Slawyer Dominic Jaar presented twice at the recent ABA Techshow in Chicago. Here’s the text of his presentations:

• The first is on the use of Web 2.0 tools for [doc] collaboration
• The second is about the use of phones and PDA’s to create the [PDF] mobile office

Thanks, Dominic. . . . [more]

The Women’s Court of Canada launches this week. (See the story in the Ottawa Citizen.) The WCC is a group of women academics and practitioners who combined to rewrite six Supreme Court of Canada decisions to take a full and proper account of women’s equality. The affected decisions are:

• Symes v. Canada, [1993] 4 S.C.R. 695
  deduction — child care expenses — women — taxpayer — income
• Native Women’s Association of Canada v. Canada, [1994] 3 S.C.R. 627 ((The citation is misprinted in the Majury article referred to below.))
  funding — freedom of expression — women —

The College of Law Practice Management (of which I am (ahem) the President) sponsors the InnovAction Award, which is designed to identify and honor innovation in law practice management. Slaw is pleased to be a Friend of InnovAction

The College of Law Practice Management is calling for entries for its 2008 InnovAction Awards. This is a worldwide search for lawyers, law firms and other deliverers of legal services who have invented and successfully applied totally new business practices to the delivery of legal services. The goal of the InnovAction Awards is to demonstrate to the legal community what can . . . [more]

Dennis Kennedy has done his 2008 column for LLRX on legal tech. There aren’t a lot of surprises in “Eight Legal Technology Trends for 2008 – Good Times, Bad Times or Hard Times in Legal Tech?” with the exception, perhaps, of his view that e-discovery has failed to conquer; but there are a lot of wise words. Here are the subheads:

1. Smart Ways to Work Together – Collaboration Tools.
2. Dancing with a Recession.
3. Opening Audio and Video Channels.
4. Going Mobile.
5. The Death Throes for Email?
6. Security Begins to Matter . . . Really.
7. Lawyers Win Round 1 in

A national workplace survey reports that more than seven in ten American white collar workers feel inundated with information at their workplace, while more than two in five feel that they are headed for an information “breaking point.”

Sponsored by our friends in Dayton, OH, the news release states:

Eighty percent of legal professionals feel overloaded with information, and 70 percent say they spend a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information. Nearly half say that research takes up so much of their time that they occasionally omit billing clients for this work.

Other survey findings that demonstrate challenges for . . . [more]

University of Toronto law professors Andrew Green and Benjamin Alarie have posted a new paper on the Social Science Research Network entitled Should They All Just Get Along? Judicial Ideology, Collegiality, and Appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada:

“Over the past 25 years, the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada have not exhibited the divergent policy views along party lines that have been characteristic of the justices of the United States Supreme Court. This apparent lack of partisan polarization in Canada may at first give rise to smugness about the appointments process in Canada; after all, our

I don’t generally pass on pointers to academic articles in the Social Science Research Network database, because there are plenty of others on the web who are doing that. But a recent paper (Guthrie, Chris, Rachlinski , Jeffrey J. and Wistrich, Andrew J., “Blinking on the Bench: How Judges Decide Cases” . Cornell Law Review, Forthcoming Available at SSRN [PDF here]) caught my eye and so I’m mentioning it here.

The authors tested a sample of U.S. trial judges, seeking to find out whether the judges used their intuition (making mistakes) or deliberated (getting things right) when solving . . . [more]

Tuesday night I gave a presentation to Toronto Wiki Tuesdays about the use of wikis in law firms. On Monday, to get some additional ideas, I posted a message to Slaw asking for any new examples of wiki use in law firms since I wanted to present more than just wikis I had a hand in myself. The next day a very interesting discussion ensued on Slaw about whether wiki use is suitable for firms. This was a fantastic discussion, starting to really get at the heart of whether a firm should be using wikis and what really works. So . . . [more]

Statistics Canada’s annual report, Legal Aid in Canada: Resource and Caseload Statistics, 2006/2007, is now available online [PDF]. There’s a summary available on The Daily, too.

For those of you interested in the bottom line, the takeaway quote is:

Canada’s legal aid plans spent $659 million on delivering legal aid services in 2006/2007, or the equivalent of $20 for every Canadian.

This seems quite modest to me, given the sorts of amounts we spend on health and education.

Just over 11,000 lawyers, from both the private sector and legal aid plans, provided legal aid assistance in 2006/2007, a 9%

The American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management magazine, January/February 2008 issue focuses on marketing technology trends. Heavy emphasis on social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and podcasting. This is a selection from the full roster of articles:

Marketing Technology Trends
Today’s marketing arsenal features a vast array of tools—as well as technology practices that range from the truly cutting-edge to the archaic. Where does your firm fall on the scale? Here’s a look at some technologies that can really boost your business development efforts.
By John D. Bowers

Tracking Law Firm Marketing Technology
What are the technology needs of

I recently talked to a lawyer at a large Toronto law firm who was happily using voice recognition software to draft initial versions of long documents and to give voice commands to his computer.

Voice recognition technology has been around for a long time – my perception was that it wasn’t ready for prime time. Curious to see the vendor’s view of the software, I paid a quick visit to the website for Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Has this technology really advanced to the point that it’s ready for wider adoption? . . . [more]

Today’s Bloomberg News has a stimulating review by their architecture critic of Rafael Viñoly’s new Bronx County Hall of Justice. . . . [more]