My post about Google’s new favicon got me thinking: do law firms use favicons, and if so, how good are they?

A completely unscientific survey of “quite a few” firm websites tells me that only a small minority of law firms make use of this branding opportunity — and those that do have, by and large, really weak favicons.

Herewith five that I came up with:

This is a weak one. It’s the Cassels logo, seen to the right, in miniature. But at 16 x 16 pixels, the thing just doesn’t translate well: the shape is unclear and the colours

Yesterday the Webbies were announced. They’re described by the New York Times as ‘the Oscars of the internet’, and are judged by a panel which includes Simpsons creator Matt Groening and movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Once you get beyond the gushing over the creative use of new technologies by Stephen Colbert for the Colbert Report and Will.i.am on the Obama campaign, the list includes a couple of quite excellent law-related websites.

Out-law by Pinsent/Masons we’ve blogged about over the last couple of years, won the overall Best Website Award. Even more remarkable, it was the first non-US site to . . . [more]

Dalhousie law prof, Philip Gerard, has an enjoyable piece on The Court today in which he shades his eyes and does a tour d’horizon in search of a replacement for Justice Bastarache.

Herewith an excerpt to whet your appetite:

That leaves Nova Scotia, but it has to be said in all honesty that the province is not bursting with Supreme Court-calibre talent at the moment. Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of highly competent and professional judges sitting on the Nova Scotia bench. But the bar for the Supreme Court is higher than that. If you are looking

I just noticed while browsing CTV news on a wireless connection in my hotel room in Boston that their lead story is that Mr. Justice Bastarche is retiring from the Supreme Court of Canada . . . [more]

Times Online has a nice little piece from an interview of Rosemary Martin, the new chief executive of The Practical Law Company, in which Ms Martin argues that law firms will need to change the way they do business, and in particular move away from charging by the hour.

“The clients have been supine,” Martin says crisply. That may be about to change if she has her way. “For the past 25 years lawyers have largely resisted changes. My goal is not to make lawyers poorer but I do want to make law firms more productive and effective.” If

An article in today’s London Free Press by David Canton of eLegal talks about the concern the European Commission for Justice, Freedom and Security has about tracking dots that some colour laser printers leave on printed material. From David’s article:

Printer makers are able to encode the serial number, manufacturing code and the date of printing through a series of small yellow dots interspersed on the printed paper. These dots are invisible to the naked eye…

Xerox has admitted it provided tracking dots to [the U.S.] government. At present, only select enforcement agencies have the capacity to read the codes.

Tscript.com is in the business of putting litigation transcripts online and so making them accessible at any time from anywhere. It seems that sometimes when a public body holds an inquiry the transcripts are made generally available on Tscript, something I discovered when I was exploring the Ipperwash Inquiry. Every word in a transcript is indexed and linked to the pages where it occurs, the index appearing in a frame to the left of the document. (This might make searching awkward, depending on your browser; Safari searches both the text and the index; but if you have difficulty, you’ll . . . [more]

Gutenberg Canada, our local wing of the internet publisher of public domain texts, has just published its 100th e-book. For the honour, it’s chosen a 1904 publication, Osgoode Hall – Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar by lawyer James Cleland Hamilton (1836-1907).

For reasons of efficiency and ease of preservation, the Gutenberg folks often provide materials in the simplest of forms, which can make reading them — online or off — something of a chore rather than a pleasure. But I’m happy to say that for this work they’ve confined the html column of text to a readable width (but, . . . [more]

For all you law and IT lovers, I am pleased to announce that Leg@l.IT is back this year! With Canada’s Privacy Commissionner, Jennifer Stoddart, and Prof. Pierre Trudel as co-presidents, three tracks with the most interesting and en vogue subjects (here is the agenda) and an impressive group of speakers, including fellow Slawers (Simon Chester, Jordan Furlong and Vincent Gautrais) and blogger (David Bilinsky), it is THE event you don’t want to miss!

Leg@l.IT is an accessible and spearheading conference, the most important of this kind in Canada, about the potential and . . . [more]

LawProse, Inc. has a remarkable set of videos of interviews with eight of the justices of the United States Supreme Court — 26 videos in all. If you’re a court watcher or interested in the psychology of judges and judging — or if writing for judges is your thing — this is a feast for you. An article by Tony Mauro on the U.S. Supreme Court Monitor describes the videos as showing the

justices speaking passionately, sarcastically, angrily, into the camera as they answer questions about brief writing, oral advocacy and their own love-hate relationships with the written word.

Apparently . . . [more]

Here is a link to a summary of the attendee survey results from the ALM Legal Tech Conference in January.

Odd that it took this long to compile – at ABA Techshow in 1988, we were doing automated audience surveys, using unbelievably primitive tools, but real-time.

Here is the answer list to one question:

What topics do you see as hot technology issues in 2008?

Electronic Discovery 69%
Online Collaboration 32%
Knowledge Management 36%
Document Management 53%
Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity 29%
Data Security 48%
Other 13% . . . [more]

A tip of the SLAW hat to SLAW’s own Steve Matthews for his article called “Who Do You Think You Are?” in this month’s edition of the CBA National magazine. Among other things, Steve writes on protecting your online brand and developing an online network. Nice work Steve. . . . [more]