This morning’s Globe and Mail carried a death notice for Alison Youngman, who spearheaded Stikeman’s Technology and Outsourcing group, dead of cancer at too early an age.

She promoted the adoption of new technologies before it was fashionable to do so. She became a self-taught expert on technology law, creating a nationally recognized Technology and Outsourcing group for Stikemans. She published widely and served her profession by co-chairing the American Bar Association Negotiated Acquisitions Committee Task Force on Joint Ventures.

She was part of the OBA’s Business Law Section on the Modernization of Business Law in Ontario . . . [more]

I wanted to make sure we didn’t overlook this item, even though it was prominent in the news this week.

On Tuesday, March 3rd the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador released the report from the Commission of Inquiry on Hormone Receptor Testing exploring how testing failed to give correct results for women facing breast cancer in Newfoundland over a number of years, and providing a number of recommendations to prevent the same from happening again.

The Commission was established by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador under its Public Inquiries Act, 2006 on July 3, 2007. The Honourable Margaret A. . . . [more]

Legal IT 3.0 is coming up on April 20 & 21 in Montreal. Dominic Jaar is once again heading up the organizing committee and has put the program together along with Xavier Beauchamp-Tremblay.

It is the largest and the most important event of the year in Canada on information technology for law. Dozens of experts from Canada and internationally (United States, France and Australia), including the keynote speaker Ronald J. Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, will be there. You will also see some Slaw folk speaking including Simon Chester, Steve Matthews, me, and of . . . [more]

Congratulation to Slaw’s own Dominic Jaar, who has just been named CEO of the Canadian Centre for Court Technology. From the press release:

The mandate for the CCCT is:

1) Bringing the justice sector stakeholders together, including deputy ministers, lawyers, senior court administrators, judges and representatives of the public, to create an atmosphere favourable to technological innovation and excellence in our court systems to enhance access to justice.
2) Supporting the effective transfer and sharing of information between courts and other elements of the justice system.
3) Providing the tools and activities needed to exchange information and

Necessity breeds invention. From Procter & Gamble to IBM to Federal Express, from nylon to photocopiers to the electron microscope — some of the world’s most well-known companies and products were born in past recessions and depressions. The current economic crisis will be no exception — when times are tough, forward-thinking people will find ways to do things better. That applies especially to the practice of law.

Is your law practice or firm one of the profession’s leading lights of innovation? Have you or someone within your firm with vision and courage led a groundbreaking effort to practice law differently? . . . [more]

Working with the Working Group on Lawyers and Real Estate, the Law Society of Upper Canada has prepared guidelines to help lawyers avoid becoming the tool or dupe of unscrupulous persons when dealing with real estate transactions involving powers of attorney. These guidelines are available here.

With the prevalence of real estate fraud, it is important that real estate lawyers implement practices and procedures in their firms to recognize and fight fraud. In recent years, powers of attorney have been used in real estate transactions to perpetrate fraud. Forged powers of attorney have been used to fraudulently mortgage properties . . . [more]

If you were an early bird like me and on your computer circa 5:30-5:45 a.m. EST this morning, or on the other side of the world when this would be a reasonable time of the day, you too may have participated in the “Great Gmail outage of February 2009.”

Yes, Gmail was down, and mass panic ensued it what became commonly known as Gfail.

The hysteria could probably best be observed first hand on Twitter, where thousands of users, myself included, screamed in protest and paranoia.

@sandersonjones probably said it best,

Google, I know you’re listening.

One of the great wonders of the web is the ability it affords us to glimpse the world from different perspectives by reading current papers from around the world.

Starting with today’s Hindu, a great paper from Chennai, we find the following stories:

Bloggers not entitled to any special protection for expressing critical views, Supreme Court of India holds:

Bloggers may no longer express their uninhibited views on everything under the sun, for the Supreme Court said they may face libel and even prosecution for the blog content. Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justice P Sathasivam refused to . . . [more]

The National Post is reporting that India is now open to foreign law firms in a limited way. The Post has its information from Dezan Shira & Associates whose “briefing note” of a week ago makes it clear that the Limited Liability Partnership Act 2008 [PDF] permits foreign firms to register and offer “consultation services” but not practice law. It seems that the Bill has received presidential assent.

S.59 is the relevant enabling section and reads as follows:

59. The Central Government may make rules for provisions in relation to establishment of place of business by foreign limited

We’ve commented before on the CBA’s work on conflicts of interest, and on how to avoid conflicts, so here are three news items on conflicts. . . . [more]

While it’s mainly an American based survey there’s much of interest in the latest ILTA Survey of Corporate Law Departments.

I was surprised that

Word 2003 still dominates word processing

Sharepoint hasn’t been widely deployed

Most corporate law departments have had experience coping with electronic discovery

Knowledge management doesn’t seem to be of interest to most corporate law departments

There appears to be ample opportunity for creative technological exchange between law firms and their clients . . . [more]

Slaw is unusual in that three of the four non-American chairs of ABA TECHSHOW are contributors to a collective blog.

For those who haven’t heard, TechShow is the world’s premier legal technology CLE conference & expo. It’s also the longest lasting – since it started in Dallas back in 1984. The three-day CLE conference is attended by more than 1,500 professionals each year and features more than 50 legal technology CLE programmes and training sessions in fifteen topical tracks. . . . [more]