In my last column  on 19 August 2011, I commented on the riots that took place in English cities. Soon after the riots, Prime Minister David Cameron, stated his conviction that the riots were the result of a broken society and gangs, which he quickly moved to declare war on. Since then, government, academics and the voluntary and community sectors have been performing an autopsy on the riots and this post outlines with regard to young people’s involvement, some preliminary findings; asks what we can learn from the past and overseas, and what investigations are currently underway.

Ministry of Justice . . . [more]

If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. That is the old-fashioned premise behind a relatively new web marketing strategy known as remarketing or retargeting. And if you have had the experience of seeing ads for a specific company or product popping up over and over again as you surf the web, chances are you have already experienced it firsthand.

We are all familiar with the abandoned shopping cart – going partway through the process of selecting and configuring that perfect something [insert your own shopping proclivity here] on a retailer’s website before bailing out just . . . [more]

Disability insurance is the most complicated type of personal insurance you can own. Even experienced insurance agents can find it challenging, so I pity the poor lawyer that attempts to find enough time in the day to read and understand their policy.

If you’ve read my prior columns, you already know that there is a huge financial risk of going without disability insurance. As a result, it’s extremely important understand how your disability insurance will pay a benefit in the event of a claim. Without getting into too many details, here are 4 questions you should ask about your disability . . . [more]

Lexum has recently conducted an analysis of the underlying technology behind Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet and other “social” buttons. The analysis revealed that, if used in the way prescribed by Facebook, Google, Twitter et al., these buttons create some significant privacy issues for Webmasters and their users.

Before we get to the privacy issues however, it is appropriate to explain how these buttons work. Adding a Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet, Google +1, LinkedIn Share or any other sharing button to one’s Web site is a relatively easy affair. The companies that distribute them have dedicated pages . . . [more]

The Globe and Mail reported recently (November 12, 2011) that only 30% of judges appointed by the Conservative government since 2006 have been women. (So far in 2011 just under 20% of appointments have been women.) This is a significant decrease from the last year of the Liberal government when 40% of their judicial appointments were women. A spokesperson for the Justice Department stated that the number of appointments reflects the number of female applicants.

In the past, it has been argued that the number of female federally appointed judges (32% in total) has been similar to the . . . [more]

[with Meredith James]

Is it acceptable for legal pollution levels to be higher in some neighbourhoods than in others? In the US, pollution is often concentrated in areas of colour, including the famous Cancer Alley. Changing this is called “environmental justice”, and is an important priority for US EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

(Ecojustice has framed the same issue as a Charter challenge in its work on behalf of two members of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. It argues that Ministry of the Environment ongoing approval of multiple sources of pollution surrounding their Sarnia reserve violates their rights to life, liberty and . . . [more]

Recent activity in the legal informatics world has been characterized by numerous efforts to make legal documents and technologies more openly available, and to make legal information more interoperable. Here are some examples:

• Núria Casellas, Joan-Josep Vallbé, and Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute discussed their recent work applying Linked Data technology to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), in entitled , presented at the Open Government Knowledge 2011 conference. The paper described their experiments with marking up the text of the CFR as RDF Linked Data, marking up the CFR Thesaurus of Indexing

The “Great Encyclopedias” of Legal Research – Part III

This is the third of a series of posts that were prepared following a request by Professor Daniel Poulin to explain the nature and purpose of “Halsburys” and the “C.E.D.” to his seminar on legal information at the University of Montreal. The views expressed are the personal opinion of the writer.

ON THE SHOULDERS OF OTHERS

The Fourth Western and Ontario Editions of the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest are the newest publications to follow the Halsburys Model in Canada. While essentially simple revisions of Titles published in previous editions, the Fourth Editions . . . [more]

What can you do with a 9 volt battery? Not much, it seems.

Whenever we switch between daylight savings and standard time, we get reminders to change the batteries in our smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. My carbon monoxide detectors take AA batteries, but the smoke detectors take the square edged 9V batteries.

It’s a pain disposing of batteries because they are household hazardous waste and need to be taken to a household hazardous waste depot. So I have a big container of batteries just waiting for me to take them to a depot. (I will get around to . . . [more]

This post has its origins in a particular incident that compelled me to share some further thoughts with the firm’s managing partner.

Dear Managing Partner:

In our strategic planning committee discussions of earlier this week, we heard from one senior partner about the importance of capitalizing on an opportunity to open a new office in another State. He informed us about this lawyer he knew who could bring us a $2 million book of business. I asked how that would augment or support the firm’s core area of industry strength. We learned that it had nothing to do with the . . . [more]

I like to encourage lawyers to ‘repurpose.’ Repurposing is using what you have already done (including legal work) in new and different ways to attract the attention of a new audience or to provide valuable reminders to your existing audience. Lawyers can leverage what they are already doing to get more mileage out of their work. For example: taking a recent case and creating a case study or turning a CLE presentation into an article for an industry trade publication.

Re-issue existing content in a new form

Another way to repurpose your old content and give it new . . . [more]

As you can imagine, the personalities you may meet over the course of a career in criminal law can be – ahem – colourful. I have frequently marvelled at some of the outrageous things I have seen defendants and complainants say and do but often forgotten in the rich cast of characters that populate a criminal trial is the crown witness. Commonly relegated to side-show status, in many trials a crown witness deserves top billing on the docket marquee along with the accused and complainant. This is particularly so for that most intriguing of animals – the confidential informant (“C.I.”). . . . [more]