Two recent interesting articles on knowledge management in law firms you might find useful:

• Knowledge management: The number of knowledge management lawyers is on the rise, but the field is still working out some kinks (Lawyers Weekly) by Milton Kiang, June 26, 2009 issue

  Interviews with various Canadian KM directors, talking about where we are with knowledge management as well as the growing role of lawyers in KM. Quoting Blakes‘ KM director Marcia Cooper:

  It’s considered a necessary function, for the firm to work effectively, for the firm to deliver value and best client services. Even in these

Synesketch feels your pain, and expresses it as an abstract drawing. Just feed it some text to start it off.

Synesketch is a result of a research that spreads out through several diverse fields – from natural language processing techniques based on WordNet, across Ekman’s research of emotions, to color psychology, visual design, data visualizations, and affective computing.

Produced in Belgrade, by Uroš Krčadinac and others, the potential applications are interesting.

The author also suggests it could be useful for a chat program, but that strikes me as pretty abitious, considering that it is the lack of context that can . . . [more]

In this world of super fast document retrieval it is sometimes important to remember the basics. I was just asked for a decision where the style of cause and the citation both contained errors. The “help I can’t find this case” is usually one of my favourite problems. This Thursday after a mid-week Canada Day off is a lot like a Monday.

The citation that was given to me was a 1983 case from the O.L.R.s – obviously that was incorrect as the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviationreports that the Ontario Law Reports was published between 1901-1931 only. Rather . . . [more]

In honour of Canada Day I share with you a video introducing a new book about the Six String Nation project by writer, radio host and producer Jowi Taylor. I was recently fortunate to hear Jowi speak and had the opportunity to try out the guitar. The longer story is over on my personal blog.

Happy Canada Day!

. . . [more]

The Global Legal Monitor, published by the Law Library of Congress in Washington, is a publication that provides regular updates on legal developments from around the world on a vast array of topics.

Content comes from official sources, judicial decisions, and other legal news sources.

As of last September, it has offered an RSS feed for updates for all news stories.

It now also offers dozens and dozens of free RSS feeds broken down by topic and/or jurisdiction. . . . [more]

As covered by CBC News earlier today, Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner Gary Dickson expressed his concern about an increase in privacy breach complaints in the province in his 2008-2009 Annual Report. His office opened 62 new breach of privacy investigations over a recent 12 month period. According to today’s Press Release from the Commissioner, Dickson said:

this explosion in the volume of breach of privacy complaints however constitutes the single most significant change in our caseload since the appointment of a full-time Information and Privacy Commissioner in 2003.

He called for improvements in the areas of leadership, . . . [more]

I have been “gone fishing” for the last few days so most of the week’s developments were in a catch-all post that ranged from Sanofi’s further branching out into generics to a Dalhousie study on global fisheries management.

There were a couple of big catches this week: 

• Venture-captialists seem to have reeled in some new funds — the bills in Congress to reauthorize the SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) program allow companies backed by VCs to participate.
• And Ogilvy Renault (my home-away-from-home) landed the Golden Law Award as Canada’s best law firm for the second year

Microsoft is holding a roundtable meeting this afternoon in the UK to answer questions about their new search engine Bing. The meeting starts at 1900 UK time (I’m calculating that at 2 pm ET). The discussion on Twitter can be tracked here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=meetbing (no Twitter password necessary). If you are on Twitter, the tag being used is #meetbing. Questions may be addressed to various people including @karenblakeman, @Philbradley and @leggetter to relay to Microsoft during the meeting.

See related Slaw post: Microsoft’s Bing Goes Live (June 1, 2009) . . . [more]

On June 26, 2009 Elections Canada released its report and related surveys 40th General Election Evaluations, assessing our last federal election held on October 14, 2008. It shows this was the lowest voter turnout since 1962 at 58.8 percent of registered voters, a trend consistent with that seen in other jurisdictions around the world. Reasons cited for not voting include being out of town, being too busy, apathy, and a dislike for all candidates.

The Evaluations look at the last election from various points of view including those of voters, candidates and election administrators. In addition to increasing voter . . . [more]

South of the Border, the Council on Library in Information Resources has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore what de-classified intelligence gathering and analysis techniques have to offer the humanities, and especially humanities computing.

From the press release:

The confluence of digital conversion activities and technological advances allows researchers in the humanities to examine questions that require scale and computational power. Intelligence-gathering agencies are a potentially excellent source for tools, resources, and methodologies that have direct bearing on and applicability to contemporary digital humanities research because of the similarity in the methodological challenges, namely,

The conviction of Robert William Pickton was upheld today in a two-one split decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal. Here is the judgment from the court, subject to some redaction because of the publication bans.

In a second ruling yesterday, the court unanimously accepted the Crown’s appeal of a decision by Justice Williams to sever the 26 counts of first degree murder into six and twenty as well as errors of law in three rulings on evidence and errors in the jury charge. But the Crown acknowledged that a new trial on 26 first-degree murder charges . . . [more]

I was in an interesting discussion today with colleagues on whether there has been a proliferation of the citation of unreported judgments in judicial decisions in Canada and whether this was a good or bad thing.

The context is this: in the good old days of print case law reporters (e.g., Dominion Law Reports or Ontario Reports) when life was much simpler, qualified editors chose to publish only the significant or important decisions. As such, you knew that when lawyers and judges cited precedent to print case law reporters there was some semblance of authority or quality in the precedent. . . . [more]