Ideas are certainly a coin of the internet business realm, if not the only specie, and so it’s natural that makers and marketers want to claim and protect them. Since there’s no copyright in ideas, corporations are careful to require strict non-disclosure agreements from those whom they employ or with whom they do a certain business, relying on secrecy (and prompt NDA enforcement) to protect a notion until it can be matured to a patentable or copyright-able form. Apple, for instance, imposed a NDA obligation on anyone who wanted access to that company’s iPhone operating system data in order to . . . [more]

Doug Cornelius–someone whose thoughts many of us have followed through his blog KM Space–is leaving his real estate practice at his law firm in Boston and with it his hard-core legal knowledge management work. That being said, I am still hopeful he will practice what he learned there about knowledge management and will continue (at least a little) to update his KM blog. He had me worried that he wouldn’t.

Doug has joined Beacon Capital Partners, a real estate firm also in Boston, as their Chief Compliance Officer.

In talking to Doug recently, I learned that . . . [more]

Attorney Sergei Lemberg, the head of Lemberg & Associates, LLC and who specializes in “lemon law“, has a practical guest blog post over at the Virtual Law Practice blog worth reading. He talks about how he uses newer Web technologies to get work done, collaborate with clients, and advertise his practice.

Some highlights:

I have clients from all over the country and rarely see them in person. I use VOIP for my office phone system for onsite and off-site staff, which gives the impression of everyone being under the same roof. I also take advantage of the Web-based

Over the years inside some organizations, libraries and IT departments have had difficulty working with one another. Episode 33 of the TechTherapy podcast from the Chronicle of Higher Education looks at the differences and similarities between Libraries and IT departments and, without pointing any finger of blame, discusses why this rift exists. The discussion focuses on academic departments, but a lot of this applies to other types of organizations. (Length of this episode is 13 min, 37 sec.)

Hosts Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast come up with these differences: . . . [more]

…Not that there was a lot that could have been done to improve the already stellar blog by Jordan Furlong. Still, Law21 has a bright new look and a lot of improved functionality. Check out the nifty AJAXed menus in the sidebar — heck, take the whole thing for a test drive. You’ll see that Jordan’s moving his blog closer to functioning as a nexus for thought on innovation and change in the practice of law, which is no bad thing. Congratulations, Jordan, on this upgrade. . . . [more]

Search Engine Land confirmed yesterday that RSS feeds for search results are on their way to Google.

Interesting? Yes, but after a bit of thought, I’m lowering my expectations. There’s no way to be know if these concerns will ever come about, but let me document them anyway:

• Drinking from the Firehose? – If, as expected, this works similar to blog search RSS, the amount of content could be huge. Putting up tighter filters may help, ie. searching in quotes, longer search phrases, more specific search terms; but the web is a big place…
• Content I Want? – Blog search

Robert Ambrogi has a post over on Legal Blog Watch about a conference at Seattle University School of Law on the digital future of legal casebooks. It seems that the situation in the U.S. is no different from that here: publishers and academics are unclear about what they want in a casebook, though both (some academics, certainly) perceive that electronic casebooks are the way to go.

One upshot appears to be that CALI and Gene Koo will organize a group to build and use an e-casebook on cyberlaw. There is, of course, a certain “rightness” about a course in . . . [more]

Bill Ives has a couple of posts on the use of wikis for knowledge management at law firms on his blog, Portals and KM.

In Wikis in Knowledge Management at Law Firms – Part One: ThoughtFarmer Example he reports on a discussion at a recent event in Boston, where two examples were discussed. The first was of a Canadian firm (unnamed) where the KM and IT people had set up Domino wikis (i.e. inside the firewall) for the various practice groups. The result was that they created silos of information. As a solution they turned to ThoughtFarmer. After . . . [more]

The states of Nevada and now Massachusetts require that holders of personal information must encrypt that information. Nevada imposes this requirement on businesses with respect to some kinds of information — names associated with social security numbers or various other kinds of access codes. Massachusetts imposes the requirement on everybody and applies it to storage on mobile devices and transmission through open networks.

A memo by the Chicago firm of Wildman Harrold describes both laws and gives citations.

Do we need this kind of rule in Canada? PIPEDA and its provincial counterparts require holders of personal information to keep it . . . [more]

As a follow-up to the post on Google Picasa’s facial recognition software, there are other new potential Google products that are raising privacy concerns.

A Google spokesperson announced this week a patent application that will rank social network users based on their influence, measured by metrics that would include how many people visited their profile, number of friends, and how active they were on the site.

The product would even track how frequently people post on sites and how successful they are in getting others to read or watch things that they post. Ranking could also be based on . . . [more]

Just a short post to raise a question that’s discussed on Law.com today, which is why American legal blogs seem to be populated by boys and abandoned by women.

That doesn’t seem to be the case here at Slaw. Is that something about Slaw? Or Canadian law? Or simply that our focus on legal information, technology and research isn’t the same as those blogs that Law.com was looking at?

It offers three theories (none of which is particularly compelling:

Theory #1: Women law bloggers are out there, you just don’t see them. ((Women bloggers aren’t as relentlessly self-promoting))

Theory

Few people probably noticed the changes to one of the software features in Google Pack last month. Fewer still have considered the privacy implications.

Picasa, a photo management and sharing system, launched a facial recognition system. Users tag their photos, and the software searches through pictures to find the same people and place tags on them too.

Google, who owns Picasa, has had these capabilities for a couple years now since they acquired Neven Vision.

Theoretically a user could pick off other people’s photos from Flickr or Facebook, upload them to their Picasa account and tag . . . [more]