I know this is Gavin’s beat, but the press this week has had a lot of activity in the outsourcing arena.

First news is Microsoft’s announcement today that it’s following Rio Tinto’s lead and route a fair amount of routine legal work to Gurgaon. Microsoft has been outsourcing basic intellectual property and patent maintenance to CPA Global since the mid-Noughties with around 70 CPA staff. However, this is a separate new arrangement for general legal work.

Second development goes in the other direction. CPA is inspecting sites in Northern England for its own outsourcing centre to take on 10-20 . . . [more]

Last summer I spoke to Simon Fodden to see what he thought about my doing a blog on the Law Commission of Ontario website (oh, how so obvious the answer must have seemed!). He encouraged me to do it and offered me a chance to practice by posting on Slaw (“try it out, no obligation”). Of course, it wasn’t long before I received automatic emails telling me it was my day to post. I’ve enjoyed posting to Slaw, but now it’s time to fly out of the nest and post directly to the new LCO website. Thank you, Simon, for . . . [more]

Well, there are a number of important issues coming to the surface as the Olympics open. Created by Canadians for Canadians, these issues are not Olympics-related, but are Olympics-occasioned.

• Most promenently, the Civil Liberties of opponents of the Games
• Rights of the Homeless
• Trademark infringement impunity (see comment 1)
• and perhaps least prominently, Architects

And probably others I have missed… . . . [more]

What shall we name the baby?

Put aside the fact that relatively few names work for boys but anything at all seems to go for girls nowadays, there are the matters of nicknames, faux pas with initials, unfortunate translations . . . and then rhyming.

Laura Wattenberg does a riff on rhyming on the Baby Name Wizard site, starting with the fuss that gets made of the fact that nothing rhymes with “orange.” What, she asks sensibly, rhymes with “purple”?

What’s it got to do with names? Well, she asks us to compare two names, Kayden and Faith. Although Faith . . . [more]

We’re used to seeing law firms breaking new ground in deploying technologies for marketing purposes, but I hadn’t seen a law firm sponsoring a television channel – and one devoted to matters legal.

What’s even more remarkable is where it’s coming from. Not some US powerhouse, or a tech-savvy firm in rural Canada.

No this news comes from Bucharest, (which as Simon reminded us Romania outranks Canada in its electronic infrastructure), where Juridic TV, the first television channel dedicated to public legal information, was launched online on February 8 and will broadcast an around-the-clock daily programme. . . . [more]

One of the great funny men of all time, in my opinion, was George Carlin — he’s famous for his Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, the “hippie-dippie weatherman,” and many trenchant routines satirizing the powers that be.

Towards the end of his life he had a routine about being “a modern man, a man for the millennium.” It consisted of a lengthy string of clichés delivered at a machine-gun pace from memory without a slip, a true tour de force.

Here’s the video, followed by a transcript so that you, too, can practice telling the world who/what/how . . . [more]

A Times-Colonist report reveals the outdated, inconsistently applied, and sometimes mis-applied access to court records policy in a number of BC courts. It seems BC is way behind the curve on this, as compared to the rest of Canada. Today’s article is only the first of a four-part series. The article includes a link to an interactive Googlemap.

Reaction has been swift:

Associate Chief Judge of the BC Provincial Court

BC Judges

And here is a Google News search that should follow the issue. . . . [more]

The Tucson Citizen has published what they call a ‘wordless editorial’, which I’ll presume to be commentary on the US Supreme Court’s recent decision on corporate political spending.

The single image offered is replicated below:

. . . [more]

I just read Ted Tjaden’s post about Ontario courts assuming jurisdiction over out-of-province defendants.

Professor Janet Walker, of Osgoode Hall Law School, is preparing a report on this issue. She undertook the project as the inaugural OHLS LCO Scholar in Residence at the Law Commission of Ontario. This is not officially an LCO project (it was not approved as a project and its recommendations will not be subject to approval by the LCO’s Board of Governors), rather the LCO has supported the project by posting on our website, facilitating consultation, translation into French and will issue the final report. . . . [more]

Last year a California class action suit resulted in a settlement where each class member received a $10 gift card from the defendant store. The settlement called for the plaintiff’s lawyer to get $175,000 125,000 (sorry -typo)

The judge who approved the settlement didn’t like it, and ordered the lawyer to also take payment in $10 gift cards from the store.

Boing Boing refers to a post on the Lowering the Bar blog that says that judge has been disciplined for that by the state Commission on Judicial Performance.

No word on the fate of the lawyer’s gift cards. . . . [more]

We’re all working so hard on legal work right now in mid-winter cold and darkness that I thought it’d be fun to write something subversive. Maybe you’re at your breaking point and need a little musical inspiration to convince you to permanently log off of Quicklaw, hand in your security pass and make a break for truth and enlightenment? Here is a list of songs about getting back to the roots or “going country.”

Think nice thoughts for the rest of us eh!

Honk, High in the Middle

This song is from the soundtrack to the 1972 surf movie “Five . . . [more]

I would like to know why (some) Nova Scotia reasons for judgment reported on CanLII are “centre justified”. Do they come this way from the courts? They are much harder to read than fully justified paragraphs or ones left with a “ragged right”. . . . [more]