On January 27th the Law Society of British Columbia issued a final version of its Report of the Cloud Computing Working Group. The changes made from the previous draft of July 15, 2011 are discussed in a memo to the Benchers available on page 67 of the Bencher’s Agenda from its January 27th meeting.

The purpose of the report is to:

identify the risks associated with lawyers using electronic data storage and processing, accessed remotely over a network (like the Internet), particularly circumstances where those services are provided by a third party vendor, and to suggest how lawyers can

This information came out last month, but is important to note. The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (the SEC) put out information about investment fraud and social media in January:

• SEC – Investor Alert: Social Media and Investing – Avoiding Fraud (January 4, 2012) [PDF]
• SEC – Investor Bulletin: Social Media and Investing – Understanding Your Accounts (January 2012) [PDF]
• SEC – National Examination Risk Alert – Investment Adviser Use of Social Media (Vol. II, Issue 1, January 4, 2012) [PDF]

These alerts were prompted by charges laid on January 4th against Anthony Fields, an Illinois-based investment advisor who offered . . . [more]

A Broad and Ambitious Justice Review

BC Premier Christy Clark along with her newly-titled Minister of Justice and Attorney General Shirley Bond announced a broad-ranging review of the BC justice system last week. In conrast to many previous reviews in other jurisdictions, this review is not lacking in ambition or scope. The review includes a Green Paper on Modernizing British Columbia’s Justice System and an internal audit review of the province’s justice system. It also includes a review of BC’s criminal charge assessment process, a Legal Aid Services review and a new plan to post justice system data on . . . [more]

As rated by Roger Skalbeck of the Georgetown University Law Center, on behalf of the ABA in their annual effort. The 200 law school websites evaluated ranged from a low of 25% to a high of 98.5%. Given the very elementary standards against which they were compared, it is surprising that any really could fare very low at all. This summary of the evaluation criteria should give you an idea:

. . . [more]

This morning in a brief decision Canada’s top court ruled in a Reference that Internet service providers are not bound by the CRTC’s broadcast regulations

The judgment is so brief we quote it in full: . . . [more]

The LegalTech 2012 Conference last week was a bit overwhelming for me as a first-time attendee.

As a knowledge management (KM) lawyer / law librarian, my continuing legal education opportunities tend to focus more on conferences related to KM or law libraries, such as the upcoming annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries / L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit held in Toronto in May.

However, I think it was worthwhile attending LegalTech, although I might not need to attend every year. The main difference for me was the large number of technology vendors exhibiting or presenting their . . . [more]

Library Boy told us last year about some tentative steps that courts were making to embrace – or to sniff around tentatively – the whole subject of social media. Today’s announcement from the UK Supreme Court that it will start official tweets of judgments – this in anticipation of the Assange extradition decision – represents the first wholesale adoption by a final court of appeal.

It overshadows Chief Justice McLachlin’s announcement within a speech at Carleton University on the Media and the Courts, that the Canadian judiciary should start to think seriously about social media.

See the Globe, the . . . [more]

Two weeks ago federal prosecutors in the US shut down MegaUpload, one of the most popular file-sharing sites on the Internet. The site was a widely-used “digital locker” that stored files for millions of users world-wide. Some of those users, however, used the side for illegitimate purposes, turning the site into a hub of what the US prosecutors characterized as “massive worldwide online piracy.”

While there’s no question large quantities of illegal, pirated material was successfully removed with the MegaUpload takedown, thousands of innocent users have lost access to their files as a result of the takedown. The legality . . . [more]

The Paris court of appeals has decided that a suggested search query generated by the Google Suggest function defamed the company whose name was first entered into the search box. This feature works by displaying the most popular searches performed by other Google searchers associated with the text typed into the search box. So Google doesn’t decide what is displayed; its machines just count and show.

Turns out that one of the most popular associations with the name of the plaintiff company was ‘escroc’, which in French means crook or swindler.

Is this a kind of ‘crowd-sourced’ defamation? What can . . . [more]

I have a tendency to want to keep my gravy out of my peas — control issues, I know. This makes me work to keep my social media in silos as much as possible, fearing, I suppose, the further loss of privacy if Facebook gossips to Twitter about me and vice versa. The devil — or the deity, if you prefer — is in the intersections, the linkages, the relationships.

This desire for some crafted anonymity or at least a tad of privacy is a forlorn hope, I realize, if I’m online and tweeting, blogging, “plus”-ing and the like, whether . . . [more]

After a 6 week break the Members of Parliament return to Ottawa today starting at 11 am ET. The Projected Order of Business mentions resumption of the debate over Bill C-25, Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act. CBC’s Kady O’Malley has her take on today’s proceedings over on the CBC website.

We are expecting a new Federal budget in the next few weeks. And according to CBC News Now, other major legislation that will be dealt with this session includes immigration, financial services review, copyright reform (Bill C-11), the omnibus crime bill (Bill C-10) and doing away with the long . . . [more]