A lot of attention has been paid lately to ‘cybersecurity’, much of it aimed at system-wide security or ‘critical infrastructure’ security, but a good deal also to individual questions of authentication, identity management, vulnerability to hacking/phishing/malware and so on. Among the solutions at the individual level, one finds suggestions about using locked-down versions of documents in PDF, various degrees of encryption and so on.

To what extent is the use of these measures problematic for people who rely on technology to make information accessible to them because of physical or other disabilities? The simplest example is the inability of text . . . [more]

The Quebec Bar Association has teamed up with Montreal radio station CIBL 101,5 and the Juripop legal clinic to organize a weekly radio debate program called Droit de Cité.

Every week, 2 teams of university debaters face off on a controversial public topic. Members of the public get to vote online to determine which team wins. All shows are archived on the Droit de Cité website.

The show started in the second half of October and will last 31 weeks.

Topics so far have included:

• Should Quebec set up its own firearms registry?
• Should the City of Montreal install

There’s an item of interest in the federal government’s Weekly Checklist of publications, namely a brief by James R. Robertson, General Counsel, and Erin Virgint of the Legal and Legislative Affairs Division, Criminal Charges and Parliamentarians [PDF], a publication from the Library of Parliament.

The report looks at three areas where criminal charges or convictions might be thought to have an impact: eligibility to run for office, removal from office, and expulsion from Parliament.

The first area is governed by the Parliament of Canada Act and the Canada Elections Act, as well as the Constitution Act, 1867 with respect . . . [more]

CanLII has just released a report [PDF] of the results of its 2012 survey of the legal profession as to their use of and satisfaction with their service. A brief synopsis of the results is available on the CanLII website, but the main findings are as follows:

• nearly 9 in 10 respondents have used CanLII in the past 12 months
• 56% of respondents start their case law research with CanLII
• 45% of respondents report an increase in their use of CanLII relative to commercial alternatives, while only 3% report a decrease. The balance report no change.

The Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. occasionally publishes reports that compare the laws on a given theme in a number of countries.

Earlier this month, the Library published Bioethics Legislation in Selected Countries:

“This report examines the field of bioethics from an international and regional legal perspective. It focuses on major international law documents such as the United Nations Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and UNESCO declarations on human cloning and the human genome. Coverage of regional legal instruments includes the Council of Europe Convention on HumanRights and Biomedicine (the Oviedo Convention) and its Protocols

The most recent Humble Bundle DRM-free distribution offer, the Humble eBook Bundle, closed a day or so after a two-week run. Here is some background:

What is the Humble Bundle? It is our take on digital distribution, where anyone can pay any amount of money they like for great DRM-free cross-platform products. (Previous Humble Bundles distributed music and video games.)

The result of the two-week ebook bundle distribution: 84,219 downloads of a DRM-free cross-platform bundle of ebooks, worth $1,202,871.71, with an average contribution of $14.28. Some of the proceeds will go to the authors, some will be directed to . . . [more]

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an intriguing story on legal fees and the changes that a client-driven marketplace has had on the way that firms bill not merely for their professional fees, but also for disbursements.

For example, the article comments on ways in which technology has transformed processes which would previously have resulted in charges to clients:

To be sure, technology has swept some items off law firm bills entirely. Before the advent of email, law firms spent small fortunes on couriers to hustle documents across town or out to the airport. Lawyers now upload digital briefs and memos

by Tiffany Wong

On September 17, 2012, I presented at the APLIC-ABPAC and Parliamentary Researchers Conference held at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario on the subject of using social media for legal research. I quickly discovered while facilitating discussion through a sample research question that I was not quite able to convince a room full of skeptical parliamentary librarians into using Wikipedia for their research needs, namely research requests on any myriad of topics from current Members of Parliament (MPPs). Understandably, like many lawyers, parliamentary researchers are concerned that the information found on social media is:

• Unreliable
• Changes often
• Out-of-date

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) have co-published a white paper called The New Librarian that looks at the new skills that today’s information professionals need to have or acquire to do well and survive. It is full of examples of how law librarians in different contexts are facing up to the challenges of constant change.

In her introduction, Kate Hagan, Executive Director of AALL, writes:

This joint white paper acknowledges the strategic alliance that has developed between the law librarian and technologist in driving efficient and effective legal information management. The

Lexum, the company that puts the opinions of the Supreme Court of Canada online, has updated the judgments page. The new page shows off Lexum’s product Decisia, software to assist courts and tribunals to put their decisions online.

The new page offers you a few recent decisions and a few news releases, with the option in each case of browsing through the entire database. Judgments can be browsed by date, case name or subject. Sophisticated searching is also possible, of course.

The only suggestion I’d make (after a very few minutes of using the Decisia layout) is that . . . [more]

A must see for law librarians came across my Twitter stream yesterday. ILTA and AALL have partnered to produce a white paper called The New Librarian. The content is great with articles by some folks well known in the legal information community. One of the really cool things is that the paper was created with Uberflip.

Check it out. . . . [more]

The Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) has made a significant archive of videos available online. A consortium of for-profit cable companies, CPAC provides free, not-for-profit video coverage of the daily grind of federal political and legal life in Canada, filming Parliamentary debates, commission hearings, and Supreme Court hearings.

At the moment it’s not possible to know the exact scope of the archive — at least, I couldn’t find much in the way of precise explanatory material about dates and coverage. The viewer can choose to enter the archive via one of a number of tabs: Latest, House, Senate, By Show, . . . [more]