A view from outside the legal industry, IT World Canada’s CIO Canada blog offers a couple of “Quick Hits” to help technology companies trim their legal costs. That section clipped here:

Legal Services: 1) Does your policy or are your relationships with Law Firms segregated according to the type of work and risk? Mid-tier firms charge up to 25% less than the large, national firms 2) Do you negotiate fixed professional fees for routine work? 3) Do you negotiate and cap administrative and incidental rates and fees?

Some interesting insights, on fixed fees, commoditization, market prices for routine work, and . . . [more]

Google News search has changed the way it reports the results of a search, with the consequence that LawTop is misfiring, bringing down photos, though none is asked for, and linking back to Google instead of two the website that originated the story.

I’m taking LawTop down for repairs and reconsideration. I’ll let its users know when it’s up again by posting about it on Slaw. . . . [more]

We’ve had fourteen new additions to lawblogs.ca since our April update:

• Magali Lepage, LL.B
• James Hatton on Licensing
• Nimonik – Environmental Regulations Simplified
• Res Ipsa Loquitur (Pamela Pengelley)
• Environmental, Energy, and Resources Law (Davis LLP)
• Family Law (Davis LLP)
• Democracy Law Blog (Clayton Whitman)
• The Litigator Live (Affleck Greene McMurtry)
• Legal Nurses of Canada
• Canadian HR Reporter (Jeffrey R. Smith)
• Canada Law Blog
• Trade Lawyers Blog
• Donna Neff’s Law Blog
• Toronto Trial Lawyer’s Blog (Allan Rouben)

These probably represent the largest group of additions we’ve had to date. Most blogs tend to operate for a period before emailing us, but . . . [more]

Take a look at the article by that title on the Canoe Tech page.

It questions whether the tendency for people to put reply messages on emails that they are on vacation, or talk about their vacation plans or current locations on Facebook and Twitter is setting themselves up for breakins. Most people would not have a home voice-mail saying they are away, or let newspapers pile up on their doorstep while they are away – so is letting the world know about it by one’s web 2.0 tools any different?.

Take a look at the article and feel . . . [more]

Spring was still in the air this week as Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation sought a special someone to help it evaluate co-investors and investment applications for its Emerging Technologies Fund.

MaRS Innovation and its new CEO Rafi Hofstein were a match, with Hofstein bringing expertise from his previous gigs as President and CEO of Hadasit Ltd., the technology transfer company of the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, Chair of Hadasit BioHolding Ltd., and Vice President Business Development for Ecogen, Inc., among other accomplishments.

Birds do it, bees do it, and now companies are doing it in all . . . [more]

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is encouraging its members not to sign confidentiality clauses/agreements that prevent them from sharing information in their digital licenses. The press release states that openness in agreements will result in better terms and conditions for libraries.

See the ARL press release at http://www.arl.org/news/pr/nondisclosure-5june09.shtm. . . . [more]

Wolfram Alpha is truly amazing, especially in the demo. Google also recently released a search engine that generates structured responses: Google Squared. It is less impressive, but then the examples provided don’t cover engineering calculations that generate snazzy graphics. Anyhow, both fail miserably for the law topics I tried… . . . [more]

You gotta hand it to the Australians. While we’re talking privacy or IP rights, they’re talking about surfers rights! In a bit of a Friday fun link, see Surfing on a sick day is fine, Australian court rules.

Pretty funny story. He obviously had a better defense than the ‘sick leave, schmick leave‘ I came up with. :)

(HT: QuizLaw) . . . [more]

I had a chance this afternoon to pop into the collection of speaker presentations from the CALL conference, making me regret even more that I was not in attendance this year (thanks to Cynthia Simpson for the long e-mail, detailing everything I missed).

The one that really caught my eye was the presentation by Judith Seiss, Embedded Librarians : Our Future or Our Fear? (the link goes to her paper, but there is also a powerpoint deck on the CALL website). At the risk of spoiling the surprise, the paper muses on the future of libraries and librarians, and supports . . . [more]

Flickr is one of the roaring dot com successes… Modest start, Canadian connection, unfortunate trend setter for dropping the ‘e’ in ‘er’, huge sale to Yahoo! And now with an astonishing two billion photographs on board. How to mine this wealth? Well, there are a good many ways — in addition to Flickr’s own search function — it seems, and in today’s fillip I’ll take a very brief look at a few of them.

Compfight helps you find photos you can use — because they’re licensed under one or another Creative Commons license. As well, you can ask it to . . . [more]

In the new world order of feeds and blogs and tweets, we don’t talk about newsletters anymore.

Yes my friends, newsletters still exist! Michel-Adrian posted about finding law firm newsletters and Ted mentioned the CCH Law Student newsletter and we all know about the collection of law firm publications at Lexology.

Although the lines blur with technology, I suggest that to be labeled a newsletter, the information must be sent in hard copy or be made available electronically with some sign up action on the part of the recipient. Though signing up for information by a recipient may seem . . . [more]

As the rest of the world prepares to observe the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, the Chinese government is taking its usual steps to prevent citizens from talking about it. According to various reports, TV broadcasts have gone black when the issue is brought up and articles have been censored and pages ripped out of foreign- and Hong Kong-based newspapers.

In addition, draconian restrictions on internet traffic have been put in place, including keyword-based censoring and active monitoring. The censors have also blocked websites such as Twitter, Flickr (in case the illegal photo gets . . . [more]