We are all undergoing training at my place of work on the newest versions of word processing and e-mail programs. At a session today, talk got around to the the need to be careful about the “metadata” that is created whenever we create and change a document.

It so happens that the American Bar Association website has recently updated its list of professional ethics opinions from around the United States concerning the handling of metadata:

(…) the term refers to the embedded stratum of data in electronics file that may include such information as who authored a document, when

. . . [more]

I recently pointed to an Ontario study showing that up to a third of residents face legal problems, and the majority of those problems are in family law. The study also looked to Internet resources as part of the solution for self-represented litigants who cannot afford counsel.

There’s a new show being launched featuring a sitting Ontario Family Court judge called Family Matters with Harvey Brownstone. Justice Brownstone is well known in Canada for his public speaking, which includes almost every law school in the country, and his book on family law, Tug-of-War.

With the new show he’s . . . [more]

I’ve talked on Slaw before about IBM’s Many Eyes, the project from their research lab that lets you upload data and turn it into visualizations of various kinds. Now they’ve developed a version called Many Bills, a way of searching through the bills presented to the U.S. Congress (during 2009) to find and present topics buried within these lengthy documents.

A search for [copyright] for example yields 61 bills and 106 sections within them that touch on copyright. Each bill is presented as a narrow stripe (50 to a very wide page, in this case), with the sections . . . [more]

The new copyright bill is expected today. There has been much anticipation about what it might contain. That is understandable given that several failed and controversial attempts have been made to pass a reform bill over the last few years. And that there were extensive hearings around the prior bill last summer that attracted a significant amount of commentary. And that digital media is considered by many (e.g. the Canada 3.0 initiative) to be a crucial part of the economic future of Canada.

The anti-spam and privacy bills introduced last week are important bills that have effect on business and . . . [more]

A colleague alerted me to this resource: NewsGator offers free one-hour educational webinars. You can register for upcoming webinars or watch previously recorded ones. The upcoming webinar on June 3rd focuses on the benefits of Government 2.0. Previously recorded webinars have discussed the following topics:

• Next Gen Learning with Web 2.0
• Enterprise Social Networking. Is Your Company Falling Behind?
• Web 2.0 Bridges Gap for Information and Knowledge Management

. . . [more]

This week, a deal far away from home helped bring closer to home one of the challenges facing the biotech industry. Abbott labs bought a unit of India’s Piramal healthcare, moving further into the generics business (at least in emerging markets).

The recent introduction of generic Lipitor in Canada is one example of the challenges facing pharma companies as current blockbusters come off patent and face generic competition. A lot of commenters have been expecting that challenge to turn into more money spent by pharma companies on biotech; but the Abbott-Piramal transaction emphasized that there’s more than one way . . . [more]

The Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project released a report today, Listening to Ontarians, funded by the Law Society of Upper Canada, Legal Aid Ontario and Pro Bono Law Ontario. The study focused on middle-to-low-income populations, defined as a household income of under $75,000.

Tracey Tyler provides a summary of the report at The Star.

The study shows that one-third of those interviewed had a legal problem in the preceding year, with low-income populations facing the greatest hurdles,

While the rate of incidence of legal problems within this group was consistent with Ontarians in the total survey

. . . [more]

on Slaw.ca: As a first test of iPad ereader apps, @conniecrosby tries out the Kobo and iBooks apps

I have had calls from lawyers in the midst of handling apparent fraud attempts who were wanting to verify whether the lawyers named as the drafter of the collaborative family law agreements presented to them by the fraudsters were in fact real lawyers. There were names and signatures in the agreements – but nothing else. No firm names, telephone numbers, addresses etc. Red flag!! Searches of the internet failed to turn up anything.

So where can you go to attempt to establish if you are dealing with a real lawyer that is in good standing?

A newly updated LLRX article, . . . [more]

The Canadian government introduced two important new bills yesterday. Bill C-29 amends PIPEDA – I’ll leave commentary on that to David Fraser.

Bill C-28 is the “Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act” or FISA. It is essentially the same as the “Electronic Commerce Protection Act” that was proposed previously. Here is Industry Canada’s news release, and the bill itself.

It targets the sending of what we would typically call spam, or unwanted commercial email, as well as spyware and phishing.

From the news release:

The proposed FISA is intended to deter the most damaging and deceptive forms of . . . [more]

Back in the winter, we unveiled the new features that Thomson / West’s boffins have been dreaming up to soup up Westlaw for a Google-impatient generation.

A few notes from Eagan. . . . [more]

An event perhaps long overdue, today May 20, 2010 is the day Duke University will shut down the Internet’s first discussion forum. The “Users Network” or its more recognizable name ‘Usenet’ was started in 1979, and evolved to more than 120,000 newsgroups on almost every subject imaginable.

We could call Usenet the Twitter of yesteryear, and that wouldn’t be too far off. But even as we say good-bye, I see attributes in Usenet that are still somewhat unique. Will we ever see the Internet offer a single source and location of global discussion? It’s not likely.

I also find . . . [more]