The Wall Street Journal recently featured a fascinating article on how architecture influence how we think. Researchers have found that nearly everything about a room, from the height of its ceilings to the colour of its walls, has a direct impact on the quantity and quality of our thoughts. Not only that, but researchers have found our capacity to recall information, to be creative, and to draw connections between seemingly unrelated concepts is heavily influenced by our surroundings. While the connection between a room’s qualities and mood has been established for years, this research represents some of the first . . . [more]

The latest edition of LAWPRO’s webzine has a number of articles specifically for litigators. One of them is an excellent paper from Justice Carole Curtis called Dealing with Difficult Judges.

Litigators of all stripes will find helpful reminders and suggestions on such topics as knowing your judge, planning strategy in advance, avoiding ‘head butting’, and protecting the record, your client and your reputation.

Justice Curtis alse describes the categories of difficult judges, and attempts to answer the question of the frustrated litigator: what does the judge want? . . . [more]

Are you ready to meet the future? Special Libraries Association members have been exploring this question on the Future Ready 365 blog, discussing potential and what it takes to make us as individuals, an association, and the profession as a whole ready for the future. SLA President Cindy Romaine explains that being “future ready” for members, the Association and the profession is supported by four pillars:

• Collaboration to accelerate the availability of useful information
• An adaptable skill set that anticipates and responds to the evolving marketplace
• Alignment with the language and values of the community you serve
• Building a

The Crime Writers of canada have produced their 2011 catalogue of Cool Canadian Crime.

If that doesn’t supply you with enough mystery, here is a list of 5 easy to find and famously puzzling works from history: Five weird and strange manuscripts.

If that’s not your bag, you might enjoy these more eccentric works: 20 Strange and Wonderful Books, and 20 even stranger and more wonderful books. . . . [more]

Last week TechCrunch featured a terrific guest post by Mark Suster about Why Startups Need to Blog (and what to talk about …). In reading Suster’s blog post, it occurred to me that many of his recommendations for startups apply equally well to law firms.

The kinds of questions I constantly hear from lawyers about blogging – “what should I blog about?”; “who is my audience?”; “where should I post?”; etc. – are the same kinds of questions many startup company bloggers-to-be ask about blogging. Suster’s article provides insights that bloggers from any industry can benefit from.

A few . . . [more]

Thank CERN for the Internet. One of the topics I read widely about is leadership. My personal interest, along with developing my own leadership skills, is law firm leadership. There is a great selection of writing on law firm managment and leadership here at Slaw and around the web.

In my opinion, it is important to read outside your specific niche. I can’t remember now what turned me on to the Leading Geeks blog. It may have been a retweet by Greg Lambert, or a reference from Jay Sheperd, but what ever it was, I quickly plugged . . . [more]

Eventually it will come to pass: someone will lament, probably on facebook in a few years, that modern communication practices are driving us all to lose our grand tradition of texting. The leetspeak, the comedy, the memes, the autocompletion bloopers… it will all be a thing of the past.

Here is a diverting meditation on the transition from manuscript to print culture to put you in mind of that future history. . . . [more]

Google UK has created a magazine, or small book, about data for some of its business customers, and, thinking of the rest of us, has put the thing online. The name, Think Quarterly, suggests that we’ll see three more of these during the coming year.

What’s the big deal? Well, in a way, nothing. There are lots of online “books,” and data’s no stranger in the list of current tech topics. But this is Google, albeit a field office, and if there’s a company that should know a thing or two about data, it’s Google. As well, when the . . . [more]

I normally try to avoid posting about items that have been discussed elsewhere but I believe this merits a Slaw post. I’m sure many of have seen what follows in other forums (it was brought to my attention by a colleague) but this causes you to think a bit differently and more of that is good on a Monday morning. Okay maybe it isn’t completely different but it takes something you know well and does it differently and makes you wonder about the future of publishing and just what an ebook is or more specifically what an ebook might be. . . . [more]

Just two weeks ago Supreme Court Justice Thomas A. Cromwell gave the Macfadyen Lecture, the second in the memorial series sponsored by the Scottish Council of Law Reporting. The Council has now made the text of that talk available online.

Justice Cromwell spoke on “The Challenges of Scientific Evidence.” A quotation from his introduction and an outline of the topics he addressed will give you a sense of the scope of his talk:

In virtually every jurisdiction, [the] courtroom encounters between law and science have also resulted in spectacular miscarriages of justice. This, along with the other concerns, have

Crime Writers of Canada (tagline: the write kind of crime) has released their latest roundup of Canadian recent and imminent crime fiction. . . . [more]

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