Absence may make the heart grow fonder (the “liquor is quicker” crowd would claim it’s absinthe that really does the fonding), but it certainly leaves us holding some strange states in English. In this fillip I want to take a look at one group of things that, well, aren’t there.

As you know, the language has a number of ways of bundling a lack into a word. For one thing, there’s “lack” itself. Thus, lacklustre, for instance. Then there are the prefixes dis-, de-, in-, dys-, un-, and the like, that can flip something . . . [more]

I’ve been thinking about mobile commerce recently, in part because I am on a panel at the Canadian IT Law Association annual conference tomorrow entitled “Mobile Business: Industry Trends, Public Policy Issues and Legal Implications” along with Jacob Glick of Google, and Eric Gross of Gowlings.

m-commerce is already here, and will grow significantly in the near future. Consider that mobile devices are outselling PC’s.

North America is not on the leading edge of this. Places like Japan and Korea, and parts of Europe are ahead of us.

As examples of what can be done, take a look at these . . . [more]

Given the recent interest in whether the nominees for the Supreme Court should be bilingual, I thought readers might be interested in a dispassionate overview from those great folks at the Legal and Legislative Affairs Division of the Parliamentary Information and Research Service: “Bilingualism in the Federal Courts,” [PDF] by Marie-Ève Hudon.

This document analyzes the rules that govern the use of both official languages in the federal courts, that is, the courts established by Parliament. It gives a brief overview of Canada’s court system before examining the legislative, constitutional and judicial framework of bilingualism in the federal

Hey, you greyheads, remember back in the day? You wrote letters. Or, if you were lazy, you read letters that others wrote to you. Now, for those of you who still have a spring in your step after you go walking, let me elaborate: the national service that now brings flyers and the occasional bill to your door would once upon a time bring you news from friends and relations, a kind of Facebook on feet, if you will. Often these epistolary efforts were longer than emails, done in a personal cursive, and, as a bonus they never needed to . . . [more]

It’s an obvious feature of practice that a lawyer’s professional interest will generally gravitate towards the big, the powerful, and the rich — there’s a business side to lawyering, after all, (though I’m not yet prepared to agree with those who say, reductively, that practice is a business), and, as a long-gone uncle used to opine, “It’s gotta be fed and it don’t eat hay.” That said, it’s good, I think, even for those in big towers and Jimmy Choo shoes, to reflect on small wrongs and rightings from time to time, the matters at the bottom of the justice . . . [more]

ITBusiness.ca had a story yesterday about a Humber College professor named Tom Green who uses @tomgreen as his twitter name. Fans of comedian Tom Green have been campaigning him to give his twitter name to Tom Green the comedian, who uses @tomgreenlive. 

While it is an amusing story, and professor Tom Green has every right to keep his twitter handle, there is a lesson here.

Even if you are not a social media fan, and you don’t have an immediate desire to tweet or update your facebook status, it is a good idea to at least register your name . . . [more]

For the record here is the Prime Minister’s announcement of Justice Andromache Karakatsanis and Justice Michael J. Moldaver as the Government’s nominees for the Supreme Court of Canada. Both nominees have agreed to appear at an ad hoc parliamentary committee to answer questions of Members of Parliament on October 19. Blatchford’s reaction in the National Post is here, the Post’s editorial reaction and CTV’s story.

Justice Moldaver’s CV and Justice Karakatsanis’ CV

  . . . [more]

Hats off to the judges present and past (four retired judges) of the Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal who are giving up evenings in November to provide educational sessions for islanders on PEI’s courts, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, public law, criminal law, civil law and family law. It will also include a tour of the Sir Louis Henry Davies Law Courts building where participants can see the courtrooms, holding cells, law library and public areas.

The free sessions will take place November 8, 15 and 22 starting at 6:45 p.m. and registration is limited to 50 people. . . . [more]

Persons Day this year falls on Tuesday, commemorating 82 years since women were made persons under the law following the Persons Case. LEAF, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, is holding its annual gala Persons Day breakfast in cities across Canada over a number of mornings (Ottawa’s was already held on Friday). There is still time to book your ticket. Last year 5,000 people across Canada attended the breakfast, with 800 in Toronto alone.

The Government of Canada’s Status of Women Canada website has additional information about the “Famous Five” and the Persons Case at http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/dates/gg/case-affaire-eng.html (English) and  . . . [more]

The moon today is waning gibbous and 95% of full — whether or not you can see it through the rain or past the city lights where you are. I suspect that, if you’re at all like me, you don’t often look up and note old luna’s phase. Nor, I suspect again, are you likely able to say just by looking at the image on the right whether the moon’s on its way to or from full. That fact struck me the other day; not only have we in the city — and, I dare say, in nearly all of . . . [more]

The OIPC BC released Guidelines for Social Media Background Checks yesterday. The Guidelines were developed “to help organizations and public bodies navigate social media background checks and privacy laws.”

The Guidelines outline the privacy risks associated with the use of social media to screen and monitor current and prospective employees, volunteers and candidates, including:

The collection of potentially inaccurate personal information;

The collection of too much or irrelevant personal information;

The inadvertent collection of third-party personal information; and

The overreliance on consent for the collection of personal information that may not be reasonable in the circumstances.

The Guidelines also provide . . . [more]

This morning’s Intapp Law Firm Risk Management Blog features a piece I recently published in Managing Partner Magazine in London entitled: “Managing Screens,” which explores the tension between tightly controlling access to sensitive client (and firm) information and fostering internal sharing, which I characterize as: “the potential of exploiting collective professional knowledge.”

“What has changed is that, in the past decade, so-called ethical screens have proliferated within law firms. Ethical screens are what used to be called Chinese walls: institutional mechanisms combined with technological safeguards and personal undertakings which ensure that confidential information is tightly protected.”