I first met Michael Rabinovici at a Legal Marketers Association (LMA) event on Social Media Success. We’ve stayed in touch periodically since, and he helps run a strategic consultation company, AR Communications Inc.

He recently gave a presentation on social media marketing and lawyers that I thought would be of interest to our readers, so I asked him to upload his slides and audio to SlideShare.

My apologies for starting this post with a pic, but

A woman in a hotel room in Uganda is making judgments ready for the scanner.

It demonstrates graphically the challenges faced in making legal information publicly accessible through a Legal Information Institute. That’s the topic of an excellent blog posting by Kelly Anderson of Southern African Legal Information Institute – SAFLII – over at VoxPopuLII, which is a guest-blogging project sponsored by Tom Bruce and our friends across the lake at the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School.

We may be complacent in North America about our . . . [more]

The Podcasting Legal Guide for Canada by Kathleen Simmons and Andy Kaplan-Myrth was first officially released back in June 2007 by Creative Commons Canada (see my Slaw post from June 29, 2007). Now they have put out a call to translate the Guide in an open source style, via Traduwiki. Their goal is to have it translated into French, although Traduwiki has the infrastructure to allow for translation into a number of different languages.

If you can help in the translation, please make your contribution via the wiki.

Photo: by Connie Crosby, also available under Creative . . . [more]

A week full of money: the Ontario Budget was announced Thursday, and it contained about $700 million of spending on innovation, including $300 million for research infrastructure and $250 million for the previously-announced Emerging Technologies Fund. Reactions were pretty positive, but badly in need of a thesaurus. The proof of the pudding is in the allocation though — in terms of benefits for biotech — the first commitment from the $205 million Ontario Venture Capital Fund turns out to be to a new VC that is more interested in software than soft tissue.

Here’s $100 . . . [more]

The news is full of the revelation from the universities of Toronto and Ottawa that a significant internet spy network has infiltrated more than 1,200 computers in over 100 countries, an operation seemingly run from China. (See the New York Times story and the BBC story.) The report, “Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network,” a product of cooperation between the SecDev Group at Ottawa and the Munk Centre for International Studies at Toronto, is available online via Scribd. . . . [more]

Google Docs has just introduced a feature that lets you insert a drawing that you can create using their own in-browser tool. While this isn’t exactly momentous — especially for a profession where a thousand words are preferred to a picture — it can be a useful feature if you need to create a diagram on the fly, for instance.

The actual program works really well, having all the expected features such as grouping and rotating and colour fill, with a roster of ready-made shapes to suit most purposes.

Doodle on. . . . [more]

I find collaborative writing hard — too much of a control freak, I guess — which means it’s probably a really good thing I didn’t go into practice, where the art of collaborative writing is an important skill. When I must marry your words with mine — and hers and his — I find the commenting features of Word essential but confusing at times. Now TextFlow offers a new way to display, compare and accommodate the variety of edits that can result when you all give me feedback on my draft. TextFlow is an application built on Adobe’s AIR platform . . . [more]

Lawyers’ Weekly reports that the Law Society of BC is considering whether it should be able to insist on doing a complete copy of a member’s computer in the course of an investigation. Pros and cons are discussed in the article, along with the proposed policy.

Concerns raised have included the lawyer/member’s privacy, and solicitor-client privilege.

Could not however the Law Society have sent in an investigator who would have had physical access to all the same files? Is the concern that once the mirror image is made, it is accessible to more people, with unknown controls?

In Ontario, the . . . [more]

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, honouring women in technology. From the website:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively

Major report out this morning commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in Britain taking the Brown government to task not merely for the dubious policy choices involved in the extension of many public sector surveillance and record-keeping databases but for their very illegality. . . . [more]

There’s an entry on Language Log, How fast do people talk in court?” by Mark Lieberman that should be of interest to court admins, translators, reporters and some litigation lawyers. He and a colleague are doing a study to determine what are typical rates of speech in courts or depositions, so that court reporter tests can be useful. (There are also a couple of related entries referred to, one on the old court stenograph, and another on “voice writing.”) And as for fast talking, you should check out the excerpt on YouTube from the Little Britain . . . [more]

Sure was an exciting week, if you enjoy parsing politicians’ public proclamations… Gary Goodyear, Canada’s Minister of State for science and technology, dug himself a deep hole when asked about evolution and although he kept digging for quite some time, he appears to have found neither a coherent response nor a convincing fossil. 

And speaking of divine intervention, no sooner did I put up a post bemoaning the worldwide biotech cash shortage, than over $1 billion in new venture funding rained down from … well, the Ontario and Québec governments. More legislative intervention than divine, but don’t let that . . . [more]