I had the pleasure last week of presenting at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries / /L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit on the topic “Legal Project Management: Is There a Role for Law Librarians?”

My co-speaker was Andrew Terrett, the National Director of Knowledge Management at BLG who provided a great, pragmatic overview of project management in law firms.

Although in my paper I also provided a brief overview of legal project management and what various law firms were doing about it, the focus of my talk was instead on the third part of . . . [more]

Following up on Dave Bilinsky’s post earlier this month, the BC distance family mediation project at Mediate BC has launched a new blog.

Located at distancemediation.ca, Susanna Jani’s goal is to provide more insights surrounding the project, and (of interest to me) reflections on how different technologies can support the families and mediators when they aren’t in the same room. As the project moves forward, regardless of whether one’s interests are in the area of mediation or technology, the insights provided should prove interesting to Slaw readers. . . . [more]

There have been two important and encouraging developments on the ethics of cloud computing over the last month.

First, the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 has issued an initial set of draft proposals addressing lawyers’ confidentiality-related obligations when using technology. The Commission’s draft report proposes:

• The development of a centralized, user-friendly website that contains continuously updated and detailed information about confidentiality-related ethics issues arising from lawyer’s use of technology, including the latest data security standards.
• Amendments to several Model Rules of Professional Conduct and their Comments to offer specific guidance and expectations relating to technology.

The amendments to the Model . . . [more]

There are two ODR (Online Dispute Resolution) pilot projects currently in BC. One is aimed at family law cases and the other is aimed at low-value civil claims. Both involve using online dispute resolution technologies to demonstrate how ODR can be used to bridge distances and solve disputes between parties.

Following the first phase announcement of mandatory e-filing for certain BC land title documents that came on March 11th, Dye & Durham has developed and issued a new white paper discussing many of the issues to be faced by BC lawyers and notaries during the upcoming transition period.

The paper outlines the planning background behind the LTSA’s move toward mandatory e-filing, current usage rates of the EFS, training received by BC lawyers (only 4 in 10 surveyed), and the evolving digital role for BC Registry Agents.

As the author of the paper (and full disclosure, a client of ours), Dye . . . [more]

I was surprised to learn, browsing through Bencher election material, that in the UK solicitors have lost the right of exclusive self-governance.

According to candidate Graeme Mew in the UK, self-governance of the profession has been “severely limited”. Solicitors in England & Wales, who used to be regulated by their Law Society, are now regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (“SRA”) which is overseen by a Legal Services Board (“LSB”). It is appointed by the government. According to Mew, “The obvious concern is that the governance of the profession will be influenced by government objectives which, in the UK, currently . . . [more]

Larry Lessig is famous for, among many other things, his dictum that “Code is law,” meaning that code in both legal and computer senses is a means of social control. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that people at his former home of Stanford University are working to see if they can actually make laws into computer code.

The wonderfully named Hammurabi Project from Stanford’s Center for Computers and Law is converting a few patches of U.S. legislation into machine readable C# in an attempt to express the logic and relationships of those provisions in a way that might allow facts . . . [more]

Standards for on-premise, cloud and mobile technologies used by lawyers have, to-date, been lacking. While an abundance of recommendations, best practices and other guidelines have been issues by Bar Associations and other organizations, there has not been a single, comprehensive document lawyers could look to for clear guidance on what minimal standards should be adhered for on-premise, cloud and mobile technologies.

The International Legal Technology Standards Organization (ILTSO) aims to change that. ILTSO is a non-profit organization consisting of attorneys, bar association representatives, IT professionals, and business leaders with a stated mission of “helping attorneys and clients better understand the . . . [more]

A good part of Slaw is playing hookey today, visiting the ABA TECHSHOW at the Chicago Hilton. It’s the 25th Anniversary show, so we are having fun looking forward and back – and seeing how far we’ve come since the days of DOS and 20 MB hard drives.

Last night, we were entertained by an IgniteLaw session in which twelve speakers gave provocative and creative talks about legal technology and the future of law practice. . . . [more]

When you have a second to lift your head from the day-to-day, moment-to-moment legal work on your desk, you might take a look at what some people are envisioning with respect to your future legal work. The Law Lab — “A Petri Dish for Legal Innovation” — (a not entirely… savoury image, perhaps) — is a joint venture of Harvard’s Berkman Institute and the Kauffman Foundation of Entrepreneurship with the mission:

to investigate and harness the varied forces — evolutionary, social, psychological, neurological and economic — that shape the role of law and social norms as they enable cooperation, governance

. . . [more]

Un peu difficile de choisir la session quand il y a trois sujets thématiques parallèles..! C’est le cas d’ailleurs aujourd’hui toute la journée, sauf pour les plénières. La session en rubrique est populaire la salle est comble! C’est vraiment un sujet d’actualité qui intéresse beaucoup les participants.

Nicolas Vermeys, de l’Université de Montréal, a ouvert la session avec une mise en contexte. Nicolas mentionne que plus de 7,000,000 de Canadiens sont présents sur facebook, selon le Commissaire à la vie privé, rendant ainsi ce site le plus populaire au Canada. C’est pourquoi sa présentation est principalement axé sur facebook et . . . [more]

Gordon Ross, Vice-President of ThoughtFarmer, opened his 13:30 session today by asking: “Is knowledge loss really an issue?” The annual average industry turnover rate is 35.7%. When staff leaves you lose both what they know (technical knowledge) and who they know (social knowledge). Intranets are not good for retaining knowledge and enabling users to find it, in one intranet survey asking “does your intranet search usually help you in finding what you are searching for”, 85% of professional respondents answered “No”.

Typical problems arising from knowledge management include:

• Just because it is captured does not mean it will be

. . . [more]