Last year I indicated that there were changes in Ontario which suggested that cloud computing had been implicitly authorized for lawyers. There was no other practical way to implement the new services rules under the amended Rules of Civil Procedure.

Despite these changes, there is still resistance to adopting cloud computing in practice, and sometimes with good reason. Security breaches of online databases have illustrated the enormous risk and problems created in a digital world.

The Ashley Madison hacks had many scurrying in embarrassment, and others concerned because their names had been used by the website without their permission. . . . [more]

Legislation recently introduced in the US Congress would compel publicly-traded companies to disclose in their filings with securities regulators whether any member of their board of directors was a ‘cybersecurity expert’.

Does this make sense to you? It does not to this commentator from the law firm Jones, Day. He says the role of the board is not to *be* the expert but to ensure that expertise is sought and its advice considered properly.

The comment notes that the SEC “has already made it clear that companies must disclose material cybersecurity risks and incidents to investors in their public filings.” . . . [more]

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is now underway in Las Vegas – where tech companies show off their latest and greatest. Popular themes this year include drones, internet of things, and cars. And of course TVs. LG is showing OLED 4K TVs that are impossibly thin – 2.57 mm, yes, mm thin. While they are expensive, and there isn’t much 4K content yet, that is expected to change much faster than HD came to market.

It is easy to scoff at some of the individual items that show up at CES, and certainly some of them will never gain any . . . [more]

Fellow Slaw contributor Kim Nayer wrote about QPLegalEze’s imminent dismantlement back in April 2014. Her post, titled “Goodbye QPLegalEze; Welcome Open Law“, heralded an end to an era of embargoed legal information, and hinted at the promise of a more democratic trend—one where the government lets the law become knowable even in the absence of our wallets.

Some goodbyes take longer than others. 20-odd months later, however, it really does feel like the house has cleared out. The repository of BC’s laws (various enactments, historical tables, ministerial orders archives, and that sort of thing) which was once kept  . . . [more]

The ABA Journal recently carried a story regarding another firm held hostage to ransomware hackers. In this case, the lawyer felt he had no choice but to pay. This follows incidents in North Carolina and B.C.

An Oklahoma lawyer says his computer files are being held hostage by the encrypto virus, despite his installation of three layers of protection to thwart such attacks.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the specs and quirks of our current technology that we forget how far we have come.

To put it in perspective, consider a smartwatch. There are many ways to measure computer performance – CPU speed, amount of ram, amount of storage memory, network speed, etc. A common way to compare basic performance, though, is by FLOPS, or floating operations per second.

A smartwatch can do somewhere in the range of 3 to 9 gigaflops. To put that in perspective, the Cray-2 supercomputer in 1985 could do about 1.9 gigaflops. You could buy . . . [more]

By Ian Hu, claims prevention and practicePRO counsel at LAWPRO.

It’s gift-giving season. Here are 5 gotta-have apps and websites for lawyers. The principle behind each of these is the same: they are easy to use, affordable, and produce immediate gains. Best of all, many of them are free or low cost.

1.WordRake (wordrake.com – starting at $129/yr)

Wouldn’t it be great to have another lawyer at your fingertips, ready to proofread your letters, memos, emails, and factums with a click of a button? . . . [more]

I’ve touched on this topic in an earlier post called, “Robots, Law, Regulation: “‘Unfortunately It’s Not a Conversation That’s Happening Anywhere …’” In that post I briefly highlighted an observation that Ed Walters* made when talking about the law of robotics, namely: Who makes or monitors the algorithmic decisions embedded in autonomous systems?

Patrick Lin, associate professor of ethics at California Polytechnic State University, posted a very nice “thought experiment” on Ted-Ed a couple of weeks ago that “isolates and stress tests our intuitions” and contributes to this conversation.

It’s a short animated video that . . . [more]

Trolls lurk in many dark recesses of the Internet. They make online browsing hurtful, defamatory, and sometimes, outright dangerous. These trolls are rarely slayed forever, and often raise their heads once again when given enough time.

The Ontario Court of Appeal recently reviewed an injunction granted in 2014 against a couple operating a website from publishing “in any manner” statement found to be defamatory towards an Ottawa lawyer, Richard Warman.

Among other grounds, the defendants sought a review of the permanent nature of the injunction as being overly broad. The very nature of the website in question was a . . . [more]

It’s the hap-happiest season of all.

And for some—family law practitioners in particular—the crackling warmth of hearth and home will be interrupted by the rustling sound of short leave applications, affidavits of unspeakable length and one or two clients’ Ghosts of Marriages Past. I have heard of counsel that dislike dealing with last minute Christmas custody conflicts so vigorously that they write office closure hours for the month of December directly into the retainer agreement. This is all said by way of making the point that family law and mid-December have a long history together. We should be reminded on . . . [more]

Every time there is a tragic attack on people or property, there is a cry from various authorities or politicians for law enforcement to get unfettered access to all kinds of communication tools.

But that would cause far more harm than good, and is a really bad idea.

The argument goes something like this:

These bad actors hide behind encrypted communications to plan their evil deeds. Therefore to stop them law enforcement needs to have access to all this. Therefore we need to have backdoors built into all encryption that law enforcement can use.

This is flawed in many ways. . . . [more]

On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be … engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might…between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them… This is the Court of Chancery, which