Recently, Slaw introduced Talklaw, a calendar of legal conferences and events. This reminded me of an annual legal conference that doesn’t get talked about much outside of Manitoba, the Isaac Pitblado Lectures.

Non-Manitobans are not likely to be familiar with Isaac Pitblado. As stated in the biography from the Pitblado Lectures published papers:

At the time of Isaac Pitblado’s death, the Hon. Richard S. Bowles, the President of the Law Society of Manitoba, said about him:

The Law Society has lost its most respected and beloved member. Canada has lost one of its most able and distinguished sons.

Teaching a seminar not long ago, I commented that texting while driving was a clear example of the failure of multitasking. A very bright senior lawyer said, “But sometimes you have to.” (Even her workaholic colleagues looked askance at that!)

No, you don’t have to. Ever.

You know it’s a bad idea, right?

It’s easy to recognize in this example that a texting driver is dividing her attention, paying attention sometimes to the cars around her and attention at other times to her smartphone. Perhaps the text message does require only part of her attention (though even that’s unclear, according . . . [more]

[ français / English ]

Bâtir une stratégie d’utilisation des médias sociaux n’est pas de tout repos si l’on n’a pas les moyens d’engager des experts pour nous aider. En partageant l’expérience d’Éducaloi, j’espère pouvoir être utile à d’autres personnes ou organismes qui sont en réflexion quant à l’utilisation des médias sociaux.

Il y a maintenant deux ans, Éducaloi a décidé de se lancer sur les médias sociaux. En une seule journée de juillet 2009, nous ouvrions une page Facebook, un compte Twitter et une chaîne YouTube.

N’ayant pas les ressources disponibles ni la possibilité de répondre aux questions juridiques . . . [more]

Let’s take the opportunity to make a few Law Tech resolutions.

Resolution #1 – I will test my backups!

Backups are crucial and you don’t want to find out whether they worked or not when you really really need them. So in addition to checking periodically to make sure your backups are actually running (You *DO* check don’t you?) you should actually test your backups from time to time.

How? Create a dummy file – just a Word document will do – and put it in your file system. Call it “Backup Test” or something like that. Let your backup . . . [more]

I attended an interesting webinar on “Content Curation on the Social Intranet.” given by Shel Holtz of Holtz Communication + Technology on December 13^th.  While the concept is not new and several articles have been written on the topic, it did make me wonder why law firms have not utilized content curation to bring together commentary that they have published on their websites, blogs, twitter feeds, email blasts, videos and podcasts. Curating the best content by topic would make it much easier for clients to find all of the information produced by a law firm on a particular subject. . . . [more]

The tents are gone. The communal food kitchen, the library, the media center, the mic checks, too. Occupy Wall Street has been swept away, from Zucotti Park, off Wall Street, to the Vancouver Art Gallery. The incipient movement is now a matter of sporadic occupations, port blockades, and a media campaign. It may just be me, but the mainstream media attention that has followed in the aftermath seems to reflect a sense of wanting to hold on to this moment.

Certainly, I felt myself wanting to believe that here was a social movement that was showing some promise of . . . [more]

I visited my local Service Ontario office recently to do something the government requires of me every five years: renew my driver’s license. Fifteen minutes, a few signatures and a couple of photographs later, the deed was done, and I received my new license by registered mail a couple of weeks afterward. Couldn’t have been easier.

I did have to prove a number of things before I could get my new license, mind you. I had to bring in my passport and birth certificate, attest in good faith that I was a citizen of Canada, that sort of thing. Interestingly . . . [more]

Voice recognition has been getting lots of press recently, thanks to the release of the Siri software with the latest Apple iPhones. It has been a mainstay of discussions around legal technology for more than a decade and yet continues to be a point of uncertainty for lawyers. In particular, how do they use voice recognition in their practices. Ben Schorr discussed some of the challenges of using voice recognition earlier this year. I also received a question at a recent seminar about voice recognition so I thought I would take another look at it.

Speech to Text Conversion Software . . . [more]

I stumbled into this career and it has been a blast! I did not plan to specialize in foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarianship. I just wanted to be the world’s greatest general legal reference librarian (ah, youth!). But, here I am, enjoying doing work I never imagined.

Because I’ve been in the profession for a while, I get asked from time to time – how does one become an FCIL librarian? Here’s what I would have done to research career opportunities as an FCIL librarian (besides reviewing job postings to see what current employers are expecting from FCIL . . . [more]

What is the Cultural Commons?

The cultural commons is a vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past. A commons is a kind of property in which more than one person has rights. A commons is a social regime for managing a collectively owned resource.

In writing about art and ideas, Lewis Hyde, in his book titled, Common as Air (2010) states at page 214 “art and ideas, unlike land and houses, belong by nature to a cultural commons, open to all”.

In Imperial China, 900 to 1800, to copy the work . . . [more]

In my last column, I reviewed the uses of seals in transactional documents and the means by which seals could be created in electronic communications. Here I will deal with seals on public or official documents, when they are issued in or converted to electronic form. Contracts to which the Crown happens to be a party are of course transactional documents so fall within the previous topic.

Functional analysis

Public sector seals are placed on documents for a different purpose than the seals on transactional documents. They are not used to show that the state takes the subject matter . . . [more]

A few months ago we had a minor flood in the library. It wasn’t catastrophic, in large part due to the observant eyes of a lawyer browsing our tax section. Nonetheless it was a reminder of how important it is for libraries, regardless of size, to have a disaster recovery plan. In addition to our firm-wide business recovery plan, we now have a specialized library disaster plan.

Key tips for the disaster plan include:

• Keep the plan simple. Guy Robertson, a specialist in disaster planning, recommends that the plan be small and portable; wallet-sized is ideal.
• Clearly delineate responsibilities of