Data about individuals can be a valuable resource. Organizations holding personal information often aggregate or anonymize that data in order to gain valuable information on various trends. From a privacy perspective, that’s perfectly acceptable, as individuals can no longer be identified. Or can they?

The caveat is that is has been known for some time that it is not as easy to anonymize individual data as one might think. Reidentification of individuals by comparing anonymized data to other sources of data has been surprisingly easy in some cases.

Slashdot points to an ars technica article that talks about a paper . . . [more]

This is a great time to be a Canadian labour and employment lawyer, but Canadian law schools now employ fewer full-time labour and employment professors than they have in decades. This post highlights the issue and invites comment about the relationship between our law schools and the maintenance of a vibrant and well-qualified labour and employment bar.

The declining faculty issue first caught my attention when, in February, York University professor David Doorey published a blog post entitled “Employment Law Practice is Booming, But Someone Should Tell the Law Schools.” Professor Doorey noted the significance of labour and employment issues . . . [more]

Just when you thought every niche had been filled, up comes an area of practice to remind you that this is a more wrinkled world than we are typically aware and the practice of law is a force second only to life itself, perhaps, when it comes to occupying all imaginable spaces: there is a law of algae.

It occupies a website, too, of course, which, appropriately is LawOfAlgae.com, a.k.a. Stoel Rives LLP, a Minneapolis firm specializing in renewable energy. Which is where algae comes in. Evidently it is an up-and-coming source of biomass from which to make . . . [more]

The August 2009 issue [pdf] of the Ontario Bar Association’s magazine Briefly Speaking/EnBref has an article by David Whelan, Manager, Legal Information for the Law Society of Upper Canada on using free and inexpensive legal research tools called “Right Size Your Research”–see pages 24 and 25 [pdf]. I like that he emphasizes texts as a starting point, and of course endorses use of law libraries as a helpful resource. This is a nice round-up of resources for those looking to economize, especially for legal researchers who do not already have flat rate subscriptions to major online legal research . . . [more]

Angela Swan makes a number of thought provoking comments regarding the features of the modern law of contract in her treatise on “Canadian Contract Law”. If anything, the comments should be required reading for the followers of legal print and online publishing in Canada.

Among other things, Angela asserts that recent developments in legal publishing have had a significant impact on substantive law. Specifically she says that the established “principles” of the law of contract have been undermined by two connected developments in the world of legal publishing:

first, by the proliferation of specialized law reports; and,

second, through the . . . [more]

Harvard University has launched DASH — Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard — a repository that currently makes available free the work of “[m]ore than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” according to the press release. At the moment there are some 1,500 papers available in the repository (some requiring that you register with DASH, for reasons that are not made clear on the site).

Of particular interest to Slaw readers is the fact that Harvard Law School is a participant and has lodged 64 articles with the . . . [more]

I have been wearing my knowledge management hat a lot lately. I am working with our internal departments and groups to identify process pain points and find ways to tweak our existing systems to enable more intuitive information sharing. This process make me think about … processes.

Like many organizations, we sometimes fall down on laying out our processes for things. This often means that one group thinks another group is responsible for a task that they are really responsible for. Beyond obvious internal communication issues, I interpret my KM roll as “facilitator of good processes”.

I went looking for . . . [more]

There’s an interesting article today on Law.com about what impact the recession is having on the situation of law librarians in the United States. “Law Librarians: ‘No More Sacred Cows’” by Alan Cohen is based on the 2009 American Lawyer survey of law librarians. To see the actual findings of the full survey you’ll have to be a subscriber, but Cohen hits the high spots for you.

Library budgets have shrunk in 46% of cases, compared to 9% in 2008 / The expectation from the firms is that every resource must show a decent ROI. / New software

The free legal information portal CanLII (Canadian Legal Information Institute) announced today that it has added point-in-time legislation databases for Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island.

“Users of these provinces’ consolidated Acts and regulations now have access to versions as they came into force since 2004 or so, as well as to current versions updated weekly from governments’ websites.”

CanLII now offers point-in-time legislation databases for the federal and all provincial governments and plans to add similar collections for the legislation of Canada’s three Northern territories soon.

The databases make it possible to search a legislative text as . . . [more]

Hallelujah! Can it be true? I have been arguing for years that all of these standard form contracts that are being forced upon us in the 21st century – are about as far from being “offer + acceptance + consideration” as one can get! First, they force the whole contract on you – then there’s a provision in it that they can change the terms at any time without notice to you! Well apparently the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association has come up with a new Code of Conduct which encourages its members to provide contract language which allows users to . . . [more]

This is a reminder that we should be brief in making our point.

We know this, but often can’t resist saying more than we should. Our tendency to ramble is partly a function of ego. We’re smart, we know things and we want others to know we know things whether helpful or not. It’s also a function of fear. When we don’t trust our argument we layer on lesser alternatives that can harm more than help. Finally, it can be because we’re lazy or time pressed. Long and rambling is easy while focused is hard.

The “case for short” is . . . [more]

I hate being reminded of the fallibility of technology. I love the confidence I feel from noting up a case using an electronic database; I hate it when I find that (contrary to the results of my electronic search) the case has in fact been overturned on appeal. I recently experienced a similar feeling when using the federal government’s laws website. 

Perhaps I’m spoiled by the ability in electronic database programs like QuickLaw and WestLaw to step from “hit” to “hit” in my search results. Or maybe I’m just lazy. When I am looking for something on a webpage . . . [more]