These are notes are from a panel presentation session at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto last Thursday. Panelists included Dominique Shelton, Wildmon Harrold, Beverly Hills, CA, Prof. Teresa Scassa, University of Ottawa, Research Chair of Information Law, Ottawa, ON, Dr. Ann T. Greeley, DecisionQuest, and Nicole Black, Rochester, NY . Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own. I welcome your comments and follow-up thoughts!

Dominique Shelton – Overview on what is social media

Social media often involves the creation of “user generated content”, which . . . [more]

The past couple of weeks have offered an amazing ringside view of an unusually public and acrimonious debate over software patents.

First, This American Life aired When Patents Attack, a fantastic expose of Intellectual Ventures, a patent holding company owned by Microsoft’s one-time CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The episode leads listeners to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that companies like Intellectual Ventures are at the root of all that’s wrong with the US patent system. It’s a must-listen for anyone involved in, or merely interested in, intellectual property law.

Then, last week, after losing out on a huge bidding war for . . . [more]

These are notes are from a panel presentation session at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto last Thursday. Panelists included lawyer/librarian Matthew Braun, Legal Reference Specialist at the Law Library of Congress in Washington, DC, Sara Sommarstrom, Program Director, Minnesota Justice Foundation, and Prof. Nanette Elster, Vice President, Spence & Elster and Adjunct Faculty, The John Marshall Law School, Chicago, IL. Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own. I welcome your comments and follow-up thoughts!

This session was made up of three very different presentations exploring . . . [more]

One-term searches in Google will no longer offer a link to Google’s dictionary website. It’s been shut down.

The preferred behaviour is now to have users:

1. Conduct a single-term search;
2. Click on More search tools in the left-sidebar;
3. Click on Dictionary in the left-sidebar.

Or perhaps mildly quicker, include the word ‘definition‘ next to one’s search. The results returned will include a short dictionary entry, along with links to various online dictionary websites.

Some of the responses to this change can be found via the Google search forums. . . . [more]

A short while ago the US House Judiciary Committee amended House bill H.R.1981 “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011” so as to require ISPs in the United States to retain for 18 months a broad range of data about customers and their online activity. (It would seem that the version currently available on LOC’s Thomas does not yet reflect the changes.) To quote from the brief story by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic:

…the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along

For the last few months a colleague from our marketing department and I have been attending SMBYEG. This is the 140 character form of Edmonton’s (Edmonton International Airport code being YEG) combined with the abbreviation for Social Media Breakfast. Not everyone who attends has a Twitter handle, but #SM users are certainly in the majority.

Social Media Breakfasts serves two main purposes:

• Face-to-face networking: Bring together marketers, PR pros, students, entrepreneurs, and social media practitioners and enthusiasts of all stripes over breakfast.
  
• Education: Through panel discussions, presentations, case studies, debates, and breakout sessions … teach, share, and learn social

In this ten-minute video, best-selling author Seth Godin talks about a fundamental shift in today’s business world that includes marketing, social media and a move toward openness. He says: “You are going to have to change if you want to be there too.”

Yahoo! Futurist: Seth Godin

Some food for thought. A quick summary:

1. Marketing needs to be responsible for the product.
2. You need to measure interaction.
3. The only asset that gets built online is permission to talk to people.

I wonder about the first point and how it can be applied to a law firm? I almost think . . . [more]

It used to be that packet ships would carry the post across the ocean, always running the risk that they might founder and take messages — and lives — with them. Now we only have to worry about routers and servers, and rarely if ever are living beings harmed should one of these electronic packet pushers go down. But they do go down. And now, as then, it’s not always easy to figure out whether the break in communication is systemic or more personal.

Recently, for example, Netflix encountered serious problems with streaming that lasted, on and off, for a . . . [more]

With the Canadian Law Blogs List now surpassing 300 entries (100 in the past year), along with the continued growth of law firms and lawyers using Twitter, Canadian legal web-commentary is definitely on the rise. One segment that’s lacked exposure, however, is the number of in-house perspectives from north of the border.

Happily, that change has started, with the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (a Stem client) providing a foot in the Twittersphere door. Launched earlier this month to coincide with a website redesign, @CCCA_News will provide a mix of:

• news stories relevant to corporate counsel from Canada, the United

The South Carolina Bar Association just released an Ethics Advisory Opinion on the use of Groupon by SC lawyers.This interesting opinion dealt with the question of whether it is ethical for SC lawyers to use Groupon. The answer: Yes, but proceed with caution. Read SC Ethics Advisory Opinion 11-05 here. . . . [more]

If you’re a Mac-using lawyer, Apple’s recently released OS X Lion has a new feature that single-handedly makes the upgrade worth the $29 price of admission.

FileVault 2 enables whole-disk encryption for OS X Lion computers with just a few clicks of the mouse. Whole disk encryption ensures the contents of your drive are only readable when you provide a valid username / password combination to the operating system. This means your entire computer’s hard drive will be encrypted, and thus unreadable, should it fall into the wrong hands.

I consider whole disk encryption a best practice for all lawyers, . . . [more]

Sunday at the AALL 2011 conference in Philadelphia about 200 people attended the Cool Tools Cafe, a 75 minute session in which we could visit 5 minute demos of new tools at any of 17 tables. I managed to visit about half. I was particularly impressed by DRAGNET, a legal search tool from the New York Law School demonstrated by Terry Ballard, Assistant Director of Technical Services for Library Systems of Mendik Library.

DRAGNET (Database Resource Access Using Google’s New Electronic Technologies) is a search tool created with Google custom search which we have mentioned a few times over . . . [more]