The Practice Directions for the Toronto Region states,

Parties must consult with each other to select a return date convenient to all parties and which will permit all parties to file all necessary materials and conduct any examinations before the return date. At the time of booking, a realistic estimate of the time required by all parties for argument must be provided.
[emphasis added]

Most other regions have similar guidelines on consultation for scheduling.

Finding a single date when all counsel are available, and then also securing that date from the Trial Scheduling Office, can be challenging, especially when there . . . [more]

There has been a lot of press over the Privacy Commissioner’s decision that the Google Street View collection of information from unprotected wifi signals breached PIPEDA. See the press release, and the decision. See examples of press reports by the CBC and CTV. The CTV report says that Spanish regulators announced they were filing a lawsuit against Google for the incident, seeking millions in fines.

I know nothing more about this than I read in the press – but I think we need to put Google’s actions in perspective here. Yes, it should not have collected that . . . [more]

October 18, 2010 was election day for municipalites in Alberta. My husband made his choice in the afternoon at our polling station, with one person in line in front of him. I made my selection for a Division 1 Councillor for Lac Ste. Anne County around 6:10 p.m., on my way home, with no one in front of me in line to vote.

There were news reports for city election results, and some blog activity in larger centres, but in rural Alberta election news, and results, and even platforms were mostly silent. Especially on the web.

Prior to the election, . . . [more]

A couple of years ago I posted about Ubiquity, a Firefox add-on that let you summon up and execute a variety of useful browser commands with simple shortcuts. For various reasons I never did make the use of the feature that it deserved, and then I switched away from Firefox because I found it slow.

Now the idea is back again, this time in a cross-browser way that’s going to make it more useful. The application, if that’s what it is — perhaps “feature” or “set of commands” would be a better description — is called Quix, and . . . [more]

This week was a week of small steps in biotech. And not the kind of small steps that are actually giant leaps, either.

Canadian VC funding saw a big leap for tech and cleantech funding, but only a marginal increase for biotech. This news roughly coincided with the purchase of the VenGrowth funds by Covington Capital this week, which seems like a big leap, but will probably end up only being a minor step in the reshaping of the industry in Ontario.

Both the United States and Europe took small steps toward increasing the availability of biosimilars (“generic” . . . [more]

Last week Nicole Garton Jones, a BC-based lawyer and fellow Slaw contributor, provided some thought-provoking commentary on the position of the Law Society of British Columbia on the topic of Virtual Law Firms, as discussed in the latest edition of the organization’s Bencher’s Bulletin. In the bulletin, and subsequent response to Ms. Garton-Jones’ post, the LSBC identifies several key concerns relating to cloud computing for BC-based law firms, namely:

The last couple of years I have been living vicariously through Twitter, doing my best to follow the discussions at the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference that takes place in the UK each October. When people who are attending start emailing me things they have learned (as happened this year), I really know I am missing something!

Some highlights from ILI2010

Dr. Hazel Hall, Director of the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, spoke about “relevance of social tools for information professionals” in her talk Getting Real About Social Media. Owen Stephens has a nice blog . . . [more]

Here’s an interesting paper outlining what looks to be a very interesting research tool currently being developed for Google: A “research trail” generator as a browser feature.

We propose the concept of research trails to help web users create and reestablish context across fragmented research processes without requiring them to explicitly structure and organize the material. A research trail is an ordered sequence of web pages that were accessed as part of a larger investigation; they are automatically constructed by filtering and organizing users’ activity history, using a combination of semantic and activity based criteria for grouping similar visited web

I read with interest an article out today in the Law Society of BC Bencher Bulletin about virtual law firms.

Some quotes caught my particular attention. Specifically, a Practice Advisor at the Law Society of BC is quoted as follows:

Some lawyers are so keen on the technology and reducing overhead by having a ‘virtual law firm’ that they are not putting their minds to the professional responsibility issues regarding confidentiality, conflicts, client identification and verification, determining mental capacity of the client to instruct, undue influence over the client and so on.

There are currently very few law firms that . . . [more]

When it comes to word processors lawyers will almost universally use either MS Word or WordPerfect. These giant applications contain hundreds of features that are capable of meeting just about any imaginable need when it comes to document creation (except proper typesetting). And, in the case of Word, it integrates more or less smoothly with the rest of the Office suite of applications. Powerful stuff.

This muscularity comes with a price, though. There’s the literal price, of course. Then there’s the need to have a decent-sized pack animal around to port the app along with you on your travels. As . . . [more]

With a hat-tip to my young colleague, Michael Ladanyi:

While the decision is not yet posted online, according to the Federal Court website, Amazon.com’s appeal of the Commissioner’s Decision denying Amazon.com a patent for its 1-click purchasing was granted today. The status update giving notice that the appeal was granted can be seen here. The application describes purchasing items over the Internet using a single-action by transmitting a client identifier associated with information about a buyer.

Here is the full text of the status update posted online today:

Reasons for Judgment and Judgment dated 14-OCT-2010 rendered by The

In her annual report to Parliament on the Privacy Act last week, the federal Privacy Commissioner expressed concerns about several issues. The Privacy Act deals with privacy issues for the Federal government.

Issues included the way surplus equipment and paper is disposed, and improper and unauthorized access to documents. Highlights from the press release include:

• Wireless audit: Of five federal entities examined, none had fully assessed the threats and risks inherent in wireless communications. Gaps in policies and/or practices resulted in weak password protection for smart phones and inadequate encryption for Wi-Fi networks and data stored on mobile devices. Shortcomings