The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has announced the release of a handbook called PIPEDA and Your Practice — A Privacy Handbook for Lawyers.

According to the release, the handbook “describes best practices in managing the collection, use and disclosure of personal information, responding to requests for access to personal information, and the potential application of PIPEDA. The Handbook covers practical privacy issues that arise in the course of managing a law firm and conducting litigation”. . . . [more]

TitlePLUS’s Ray Leclair has provided prospective condo buyers with a checklist of things they should know about before deciding to purchase. This list was made available to the public in several real estate publications.

1. Status Certificate: This document should be a condition in any agreement to purchase. It includes important information such as monthly expenses, pending legal actions and other matters, including how much the condo has in reserve funds, which could affect future fees. It also includes the documents governing the condominium: the declaration, by-laws and rules & regulations. These documents govern many aspects of condo life. You

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First to BC where a committee of the Law Society of British Columbia, under the chairmanship of Gavin Hume, has produced the best and most thoughtful piece on how to practice ethically and effectively using cloud computing. We’ve referred in the past to helpful work done by the Bar Association in North Carolina and the ABA’s 20/20 Commission – see Jack Newton’s posts from May and July, as well as Connie’s and Omar’s take on last week’s ABA discussion.

At the Canadian Lawyer, David Paul has a good tip sheet of practical advice on the intelligent use . . . [more]

Lawyers and law firms have a complex relationship with journalism and public relations, I’d say: control, reputation, social positioning — power, if you will — all these can intersect in interesting ways for this trio of influence- and word-mongers. The recent brouhaha in Britain over the News of the World and Murdoch’s News Corp. phone hacking mess illustrates some of the less happy aspects of this interaction. Normally, we here at Slaw would be more focused on the legalities; but I think it’s enlightening, for a change, to look at this scandal from the public relations point of view, and . . . [more]

Scribes is an American society whose goals include the creation of an interest in writing about the law, and above all, the promotion of a clear, succinct and forceful style in legal writing.

A few years ago some Bay St law firms subjected their associates to compulsory viewing of videos of interviews of US Supreme court Judges on the subject of persuasive writing. These interviews have now been transcribed and can be accessed in PDF form at Scribes Journal of Legal Writing.

In what the New York Times described as a “trove” of interviews conducted in 2008, eight justices . . . [more]

With digital publishing coming of age, many publishers are rethinking how they produce and sell their content. One of the main challenges we face as publishers is making our content and products accessible.

Kent Law School in the UK has launched the inaugural issue of a new open access journal, feminists@law. This from the journal description on the home page:

feminists@law is a peer-reviewed online journal which aims to publish critical, interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged scholarship that extends feminist debates and analyses relating to law and justice (broadly conceived). It has a particular interest in critical and theoretical approaches and perspectives that draw upon postcolonial, transnational and poststructuralist work. The journal publishes material in a range of print and multimedia formats and in English and other languages. The journal is committed to an

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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]

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

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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]