With all the excitement of a cosplay buff just ahead of Comic-Con, I anxiously awaited the Law via the Internet conference held in early October at Cornell University in picturesque Ithaca, NY. The 3 day event included the annual get together of the Free Access to Law Movement, CanLII’s peer group from around the world, as well as 30+ papers, presentations and panel discussions from a highly varied cross-section of legal information innovators. Sporting attire appropriate to the occasion (I went with a look that screamed I’d-prefer-to-dress-like-I-have-tenure-but-I-just-came-from-a-grant-request-meeting) I took it all in with a mix of delight and dissatisfaction.

On . . . [more]

This column was written by Dominique T. Hussey, L.E. Trent Horne and Edward (Ted) Yoo

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of Canada has provided valuable guidance to patent agents and litigators as to how Canadian patents will be read and enforced (Teva Canada Limited v Pfizer Canada Inc, 2012 SCC 60).

The subject matter of the patent needs no introduction. Sildenafil is the active ingredient in VIAGRA, one of the world’s best known pharmaceutical products. There is no mystery or uncertainty as to the reason VIAGRA is prescribed.

Pfizer’s patent, however, was not as . . . [more]

For the second straight year pro sports in North America had a work stoppage. For many lawyers this is a catastrophe as they have no idea how to entertain clients without a game to attend.

What is interesting about business development is that we regularly go back to the tried and true without ever asking our clients if that is what they like to do. If every year for the past decade you have taken a client out for dinner for a steak dinner followed by a hockey or basketball game and every year billings go up slightly it must . . . [more]

It is nothing short of astonishing that more than 75% of South Carolina’s residents had their social security, credit card numbers and other personally identifiable information breached. News of the breach came in October, though it actually began in August. Who uncovered the breach? Usually it is the FBI, but this time it was the Secret Service that notified S.C. on October 10th.

How did the breach happen? Someone, as yet unknown, stole legitimate credentials from one of the 250 state employees with access to the South Carolina Department of Revenue (DOR) database.

Why was the attack so easy? Because . . . [more]

With the clean up from Hurricane Sandy now underway in the eastern United States, it is a good time to once again reflect on the discipline of risk management. Though I have not heard any first hand accounts as of yet, those firms in Sandy’s path that had engaged in some form of risk management planning were likely much better prepared for the effects of the storm and likely reestablished their business operations in a much shorter timeframe than those caught unprepared. While a full risk management program is multi faceted and includes a wide range of planning activities, there . . . [more]

As we are writing these lines, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law’s (UNCITRAL) working group III is meeting in Vienna to continue its work on online dispute resolution (ODR) or, rather, on establishing guidelines for potential ODR service providers. Since previously scheduled obligations have kept us from taking part in this year’s meeting, we’ll have to wait for feedback from other participants to comment on how things are moving forward.

In the meantime, however, those who wish to get a broader picture of the UNCITRAL negotiations and their potential impact are in luck since Professor Ronald A. . . . [more]

As law librarians many of us teach our users the best approaches to using the internet, which includes how to best construct a search. It may seem pedantic to talk about operators and specificity, but it does sometimes help to narrow the results to a manageable number. We know that most people do not look beyond the arbitrary 10 results on the first page of a Google result screen, so it is pretty important that those ten are the right ones. We teach this stuff on the assumption that we are working on a level playing field with the various . . . [more]

The law and the legal profession are moving towards greater systemisation much more rapidly and dramatically, than most realise. Professor Richard Susskind has said that the traditional law firm pyramid “has got to break up” and that law firms essentially have two branches: the specialist division and the process division.

Interesting examples of this change that is afoot, can be found in The UK Financial Times Innovative Lawyers 2012 Report. It highlights the fact that non-traditional approaches to providing legal services are gaining momentum.

Having innovative clients would have helped those interesting projects get off the ground. Similiarly, it . . . [more]

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]

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]

Over the past seven months, I’ve attended several presentations made by consultants to small law firms. Three things that were spoken have stayed with me.

The first was at the launch of the Small Practice Portal of the Law Society of New South Wales, where a speaker addressed a sea of faces from small law firms and said that the number of new solo practices being launched every year in New South Wales was unsustainable. It was one of those “look to your right, look to your left, soon one of you won’t be here” moments.

The second was a . . . [more]

There have been times, as a legal and professional publisher, when I have mused on a life without troublesome and quirky authors who take holidays, have families and sometimes put their professional work before their writing commitments. I speculated as to how it would be in an entirely automated world in which the nature of the problem was entered into one end of the over-sized computer and out the other emerged the single correct answer, as was seen in films of a bygone era. Expressed in books, perhaps each chapter or topic would end with “the answer, therefore, is . . . [more]