent weeks a great deal of coverage was given to the announcement that the Bodleian Libraries and the . . . [more]

Meetings are a fact of life for all lawyers as they are a necessary part of dealing with clients and operating a law firm. Unfortunately, meetings are often an unproductive use of time, as too often nothing of substance happens or gets decided. People go to meetings solely because they feel obliged to go, not because they get anything from attending.

Before you call a meeting, ask yourself: Is there really merit in getting all these people together? If the meeting is only for informational purposes – as are many regularly scheduled management or departmental meetings – ask yourself if . . . [more]

Statistics Canada has released the latest batch of stats from the criminal courts (2010/2011). As usual, The Daily has a handy overview; those who are interested in the finer details will find them in the corresponding Juristat publication.

Some points of note:

• The caseload has remained pretty much the same as it was the previous year, at 403,000 cases.
• The great majority of cases involved non-violent offences (77%).
• The most commonly-occurring offence was impaired driving (12%).
• Young adults (18-24) are greatly over-represented: 30% of all accused vs. 12% of the population.
• Two-thirds of cases resulted in a finding