A recent WSL Blog posting on legal outsourcing to India (a topic covered quite extensively on SLAW), reminded me I was going to mention the panel that spoke on this topic a few weeks back at the Canadian Law and Technology Forum in Toronto. One speaker discussed offshore outsourcing and the other speaker discussed outsourcing domestically to Canadian lawyers.

The offshore outsourcing speaker was lawyer Gavin Birer of Legalwise Outsourcing Inc. (who wrote a good introductory article on the topic here on SLAW earlier this summer). Given good high-speed Internet, secure communications and a body of qualified lawyers in India, . . . [more]

While on Twitter I recently came across Mari Moreshead who does “client services and community management” for CourtCanada.com. I had never heard of CourtCanada and so checked their website and asked if I might interview her for the purpose of reporting back to Slaw readers.

CourtCanada was started in 2006 by former bankruptcy lawyer Gregory Azeff who is the company’s President and Chairman of the Board of Directors. CourtCanada is currently comprised of two services:

InSolve – a bankruptcy case management system, first beta tested in February 2007 and released in final version January 2008. For cases in the . . . [more]

Every year a ‘Vendors Forum’ is held as part of the annual meeting of the Canadian Law Libraries Association (CALL). In recent years the forum has evolved into a series of simple product presentations by the legal publishers. The most recent meeting held in the spring in Saskatoon was no exception.

In earlier years, the forum was a bit more exciting with panels of representatives of legal publishers frequently under the gun as they were asked pointed questions on the legal information issues of the day. Some thought that the questions were too tough and that the forums themselves lacked . . . [more]

I just arrived home and am catching up on the terrorist attack on Mumbai this evening (tomorrow morning in India).

BlogTalkRadio SAJA (South Asian Journalist Association) are holding web-based phone-in discussions every 12 hours, 10 – 11:30 am/pm ET or 8:30 – 10:00 am/pm Indian time. The guests on the first call (evening of Nov. 26 in Canada) included Benjamin Piven, former Fulbright Scholar in Mumbai and Suketu Mehta, author, “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.” Author Rohit Bhargava has posted the details on his Influential Marketing Blog.

For those wishing to follow the latest news, some . . . [more]

That’s the title of an article worth reading at social computing magazine.com. (And speaking of social media, this article came to my attention via a Twitter post by Mathew Ingram.)

The article says:

KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0.

And the most hilarious part is that most of the combatants don’t even realize they are in a war. They think they are loosely-aligned and working towards the same ends,

I am normally skeptical when it comes to “vendor” panels or demonstrations, but Rick Borstein of Adobe did such an entertaining demo of Adobe 9.0 for lawyers at the Canadian Law & Technology Forum last week that was also useful and showed a number of improvements to the product.

His blog – Adobe for Legal Professionals – provides lots of great tips (I learned more about the annoying problem when OCR’ing with Adobe when you get this message: “Acrobat could not perform recognition (OCR) on this page because the page contains renderable text.” – Rick mentioned that the newest version . . . [more]

On Friday, Google launched its “SearchWiki,” a way of customizing your own search results. I gather that they’re rolling it out according to some pattern, which means you may not see this feature in your results for a few days yet.

What you will see is illustrated below:

If, for example, Slaw hadn’t come up top in my results in a search for “slaw,” I could have moved it up there with the arrow, and ever after it would be first. For me. Which is what I don’t quite get: why exactly would I want to fix the results of . . . [more]

Everything I know about social media I learned from PR professionals in my brief career in that field prior to law.

Neville Hobson (a social media guru in the U.K. who hosts one of my first podcast subscriptions, For Immediate Release) launched an RSS feed yesterday that combined over 60 of the best PR blogs around the world.

He based the selection on a PR Network previously created by David Jones, a local PR guru based in Toronto (he also hosts one of my other first podcasts, InsidePR).

I thought it was a great idea, so I . . . [more]

Slaw is pleased to announce that the Toronto Opinions Group (TOROG) has agreed to make public on Slaw memos and precedents that may prove to be helpful to others. The Toronto Opinions Group consists of a group of lawyers, primarily practising with the Toronto offices of the larger Canadian law firms, with an interest in third party (or transaction) opinion practice. TOROG meets regularly to review current opinion issues with a view, where appropriate, to discussing problems, assessing best practices and developing common approaches to opinion issues and opinion language. It does not involve itself in specific transactions or opinion . . . [more]

Yesterday I attended and spoke at Day 2 of the Canadian Law & Technology Forum in Toronto. There were several new products I learned about in addition to taking away a few new ideas, and I will try to post to SLAW some of my thoughts on the conference over the next few days on topics discussed (including outsourcing of legal services, both domestically and abroad; e-discovery; litigation case management software, really cool stuff from Adobe 9.0, and records management).

My paper and presentation was entitled “Effective Litigation Knowledge Management” in which I first discussed the explicit knowledge that litigators . . . [more]

Links to a lengthy interview with Richard Susskind (parts 1 and 2) who continues to provoke with his explanations of how the English market for legal services is dramatically different from that in the United States, and how the Legal Services Act presages the future on this side of the Atlantic too.

One of the unplanned advantages of federal systems appears to be the way in which they militate against reforms of professional monopolies.

Good plugs for The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services , Richard’s book which will be imminently published by OUP.

The most . . . [more]

Google introduced a really clever website over the last few days. Although they’re always getting flak for all the personal info they gather from you, there really are some pretty interesting things they can do with all that information. Like make the Centre for Disease Control obsolete.

OK, maybe that’s a bit too hyperbolic, but their new program has managed to closely approximate the CDC’s tracking of flu bugs, simply through aggregating all the web searches people do on the topic. Apparently the number of people who google “Neo Citran” or other similar terms gives you a great idea . . . [more]