June’s issue of Canadian Lawyer just came out, with a great article by Glenn Kauth on using web tactics for client development.

There’s a few familiar faces (including yours truly), and some familiar platforms.

But what’s interesting about the piece is the rationale provided for why more big firms are not jumping into it. As a cost-effective strategy, some of these firms indicate that most of their clients are not heavily utilizing social media.

In my opinion, this misses the point slightly. Not only do bigger firms have the ability to produce more comprehensive and polished approaches to social media, . . . [more]

Peg Duncan on Twitter points to an article on Law.com by an English academic, Adam Wyner, “Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web.” (By the way, if you’re not following Peg on Twitter, you should be.) I was curious because of my interest in legal research and because of the the flirtation with the semantic web that Google Squared and Wolfram/Alpha seem to represent.

Obviously — to me, at least — if computers are going to be able to respond in a sophisticated, i.e. more helpful, way to our queries about law, there needs to be an agreed-upon set . . . [more]

Are you sick of us talking about Twitter yet? It seems the possibilities are only just starting to be explored. Lawyers Weekly reporter Luigi Benetton recently interviewed a few of us (including Michael Geist and Darryl Cruz of McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Toronto) for his article “Twitter in the courtroom: a fad, or here to stay?” (June 12, 2009 edition).

Some of the points discussed:

• this area is evolving quickly
• reporters “tweeting” from a trial is akin to reporters taking notes on behalf of the public
• messages on Twitter (or “tweets”) may not adequately characterize the full shape

To follow on from Carol Lynn Schafer’s post, “Do TOS Have the Final Word on our Fundamental Rights and Freedoms?“, readers might like to know that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched TOSBAck, a site that tracks the terms of service of 44 significant websites and notes when changes occur. Of course, there’s an RSS feed, which might be the most sensible way to keep track of what’s happening on the site. . . . [more]

Since I was just asked for this decision and it’s not on Canlii yet, here is a link to the Federal Court’s decision yesterday.

Strong words from Zinn J for Foreign Affairs, CSIS and the handling of the case.

. . . [more]

Who doesn’t love Org Charts? Thanks to Karen Sawatzky re-tweeting Mark Eaton, I have a new source to feed my desire to see collections of organization charts, Org Charts by Cogmap.

What is Cogmap?

Cogmap is the Wikipedia of organization charts. We are an organization chart wiki! This means that it is a collection of organization charts online that anyone can edit, add to, and help maintain.

Cogmap is a tool for sales people, entrepreneurs, and recruiters to understand organizations and keep information up to date. If you are like us, you had some of these things happen to

We’ve talked a little about litigation around domain names of famous people. But what about accounts on social media platforms?

Tony LaRusa, manager for the St. Louis Cardinals, is suing Twitter at the Superior Court of the State of California for a now inactive account that bore his name and likeness in LaRusa v. Twitter, Inc.

Although close scrutiny of the account does indicate it was not really LaRusa’s (citing parody), they did make off-the-cuff remarks like,

Lost 2 out of 3, but we made it out of Chicago without one drunk driving incident or dead pitcher.

LaRusa had apparently . . . [more]

The University of Toronto’s David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights has a new website. Within U of T’s Faculty of Law, the Centre is “devoted to advocacy, research and education in the areas of constitutional rights in Canada.”

At the moment the resources available via the site seem to be those culled from the normal operation of the Faculty of Law, i.e. relevant journal articles and books. There’s an interesting section on “Cross-Canada Appellate Cases,” which lists some recent cases from across the country and offers brief summaries of the issues involved. I’d recommend that they have an . . . [more]

Back in April I wrote a somewhat sarcastic article here on slaw.ca criticising the new Road Safety Act (“RSA”) as allowing “convictions without trials” (https://www.slaw.ca/2009/04/22/8208/). The story took on a bit of a life of its own resulting in some TV appearances that in turn generated a fair bit of commentary from the general public. One theme that ran through a vocal minority of those who called in to the talk shows took me to task for “overreacting” or being “alarmist” in my complaint that the RSA authorized police to issue tickets from which there is no appeal. . . . [more]

… to the north west is Greenland. We moan about how folks in the U.S. know precious little about Canada, even though we’re camped right on their doorstep (well, I do, certainly). But what do we know about Greenland, with whom we share a long boundary? Do we even know that it goes by the name of Kalaallit Nunaat (i.e. land of the Kalaallit, who are the people of Western Greenland)? Or that yesterday its citizens elected the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit (Community of the People, IA) over the Social Democratic Siumut Party that governed Greenland Kalaallit Nunaat for three decades? . . . [more]

Library Boy noted yesterday that as a consequence of the Legislation Revision and Consolidation Act federal consolidated statutes and regulations are ‘official’ and can be used for “evidentiary purposes.” The government press release is here.

The federal Laws Site also now offers a side-by-side bilingual version of legislation in PDF. . . . [more]

There’s much practical advice in the British Computing Society and the Information Security Awareness Forum’s new publication Personal Data Guardianship Code released today.

If you don’t think there’s a need, a recent 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report from IT provider Verizon Business suggested that 285 million records were compromised in 2008.

Of course, the lawyers got to it: “This code is not intended to be legal advice and where the reader is unsure about any aspect of the Data Protection Act or other Acts and regulations they should seek legal advice or visit the Information Commissioner’s web site.”

The . . . [more]