I’ve joked previously that the Google crowdsource traffic feature was a free ambulance chaser application.

A British firm has developed a iPhone application specifically intended to document all the details necessary for future litigation, the iPhone Car Incident Assistant application (iCIA). The Times Online reports:

It appears ambulance chasing has gone digital after Bott & Company, a law firm in Manchester that specialises in personal injury claims, has developed an application for the iPhone that prompts people involved in an accident to record insurance and witness details, take multiple photographs, store GPS information and click through to a

I don’t know how long this has been going on, but some courts are sending judgments to CanLII with hyperlinked tables of contents. Plain old text TOCs are nothing new, of course: long — long, long. . . — judgments pretty much demand them. But courts seem to have discovered that, because they create and submit their judgments to CanLII in MS Word format, it’s fairly easy to construct a hyperlinked table of contents.

A search for [table of contents] turns up recent “hot” TOCs from Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, and Ontario.

This is, of course, . . . [more]

A notice to the profession on the Ontario Court of Appeal website reads:

Electronic Delivery of Copies of Reasons for Judgment

On January 1, 2010 the court will modernize its procedure for delivery of copies of its reasons for judgment to counsel and litigants.

Rather than requiring litigants or counsel to attend at the registry office of the court to obtain a paper copy of the decision, the court will send a PDF copy of the signed judgment by e-mail to those counsel and litigants who have provided an e-mail address. Copies will continue to be available for those parties

The Wall Street Journal reports today:

Thomson Reuters Corp. (TRI) said Thursday it will cut 240 jobs in its legal businesses, with layoffs focused on locations in North America.

The company employs about 13,000 people worldwide in its businesses providing data to legal professionals. That represents about a quarter of Thomson Reuters’ 53,000 global workforce. In 2008, its legal divisions, which include West, FindLaw, Elite, Carswell and its legal publishing unit, represented roughly $3.5 billion in revenue.

The legal business is part of the financial data and news provider’s professional division, which sells information to professionals in health care, science . . . [more]

“The Internet is an open door to knowledge, entertainment, communication – and exploitation.”

This quote is in R. v. Legare, 2009 SCC 56, Justice Fish writing for the unanimous majority (at para 1) (emphasis in original).

While I have no wish to write about the facts in this particular matter, it is interesting that a decision about exploitation should be published by the SCC in December.

Unfortunately, the holiday season is often rife with frauds. A grandson in jail scam was recently reported and McAfee has posted an article in their newsroom titled the 12 Scams of Christmas . . . [more]

The New York Times has released a viewer for its newspaper called the Times Skimmer, which displays stories in a simple grid format for use on small screens such as those on smart phones. Readers are able to choose stories from a menu of Times topical sections and categories. Keyboard shortcuts allow readers to thumb their way more efficiently through the news. As well, they can choose from seven different formats. Click on any of the thumbnails below to see an enlarged version of the format.

The Skimmer isn’t the best way to read the Times on an iPhone: . . . [more]

Many North American law firms have developed their intranet portals using Microsoft SharePoint 2007 software (soon to be released in a new 2010 version).

There have been numerous posts on SLAW discussing SharePoint; in addition, Microsoft has an industry page for law firms that provides some useful links to case studies.

There are several reasons why many law firms are using SharePoint:

– Content aggregator/organizer: SharePoint can be used to create a true intranet portal, being the interface – via a web browser – between the user an a variety of data sources such as your document,

In late October, Master Ronna Brott of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice issued a highly pointed decision that encapsulates Canadian courts’ unwillingness to entertain spoliation disputes before trial and, to some extent, to tolerate the increasingly common problem of lost records and things.

In Cerkownyk v. Ontario Place, Master Brott denied a request for production of a personal computer that a plaintiff in a personal injury claim said she had thrown out because it had broken down after litigation commenced. In dismissing the motion, Master Brott admonished the defendant for proceeding with its production request despite the plaintiff’s . . . [more]

That’s according to Google in a statement made this afternoon. Jonathan Lister who heads up Google’s Canadian operations made the following comments to CP in relation to a spate of job vacancy adverts that Google is placing to recruit new staff:

Google is now looking for a new head of industry, software engineers, administrative assistants and other staff to help take advantage of Canada’s base of extraordinarily plugged-in Internet users

I have been thinking a lot lately about video and how it might be of use in law. I blogged about Law Marketing: YouTube Milestones and the launch of law video site LegalTube earlier this month. Now allow me to introduce you to my new favourite video site, Magma.

Magma is the brainchild of Andrew Baron in New York, and developed by his team at Rocketboom, known as Internet video blogging pioneers. Not meant to replace YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and the like, this site is a place to discover and aggregate videos from those other sites. I . . . [more]

We’re late to the party on this one, which has been bouncing around the internet over the last week, starting with a claim (by Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a lawyer and a candidate for the office of Texas attorney general) in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, picked up by the Huffington Post, that a 2005 amendment to the Texas Constitution effectively wiped out legal marriage there. The thing that has Radnofsky fussed — and scornful — is Paragraph (b) of Section 32 of Article 1 (Bill of Rights), which reads as follows:

(b) This state or a political

Given the current news stories arising out of the Commonwealth leaders meeting and the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill introduced last month, I thought it might be useful for Slaw readers to have access to the actual language of the bill. (I guess it’s too much to ask the mainstream media outlets to either quote the legislation at length, in cases such as this, or provide a link to a web location for the text of legislation under discussion.)

A PDF photocopy of the bill is available on the Box Turtle Bulletin site, as is an HTML text version. . . . [more]