The revelations by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden that the National Security Agency has been conducting widespread snooping against pretty much everyone, everywhere, all the time has provoked more than just political and diplomatic fallout.

As can be expected, there are several new lawsuits.

The American non-profit investigative journalism website Pro Publica has created the NSA Surveillance Lawsuit Tracker that lists the “key legal challenges to [U.S.] government surveillance and secrecy” since 2006. The last lawsuit added to the list was filed on July 8th.

For a Canadian take on government whistleblowers, I recommend the work of the NGO FAIR (Federal . . . [more]

We all know someone, or have been someone, who has worked in the restaurant industry under precarious working conditions. Working for tips and less than minimum wage, working long and strange hours and split shifts, dealing with for harassing customers and/or bosses, physically tasking conditions, and most notably having little job security.

In our practice we’ve talked to servers who have been underpaid, discriminated against, sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by their employers and who have been fired without receiving their last pay cheques let alone pay in lieu of notice. We’ve negotiated settlements for some people, drafted human rights . . . [more]

The Quebec government has followed up on its plans to legalize doctor-assisted suicide. On June 12, 2013, the government tabled in the National Assembly Bill 52, An Act respecting end-of-life care, which besides its main goal of ensuring that end-of-life patients are provided with care “that is respectful of their dignity and their autonomy,” establishes specific requirements for certain types of medical assistance to die.

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Rethinking Regulation and Innovation in the U.S. Legal Services Market
Ray Worthy Campbell
9 NYU Journal of Law and Business 1 (2012)

Excerpt: pp. 52-54

[Footnotes are omitted but are available in the full article online via the link above.]

V. THE STATE OF INNOVATION IN LEGAL SERVICES: WHAT IS HAPPENING AND WHAT . . . [more]

“Triage” is a very popular word these days in the context of civil justice reform. It was raised in:

• the CBA’s Envisioning Equal Justice Summit in April as one of the possible solutions to ensuring that citizens have access to justice
• the final report of the National Action Committee on Access to Justice’s Prevention, Triage and Referral Working Group
• the Opening the Dialogue session on the phenomenon of self represented litigants in May

“Triage” is a popular concept but what, exactly, does it mean? I have a feeling that it may mean slightly different things to different people.

Merriam Webster . . . [more]

Law librarians, law practitioners, and others interested in thoughts on the future of law practice will be interested in a provocative new piece by Jordan Furlong: The Future is Now: Eight Emerging Roles for Law Librarians. It appears in the July 2013 issue of Thomson Reuters’s Practice Innovations.

Jordan offers thoughts on new potential opportunities for law librarians and knowledge management professionals—often themselves librarians by training—in new law firm models that he foresees developing in response to multi-factored legal market disruptions. He suggests,

Starting now, law librarians and KM personnel have the opportunity to integrate themselves into the

. . . [more]

Techdirt reports on a recent Florida law intended to ban slot machines and internet cafes – but the law is worded so badly that it is broad enough to ban all computers, tablets and smartphones. It essentially bans any machine or device by which someone can play a game of chance.

The law resulted in about 1000 internet cafes being shut down. One of them has launched a lawsuit and is of course using this bad drafting as part of its case.

As Mike Masnick of Techdirt puts it: “Can we just have lawmakers recognize, once and for all, that . . . [more]

I got new lenses in my glasses this week. They’re called progressive, and I’m therefore trying my best to look at this sign of aging as a positive step forward.

As a first-time wearer of progressive lenses, I received a few helpful tips at the fitting:

• Point with your nose – in other words, look with your whole face, not just your eyes or your view will be distorted
• Keep your head vertically aligned or you’ll lose focus.
• Avoid the sidelong glance – you’ll be looking outside the field of focus
• When you look down, lower your chin so you

. . . [more]

I’m egregiously late on this, but on the “better late than never” theory” I’m finally reporting that the Farber Financial Group has produced a smart phone app for insolvency lawyers. RESOLVE comes in Android and iOS versions, and there’s a web-based version that should run well on a BlackBerry. In fact, if you want to check it out before you download, give the web-based version a try and you’ll see most of the features it offers.

The features are described on the Farber website as including:

• Searchable, portable Canadian, US and Global Bankruptcy Statutes and Regulations (e.g. Bankruptcy & Insolvency

. . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Canadian National Railway Co. v. McKercher LLP 2013 SCC 39
   

   [1] Can a law firm accept a retainer to act against a current client on a matter unrelated to the client’s existing files? More specifically, can a firm bring a lawsuit against a current client on behalf of another client? If not, what remedies are available to the client whose lawyer has brought

. . . [more]

Although personally it seems relatively recent, it was as long ago as in the mid-1990s that I was first asked to write on legal and professional publishing, by way of a chapter in a book entitled Book Publishing in Britain, (J. Whitaker & Sons, 1995). Pondering both forward and back around 20 years each way, one has a sense of the scale in which so much has changed, while at the same time there are areas in which things have remained the same. I was amused recently to be told with pride by a seasoned business owner, that their . . . [more]

Many lawyers entered the profession because of a desire to do good, to help people, to support the rule of law. That’s their motivation.

Once in the workplace, though, their primary incentive is the need to make a living. That space between motive and incentive can create some cognitive dissonance for those lawyers who can’t take on the cases they’d like to tackle, particularly if it’s a question of the would-be client’s inability to pay; or the fear that the return would not justify the investment of the lawyer’s time.

Richard Susskind, in a paper prepared for the CBA’s Legal . . . [more]