This is an important (though admittedly recherché) area of corporate practice, which has a great resource of background materials maintained by the ABA Business Law Section Committee on Legal Opinions.

The Canadian equivalents are (hélas) maintained behind firewalls. . . . [more]

I am humbled by the invitation to join the illustrious team that has turned Slaw.Ca into Canada’s leading legal group blog. It’s a great site and I hope that I can contribute in a positive way. My day job is privacy and technology law, with a little bit of related blogging on the side at the Canadian Privacy Law Blog. I’m pleased to have an opportunity to write a bit about “things legal” that are not necessarily about privacy or technology. (Although I’ve come to think everything is about privacy and technology.)

If I sound like I enjoy what . . . [more]

Fee Fie Foe Firm Canada is a new custom search engine in beta for searching across Canadian law firm websites.

It indexes content from all manner of law firms, big and small. This includes practice group and individual profiles, press releases, news releases, case analysis, and publications such as newsletters.

I have commented on the Library Boy blog on a few other sources for finding law firm newsletters:

• We need a central repository for Canadian law firm newsletters and bulletins (March 8, 2005)
• Tracking Law Firm Newsletters With Linex Legal (July 31, 2007)
• Mondaq – Another Service For Tracking Law

Interesting answers to the question posed to Ask MetaFilter today.

Of course, it begs the question of whether in fact “so many lawyers” actually do use WordPerfect. Do you or folks at your firm? If so, why? . . . [more]

Here’s a website that was long overdue: Stephen Fine has started a Canadian site that features alternative law jobs — jobs other than in the straight practice of law within a firm. From the ‘about’ page of Alternative Law Job:

Created by lawyers, for lawyers, our job posting board caters exclusively to lawyers seeking the following career opportunities:

• In-house, government and non-profit counsel positions;
• Law related careers;
• Non-legal careers;
• Opportunities to join start-ups and small businesses.

Stephen’s clearly aiming to get into the U.S. market as well, though at the moment all of the postings are for Canadian positions. . . . [more]

 My best friend Nera is so happy about this news!

The Globe and Mail had an article this week about animal law classes being the cool new area of study at Canadian law schools. About six Canadian universities currently offer animal law classes, and the University of Toronto and Queen’s University will join this group when they start offering the classes this fall. The article reviews common topics that are covered in these classes (veterinary malpractice, custody, animal rights and personhood) as well as mentions some Canadian cases from the past that have focused on animal law.

 For more information . . . [more]

Last year in May Steve Matthews mooted the idea of a virtual law firm and sparked interesting comments, a couple from folks who were in such practices. Now big hitter Craig Johnson has teamed up with some others to make a big splash with their Virtual Law Partners, based in San Francisco. From the bouncy (but effective) website, it seems that they’re aiming at individuals, families and perhaps small businesses.

Law.com has a piece on the startup, which will fill you in on the fees, the predictions, etc. — but not on who else is doing the virtual . . . [more]

If you look at the BBC’s news website, the headline item is the Khadr interrogation video released as a result of Minister of Justice, Attorney General of Canada, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Appellants v. Omar Ahmed Khadr Respondent – and – British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Criminal Lawyers’ Association (Ontario), University of Toronto, Faculty of Law – International Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Watch Interveners, in which the court held that

The appellants must disclose (i) all records in any form of the

While we have mentioned situations where important provisions have been dropped into miscellaneous statutes, the NYT, Volokh and the ZDNet blog is reporting a quite extraordinary case where the litigants and the US Supreme Court appear to have completely overlooked a relevant statutory provision¹, for a couple of reasons:

it got dropped into an elephantine budget measure for military appropriations
the major legal databases apparently scant the relevance of military law

Both sides and the Judges involved in a recent U.S. Supreme Court judgment missed the applicability of an explicitly on-topic Act of Congress: the military justice provisions

Ann Sherman has presented a study on self-represented litigants in the Supreme Court of P.E.I. to the Community Legal Information Association of that province. The executive summary is available here, and a PDF file of the whole report can be had here. . . . [more]

Small footnote to the SCC’s recent decision in Simpson v. WIC and Mair.

LeBel J’s concurring judgment mentions blogs:

[73] This is all the more true in an age when the public is exposed to an astounding quantity and variety of commentaries on issues of public interest, ranging from political debate in the House of Commons, to newspaper editorials, to comedians’ satire, to a high school student’s blog. It would quite simply be wrong to assume that the public always takes statements of opinion at face value. Rather, members of the public must be presumed to evaluate comments

An odd sort of an announcement today about a White Paper on the implications of Web 2.0 for the legal profession, but without any indication how to find the white paper.

Here is the press release:

Collaborative Network Addresses Emerging Legal Issues

2008-06-26 21:58:06 –

– nGenera, together with California law firm Folger, Levin & Kahn, and Legal OnRamp, today announced that they had collaborated to use a wiki tool to author a sophisticated white paper on legal issues presented by new Internet technologies, including wikis themselves. . . . [more]