On May 1^st, a Texas law student uploaded the specs for 3D printing of a single-shot pistol to the web – specs that were downloaded over 100,000 times before the U.S. State Department asked that he remove them from his site. That same day, May 9^th, U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order “Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information.”

The juxtaposition highlights how open data efforts are generally considered contributions to freedom of information and the advance of human liberty, but occasionally thought of as dangerous incursions into . . . [more]

Touchscreens have made a difference. Until fairly recently, the assumption could normally be made that people would provide input to their machines using a keyboard or a mouse. But not now.

The people have spoken: we want touchscreens. Touchscreens more than justify the disruption they have caused. We need calm too, though, and that’s still a work in progress. This posting reviews some recent developments on the software standardization front concerning “pointer events” and “touch events”.

Background

Touchscreen technology has actually been around since the 1960s. A great review of the history is available in Bill Buxton, “Multi-Touch Systems that . . . [more]

One of the conferences I go to for a quick and painless technology update is Computers in Libraries (CIL) held in Washington, DC in the spring. I first came to it in 2000 when a friend of mine loaned me her press pass for the last day of the conference. At one of those sessions I was pleasantly surprised to learn about virtual reference service at Northwestern University Library, only a few miles from where I was working at the time in Chicago. I was hooked and have been to almost every CIL since then. 

After I retired, however, I . . . [more]

A colleague writes of what seems like the perfect storm of open access hitting the students with whom she works…

My students and I publish in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach published by Springer. Great outlet for our work. But, they just went open access (good).The cost to publish for an author now is $1,600 (bad). For grad students, this is prohibitive. I told my dean and she said there is no money to support grad student publications. That wasn’t surprising. Do the math: 60 students times several pubs a year at that cost would be a significant chunk

[The memosphere strikes again! Between submission and publication of this column, Omar Ha-Redeye posted a very informed and insightful Slaw entry entitled, “Access to Justice Starts With Legal Tuition“. Playing Bell to my Meucci (that reads rather strangely), Omar covers much of the same analytical territory as me—with the bonus of journalistic rigour. Still, I like to think that both posts deserve your attention.]

A lot happens in a year, and the Quebec student protests that dominated the news last spring are a distant memory now. The students went back to school, Quebec elected a new government that . . . [more]

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (“CIPO”) has recently published two notices for patent examiners relating to patent interpretation[i], and in particular computer-related/business method type patents. These notices were released following a 2011 Federal Court of Appeal decision – CIPO v Amazon, 2011 FCA 328 (“Amazon”). In Amazon the FCA instructed the patent office on how to evaluate a patent application to determine the threshold issue of whether it covers patentable subject matter. The FCA held that patent claims must first be purposively construed before one can evaluate whether the claimed subject matter covers acceptable (ie. patentable) subject matter. . . . [more]

In his new book “Tomorrow’s Lawyer”, Richard Susskind claims that there are at least 13 “disruptive technologies” in law. A “disruptive technology” is one that fundamentally challenges and changes the functioning of a firm or sector (as opposed to supporting and enhancing current operational methods). He predicts that collectively these 13 technologies will transform the entire legal landscape.

He includes “online dispute resolution” or ODR in this group. He uses a very broad definition of ODR:

When the process of actually resolving a legal dispute, especially the formulation of the solution, is entirely or largely conducted across the

The more interconnected the world becomes, the more people (businesses, governments) are exposed to harm generated online. “Cyberthreats”have become a leading source of worry for many knowledgeable people. The Internet is a dangerous place. Hacking that was once the domain of geeks wanting to show off their exploits is now big business, with division of labour (those who collect the information pass it on to those who use it) and serious resources. Tools for most forms of nastiness are readily available for sale at reasonable prices.

Crime has been joined by state and perhaps private espionage in the . . . [more]

Jordan Furlong published another great column recently about how the word the word “disruption” is being used to describe many changes in legal practice and technology. He points out that the word is most often used to describe legal process innovation. The comment boards lit up with discussion of what may or may not be disruptive. I agree with Jordan and other commenters that improving legal process or process innovation is not really disruptive. Examples of legal process innovation abound, but they mostly just introduce efficiencies into practice (for example, by standardizing steps in common procedures). On the other hand, . . . [more]

I billed 2,400 hours last year because I have the perfect work-life balance.

Since its adoption into mainstream North American vocabulary in 1986, the term “work-life balance” has caused hypertension in and the impression of decreased work-ethic by senior lawyers and firm managers. Its use by an applicant in an interview is usually fatal. Yet firms spend thousands of hours and dollars seeking the Holy Grail for law firm management: equilibrium between “work-life balance” and business interests. Why? Because “work-life balance” equates to associate retention.

With all the focus on work-life balance, why have so few managed to achieve the . . . [more]

Though my column focuses on legal information, in the United States legal education is intimately bound up with the trends in legal information. LEXIS and WESTLAW maintain a stranglehold on the marketplace by heavy investment in law school training. By putting boots on the ground in the form of dedicated training representatives, student advisors and, of course, free access 24/7 to the relevant systems, the big commercial data bases win hearts and minds. New law students are highly energized and very impressionable. What they find upon arrival in law school is, as far as they see it, the way things . . . [more]

Canada is far from perfect when it comes to its domestic human rights record. Obviously the scale and gravity of concerns do not compare with tragedies unfolding in countries like Syria or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the threat to survival faced by so many of Colombia’s Indigenous nations or the relentless discrimination women endure in Afghanistan. But the concerns are nevertheless very real and longstanding, ranging from the alarmingly high and entrenched levels of violence experienced by Indigenous women to punitive new immigration detention laws; from the failure to tackle homelessness in the country to national security practices that . . . [more]