The Federal Courts Rules Committee has asked that the Discussion Paper on a possible global review of the Federal Courts Rules should receive wide distribution to members of the public and the profession. The final version of the paper has been posted in both official languages on the web sites of the Federal Court of Appeal and the Federal Court.

For Slaw readers the most interesting issue under discussion is

advancements in information technology are encouraging more and more litigants to become actively involved in the litigation process, even if they do not ultimately seek to represent themselves before the

Hats off to the judges present and past (four retired judges) of the Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal who are giving up evenings in November to provide educational sessions for islanders on PEI’s courts, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, public law, criminal law, civil law and family law. It will also include a tour of the Sir Louis Henry Davies Law Courts building where participants can see the courtrooms, holding cells, law library and public areas.

The free sessions will take place November 8, 15 and 22 starting at 6:45 p.m. and registration is limited to 50 people. . . . [more]

Last week the most severe outage in RIM’s history crippled BlackBerry users’ abilities to use e-mail, BBM, and the Internet in general for over three days.

The outage highlighted two deeply concerning issues with RIM. First, it is almost beyond comprehension how a single point of failure could bring RIM’s global network down for this period of time. In the face of fierce competition from Apple and Google, RIM had been able to depend on real-time and reliable e-mail delivery as one of its key competitive differentiators. Not any more.

Worse, the company’s response has come across as arrogant, aloof, . . . [more]

I had written about the Just A Click Away project in January 2011. Just A Click Away is a Canada-wide initiative on public legal education and information (PLEI).

It organized a successful conference in Vancouver last February on how to use Internet and social media technologies to better educate the general public about the law.

Just A Click Away is continuing its efforts to bring the law closer to every Canadian and has just announced that it has received funding for Phase 2 of its work with a focus on “Supporting a Culture of Sharing”.

Phase 2 involves 4 organizations: . . . [more]

♬ Listen,
Do you want to know a secret?,
Do you promise not to tell? ♬

Lyrics and music by Lennon/McCartney.

At last week’s Pacific Legal Technology Conference held in Vancouver, BC, Canada, “The Cloud” was one of the hottest topics in the Conference. Of course the REPORT OF THE CLOUD COMPUTING WORKING GROUP from the Law Society of British Columbia was recognized as a leading document in terms of lawyers looking for a thoughtful analysis of moving to the cloud.

One of the other hot topics within lawyers using the cloud is the security in and . . . [more]

I am among a decreasing number of Canadians who are unilingual. I am grateful for a small innovation that Canlii has made to their main page. They added a check box for remembering your language selection.
Thanks CanLII.
Merci. . . . [more]

Chas Rampathal, the General Counsel and Vice President of LegalZoom is giving the lunch keynote at today’s PLTC 2011 in Vancouver on the Future of Legal Practice.

LegalZoom is a company that is responsible for 20% of the corporate formations in the US last year.

This is a live post: . . . [more]

We mourn the passing of Steve Jobs, whose singular achievements are recounted by the HuffPost, MTV on his impact on music, Washington Post , Wired and the Daily Telegraph.

For the legal community, the perspective is slightly different. Jobs contributed to a host of patents reviewed here. Law firms toyed with Apple computers for a while in the 1980s, but currently the only firms that are using that platform tend to be IP and media law firms who are following their clients – the creative community has always loved Apple machines. And of course there are . . . [more]

I’m new to the cloud, just having opened a Dropbox account a couple of weeks ago. Still even to a newbie like me its clear that cloud computing on a larger scale can raise many legal issues about privacy and security. As it turns out the potential new law and policy issues are many. To address these issues the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law is hosting an all-day conference on Friday October 14 entitled Cloudlaw: Law and Policy in the Cloud. The conference will consider the issues that may arise . . . [more]

Way back in March, LexisNexis Canada announced an app for Quicklaw on the iPhone. Ted Tjaden covered this new development with a review. The app was updated recently, and I thought it might be worthwhile checking out the new features, including an enhanced search interface and results list.

My personal test of the app found it a bit buggy: app shuts down if you go back to the app from the “view in browser link”, view in browser asks for a client id rather than transferring. This may have been due to settings on my device, or my internet connectivity. . . . [more]

There’s a new player in the flash mob market. Vibe is a Twitter-like app for the iPhone that lets you communicate with other Vibe users anonymously. There is no login, no sign-up, no registration: it’s strictly download and play. Moreover, you shape your “vibes” by the distance you’d like them to travel and the length of time you’d like them to live. If you “Whisper” your vibe travels no more than 50 metres from where you are, “Speak” and the radius is 500 metres, etc; and like the tapes on Mission Impossible, your vibes can self-destruct after 15 minutes, 1 . . . [more]

Medical data is one of the most sensitive types of data and, like lawyers, some doctors have reservations about storing confidential client data “in the cloud.” The security of storing Electronic Health Records and related data on-premise is perceived by many doctors to be more secure than cloud-based alternatives.

This thinking is challenged by a US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) study that assesses the root cause of significant data breaches involving health information. The study finds the top causes of breaches of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to be:

• Physical theft of devices /