In an April 18, 2011 post on the Minnesota State Bar Association’s Practice Blawg, it was announced that the MSBA trust accounting guides are now available to non-MSBA members. In the past these guides were behind a members-only wall.

These guides help lawyers work with trust accounts in the several commercially available mainstream accounting programs. There are 5 guides including:

• Keeping Client Trust Accounts with GnuCash 2.2.4
• Keeping Records for Client Trust Accounts Using Microsoft Office Accounting 2006 or 2007
• Using QuickBooks 6.0 for Lawyers’ Trust Accounting
• Trust Accounting with QuickBooks 2005 Professional
• Keeping Clients’ Trust Accounts with QuickBooks

SkyNews is broadcasting live the hearings at the UK Supreme Court. As the site says, “The Court normally sits between 10am and 4pm” UK time, which means that most of Canada will have to get up very early to enjoy this show. At the moment (10am ET), however, I’m watching something called Scottish Widows plc (Respondent) v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (Appellant) (Scotland) – UKSC 2010/0178. (Perhaps it’s been recorded and is being re-played.) The court and the hapless barrister are fumbling for perhaps fifteen minutes as the lawyer tries to direct the court to the correct . . . [more]

A simple question for Slaw-yers: was #Elxn41 the “Social Media Election”?

The term was tossed about during the campaign with conjecture on how social media would impact the election; so now that the election is over and we have had some time to reflect, was it the “social media election”? I am unsure, but my inclination is that it was not. Primarily because I did not see a lot of content generated specifically for social media, nor have I observed an impact that can be attributed to social media. I saw of lot of content generated in a traditional fashion . . . [more]

LisNews points us to an interesting alert on the vulnerability of ebook reader apps to linkspamming, phishing and, potentially, the full range of malicious exploits.

As the full potential of hypertext for the communication of book-length works is incrementally being explored, I suppose this development is inevitable. . . . [more]

The Google IO developer conference has just finished up, with one of the major announcements being the new Chrome OS laptops, such as the Samsung Series 5 seen in this Engadget video:

The feature list is intentionally short, but the prices are comparable to the sub-$450 laptop market — a little high, honestly, since the chromebook doesn’t look all that superior to current netbook trend. If you’ve used Google’s Chrome browser with apps, you already know about the user experience. The lack of the ability to install executable files has caused some speculation that the antivirus industry may be impacted . . . [more]

The University of Toronto is hosting a cyber-surveillance event this week that includes the typical academic workshops, as well as an artistic component. The event and the workshop are part The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting, a research project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

From the press release:

Digitally mediated surveillance is an increasingly prevalent, but still largely invisible, aspect of everyday life. As we work, play and negotiate public spaces, on-line and off, we produce a growing stream of personal digital data of interest to unseen others. CCTV cameras hosted by private and public

by Ryan Mattinson*

To begin, we need to briefly clarify some geek speak. ‘War-driving’ is the act of driving around with a laptop, antenna and often a GPS transceiver, in order to search for and record information about Wi-Fi access points such as SSID (name), BSSID (MAC address), signal strength, etc. and associating this information with GPS coordinates. War-driving requires only the passive collection of information contained in Wi-Fi beacons. These are signals transmitted at regular, frequent intervals by both secure and open access points, even when configured to hide their network name. This is necessary to . . . [more]

We use a lot of technology today that is – to borrow a term from Steve Jobs – magical. Consider tablet computing, cars that respond to voice commands or even drive themselves. Calling an ipad2 or an Android Tablet or a Playbook magic is not a huge exaggeration in historical terms. An iPad2 would have been on a list of supercomputers rivalling a Cray as recent as 1996.

But we don’t get to this level of technology without experimentation and failures along the way. The important thing is to use those failures to lead to new insight and better . . . [more]

I used to be asked simple questions like what is the fax number for the Canadian Consulate in Zimbabwe. This is a question that any librarian would be able to find in 1 minute. Go to the topical table of contents for the Canadian Almanac and Directory – Find that Canadian Diplomatic and Consular Representatives Abroad starts on p. 882, flip to page 888 – Fax number is 263-425-2186. It almost takes as long to write the question as it does to find the answer.

These days I am asked for difficult things like what hashtag should I use for . . . [more]

Recently I was invited to attend an information session on the e-disclosure pilot project that is about to get underway for a small number of police divisions in Toronto’s Metro North jurisdiction. While electronic documentation may seem like a 1990s innovation, its adoption by notoriously change-resistant lawyers (on both sides of the criminal bar) and technologically averse police officers, may genuinely herald a new era in the archaic field of criminal law.

Starting immediately, police from the pilot detachment (currently consisting of officers from Toronto’s 31 Division who are not tasked to special teams and rolling out to two more . . . [more]

There have been two important and encouraging developments on the ethics of cloud computing over the last month.

First, the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 has issued an initial set of draft proposals addressing lawyers’ confidentiality-related obligations when using technology. The Commission’s draft report proposes:

• The development of a centralized, user-friendly website that contains continuously updated and detailed information about confidentiality-related ethics issues arising from lawyer’s use of technology, including the latest data security standards.
• Amendments to several Model Rules of Professional Conduct and their Comments to offer specific guidance and expectations relating to technology.

The amendments to the Model . . . [more]

A message on the American Law Libraries – Private Law Libraries SIS Listserv has alerted me to: (i) A new blog by Law Librarian Jean O’Grady called Dewey B Strategic which has the subtitle of “Risk, value, strategy, libraries, knowledge and the legal profession,” and (ii) a recent intriguing post on this new blog called The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training that raises the challenge (if not impossibility) of trying to teach “cost-effective searching” on Westlaw or Lexis to students or associates given the complexity of how these products are priced. Some examples . . . [more]