A small Canadian legal venture announced itself recently, going public in its very early stages. LexPublica, using the .ca domain so that the URL is lexpubli.ca, aims to be both a business and an online source for free legal instruments and information. At the moment LexPublica is only a blog, where the two founders, Martin Ertl (a McGill grad who has worked at Davis LLP) and Zak Greant, a techie, explain what they hope to do, which seems to be akin to what JD Supra is doing in having lawyers post their material for display and use by . . . [more]

Further to the Slaw post yesterday, daily coverage is being posted both on the CBC News website, and on Michael Geist’s blog. From Monday:

Net neutrality doesn’t exist, CRTC told (CBCnews.ca, July 6, 2009)

CRTC Net Neutrality Hearings Open Amid ISPs’ Conflicting Claims (Michael Geist blog, July 6, 2009)

CRTC Network Management Hearings, Day One: Sandvine, Juniper, Consumer Groups (Michael Geist blog, July 6, 2009) . . . [more]

These news items likely aren’t worthwhile putting as separate posts, so this is a silly season round-up of odd notes from the legal media.

We’re Staying in Dayton

Despite what we speculated last year about the outsourcing of jobs from Dayton, Lexis told the local paper last week that it has no plans to move and that 3,000 jobs in town are safe.

Amazing ROI in Legal Publishing

Want to quadruple your money in 55 months? Sounds like a Madoff line.

Well, in 2004, a London fund put £750,000 of fund money into a Lexis spin-off, a MBO . . . [more]

Two recent interesting articles on knowledge management in law firms you might find useful:

• Knowledge management: The number of knowledge management lawyers is on the rise, but the field is still working out some kinks (Lawyers Weekly) by Milton Kiang, June 26, 2009 issue

  Interviews with various Canadian KM directors, talking about where we are with knowledge management as well as the growing role of lawyers in KM. Quoting Blakes‘ KM director Marcia Cooper:

  It’s considered a necessary function, for the firm to work effectively, for the firm to deliver value and best client services. Even in these

Steve Matthews has mentioned his client CLIO and their blogging about SaaS here on Slaw previously. I expect he doesn’t want to inundate us with client talk, but some of their recent blogging begs to be mentioned. They have just completed a 10-part blog series “10 Things Every Lawyer Should Know About Legal Saas” as follows:

Part 1: What is Software-as-a-Service? A discussion of what exactly Software-as-a-Service is, and how it compares to the more traditional desktop computing model.

Part 2: Why (Or Why Not) Choose a SaaS Solution? Why SaaS offers compelling advantages over traditional desktop software

Microsoft is holding a roundtable meeting this afternoon in the UK to answer questions about their new search engine Bing. The meeting starts at 1900 UK time (I’m calculating that at 2 pm ET). The discussion on Twitter can be tracked here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=meetbing (no Twitter password necessary). If you are on Twitter, the tag being used is #meetbing. Questions may be addressed to various people including @karenblakeman, @Philbradley and @leggetter to relay to Microsoft during the meeting.

See related Slaw post: Microsoft’s Bing Goes Live (June 1, 2009) . . . [more]

I agree with Simon Chester, Borat was a “silly film.” The real country of Kazakhstan is making headlines, and few people online are laughing.

The parliament in that country has approved a new law that would allow criminal prosecution for blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites. Foreign sites considered unsuitable can also be blocked.

The government defends the recent move, saying it is intended for child pornography and extremist literature. But critics cay that it can also be used to censor content on elections, strikes, demonstrations, and inter-ethnic strife.

The popular blog site, LiveJournal.com, is already inaccessible to . . . [more]

Math has never been my strong suit. Keeping my day organized in 6 minute intervals is sometimes a chore. My firm changed accounting software and with that change I decided to use the new tool efficiently and no longer keep a paper time sheet. Unfortunately, I no longer have the nice little conversion chart that used to be on my paper form.

New search tools have been getting some press here on Slaw, including WolframAlpha. This computational search engine makes for an easy shortcut to inputting the correct time span into online time sheet.

The resulting hours plus . . . [more]

Neither civil libertarians nor privacy advocates are likely to be pleased with the two Bills introduced last week by Canada’s federal government, Bills which are intended to give police wider powers to access online data without a warrant. If passed, the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act (Bill C-47) will require Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) and other “telecommunications service providers” to install equipment facilitating the interception of communications, and to allow police access, without a warrant, to the personal information of users including names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and internet protocol addresses. The Investigative Powers . . . [more]

I recently helped the Toronto Association of Law Libraries (TALL) set up a Facebook group. I’ve long suspected it: law librarians *love* Facebook. It is a place where we can talk to each other one-on-one, share photos about our personal lives, play word games, and join groups of interest. Almost immediately after creating the TALL group, we had over 30 people sign up by word of mouth. Official word about the group went out a few weeks ago, and we now have more than double that signed up.

Some of our thinking behind creating the group:

• members were asking

White Park Bay, a company that seems to specialize in porting Oxford University Press books to the iPhone, has published a number of OUPs technical dictionaries as iPhone apps, among them the Oxford Dictionary of Law. (This link will take you to it in the app store on your iTunes.) The dictionary sells for CD14.99 (who’s kidding whom with this penny less pricing?). You will note that while rich for an iTunes app, many of which sell at just under a dollar, it’s a whole lot cheaper than the Black’s Law Dictionary, which sells for CD50 (with a penny . . . [more]

I had a bit of a head-scratching experience just now: Google gave me a precise answer to a search that was more or less framed as a question; and I can’t recall ever seeing that before. Is this an old feature I’ve never stumbled on or is it something new that’s having a soft launch?

I usually don’t give Google a question, having learned instead to feed it a string of keywords tied in a Boolean knot. But today I asked “how many canals in amsterdam”? The first item in the results was an unequivocal answer — and not one . . . [more]