Coming up this fall are two conferences dealing with aspects of law and technology that you won’t want to miss:

1. The Canadian Forum on Court Technology, hosted by the Canadian Centre for Court Technology, takes place in Ottawa on September 22 and 23, 2010. Keynote speakers include Richard Susskind (author of “The End of Lawyers”), Allan Seckel (Deputy to the Premier of British Columbia) and Justice Louise Charron (Supreme Court of Canada). Panels will cover a wide variety of topics including the use of video in the courtroom, online dispute resolution, e-discovery, and modernizing the electronic records in Canadian

As we were alerted in a comment by Nick Holmes last year at this time, the U.K. has gathered together in one place nearly all of its online legislation. Legislation.gov.uk is managed by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, in turn part of the U.K. National Archives. At the moment the site is still lacking a promised “changes to legislation” function that will chart the various amendments, repeals, etc. to legislation occurring since 2002. There is, however, a point-in-time search facility.

Curiously, I’ve been unable to find a statement on the site as to whether the online version of . . . [more]

Actually, it’s this fortnight’s biotech highlights as we catch up from the long weekend. Like everything else in this feels like 35° summer, the biotech market freeze is melting a bit. Ontario in particular has been heating up lately, thanks to two government funding initiatives:

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario), which gave BDC $50 million for Ontario tech investments last year, has allocated $45 million this year to the NRC’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP). The NRC-IRAP program has been active in funding life science companies, so this money seems likely to provide a . . . [more]

The International Legal Technology Association has its annual conference ILTA 2010 just around the corner. This association and its conference includes some of the leading law firms in North America and looks at not only technology but also records management, information management, knowledge management, social media and related areas. This year’s theme is “Strategic unity”

a concept that resonates the need for law firms and law departments to unite their technology with the practice of law. These disciplines must come together as never before in order to survive and thrive in the future. Conference sessions will be developed around this

The potential ban against BlackBerry devices in Saudi Arabia has been averted, for now. The Saudi government is implementing a 48-hour grace period until tomorrow while they test out a deal reached which would allow them to monitor messages for criminal activity,

Officials say the deal involves installing BlackBerry computer servers in the kingdom, which would allow the Saudi government some access to user’s data.

Any agreement has to apply to all three of the mobile operators in the country, including Saudi Telecom, which is state-controlled, Mobily and Zain Saudi Arabia.

If the plan is successful it may help . . . [more]

The Canadian Judicial Council is a source of publications that should interest lawyers. The most recent report is The Canadian Justice System and the Media [PDF], a 2010 update to their publication of the same name in 2007. Although written explicitly for the benefit of members of the press and other news media, the section on Publication Bans and Other Restrictions on Media Coverage provides a handy review of the law in this area.

The Council commissions more frequent analyses on technology and its impact on the judicial system. For example, thus far in 2010 they’ve released four pieces by . . . [more]

On Wednesday in an Official Google Blog post, Urs Hölzle of Google informed us that Google Wave would no longer be developed:

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

Hölzle goes on to give some hope that some of this initiative may live on in other ways:

The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have

There has been a lot of press over the latest countries that don’t want Blackberries in their country unless they can get access to monitor user communications. See, for example, the Washington Post, Techdirt, Engadget.

RIM designed Blackberry communications so they would be secure, in a way that RIM itself can’t even access them. That’s a great feature that makes privacy advocates, corporate users, and individual users very happy. 

But it also makes some governments very unhappy – particularly those who believe they need to spy on communications. Some to the extent that they threaten to ban . . . [more]

My colleague Laurel Murdoch showed me the latest issue of the Harvard Law School Bulletin, the lead article focusing on the changes happening at the Harvard Law Library, led by John G. Palfrey, the Law School’s vice dean for library and information resources (formerly of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society). Palfrey is the author of a very interesting piece that Louis alerted us to, entitled Cornerstones of Law Libraries for an Era of Digital-Plus

Palfrey’s piece ends with a collaborative challenge:

Our next step should be a process akin to a design charrette.60 We ought to

Two interesting topics have come up in recent days; both of which seem connected. The first is Amazon’s prediction that ebook sales will overtake paperback sales by the end of 2011. Not entirely surprising, considering they’re already outselling hardcovers (“180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers”). And on it goes: paperback sales are eclipsed, ebooks will then be compared to the combined sales, paper becomes the minority, and so on. I think we all know the trend.

So if the market’s future is digital, what exactly do we want from the experience? The answer to this question depends a lot . . . [more]

I live in a one television household. One television supplied with data via satellite dish, 3 cell phones, 3 laptops, a desktop, an iPad, 3 iPods with screens and the best piece of tech – a long play record player that has a USB port. We don’t watch a lot of television, but for a family of four, we do consume our fair share of internet bandwidth.

There is plenty of news lately about internet delivered television. Google TV, Apple TV, and way back in 2005, PC World talked about Microsoft’s Internet TV, today’s version being Microsoft Mediaroom . . . [more]

There has been much written on Slaw and other places about the paperless office, or the virtual office. 

My personal view is that for the most part, we either already have the tools to accomplish it, or if we don’t have them, they can be acquired at low cost. The barrier is mostly our will to do it. Some people don’t see the need, or have a hard time giving up paper, or just find it hard to change.

Technolawyer points to an article that’s worth a read by New York lawyer Jay Fleishman entitled Being a Virtual Lawyer is . . . [more]