Moving on to the 10:45am session this morning in Montreal, at the LegalIT 5.0 Conference, James F. Ring from Fair Outcomes tackled the topic of managing and resolving legal disputes online.

James introduced the problem with some thought provoking facts:

• only 5% of cases make it to trial
• the vast majority of cases settle within 30 days of the first day of trial, and
• 80% of cases that do settle do not settle until the day before the trialuntil they are in a “30 days before the first day of the trial” window.

One explanation for the long . . . [more]

Blogging live from the Legal IT 5.0 Conference in Montreal, I am attending the session on crowdsourcing and the law which started at 9:30am, frankly, because I was intrigued by the title… Crowdsourcing the law?! Marcel Naud, from ROBIC, opened the session by defining crowdsourcing as:

The act of taking a job traditionally performed by a specific agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call

Blogging live from Montreal at the LegalIT 5.0 Conference, the Conference opened with a plenary session on the subject topic, by Richard S. Granat, Co-Chair, eLawyering Task Force, American Bar Association, launched in 2001. Richard founded one of the first virtual law firms in North America and is well chosen to speak on topic. . . . [more]

Two weeks ago in my post on indexes in law-related e-books I made mention of the 3 new e-book offerings from LexisNexis Canada that are included for free for purchasers of the hard copy.

I have now tested those e-books on my iPad and thought I would pass on my comments.

The three titles are:

– The Practitioner’s Criminal Code, 2011 Edition
– Ontario Superior Court Practice, 2011 Edition
– LegisPratique – Code de procédure civile annoté, édition 2010

The books are in EPUB format and were easy to download and transfer on to my PDA by . . . [more]

TV Ontario’s flagship current affairs program The Agenda featured a discussion last night on TV cameras in the courtroom.

Interestingly, only the judge on the panel seemed to be in favour of the idea.

Panel members were:

• Jamie Chaffe, president of the Canadian Association of Crown Counsel
• Jean Cumming, editor-in-chief of Lexpert
• Mayo Moran, dean of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law
• William Trudell, chair of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers
• Raymond Wyant, a provincial court judge in Manitoba

The London Times reported on 10 March that UK litigation lawyers are “bracing themselves” for the “revolution” of hot tubbing which will shortly be run in a pilot trial in Manchester, England.

More formally known as “concurrent evidence”, hot tubbing is a new method of presenting expert evidence at trial. Opposing experts testify in each other’s presence, as members of a panel, and are questioned in each other’s presence in front of the trier of fact.

It seems to be gathering steam in several jurisdictions, other than the US, as a method of reducing cost and delay in civil litigation. . . . [more]

I frequently stumble across lines that capture precisely a thing I was trying to say on an earlier occasion. Of course, by that time the conversation is long over. It is generally not practical to call up those who were listening to my inarticulate ramblings, and give them the expression I have found (although I am not above trying).

One nice thing about writing on a blog is that you have the perfect means of doing this: the next post. . . . [more]

Since I’m in rural Spain, I’ve no facilities for lengthy posts, so three pointers to interesting items from elsewhere in the world.

Let’s start with the best legal research sites you’ve never heard of. In an interview with LegallyIndia today, the ILS Pune Mooting Team – on their way to DC for the Jessup moot – were asked what research databases they used. Here is the answer:

MPL: How many online databases did you use for mooting research? Which, according to you, is the best online legal database?

Madhupreetha: Westlaw, Lexisnexis, Maxplanck, Oxford reports and Oxford Scholarship online were some

When Watson trumped several Jeopardy champions, Simon Chester wondered what the implications would be for lawyers. The New York Times appears to have answered that question, at least in part, in a story this weekend by John Markoff, Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.

Markoff points to the California litigation support companies Blackstone Discovery, who can analyze 1.5 million documents for under US$100,000, and Clearwell, who assisted DLA Piper meet a one-week court deadline by searching 570,000 court documents for specific concepts, rather than key words.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means

The Canadian Bar Association has released a discussion paper by Ottawa law prof Adam Dodek, “Solicitor-Client Privilege in Canada, Challenges for the 21st Century” [PDF]. Although, as Professor Dodek says, the privilege has evolved into a “quasi-constitutional right,” its future is far from clear or, indeed, secure. From the conclusion to the 50-page paper:

As the CBA’s interventions with governments demonstrate, legislative intrusions on the Privilege are frequent, possibly more so. We live in an increasingly globalized legal world and Canadian law on the Privilege differs in significant respects from other jurisdictions which are important both in terms

We are hearing so much these days about the changing landscape of legal services. See ‘The End of Lawyers?’ by Richard Susskind http://www.susskind.com/endoflawyers.html, or the writings of Jordan Furlong – http://www.law21.ca/consulting-services/ (also see his SLAW contributions).

One recurrent theme in the legal press now is that lawyers enjoy a legislated monopoly over the provision of certain services which do not require legal expertise. . . . [more]

Earlier in the month (the other) Simon alerted us to IBM’s development of a natural language savvy (and trivia stuffed) machine that ran rings around the human competitors in Jeopardy.

But no sooner had the victory occurred when lawyers started thinking … what if.

What if they hadn’t cleared copyright on the encyclopedias they stuffed Watson with?

But the best analysis is contained in a provocative and imaginative piece by IBM GC Robert Weber in the National Law Journal, summarized in the ABA Journal.

“Imagine a new kind of legal research system that can gather much of