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

The 10th annual Canadian Law Blog Awards is now officially open for business! It’s hard to believe that ten years has passed since I first scribbled down a list of my favourite law blogs (probably on the back of a Christmas napkin) and then wrote up a post explaining what those blogs meant to me.

The spirit of the Clawbies hasn’t changed much over the past decade. We still tell bloggers not to nominate their own blog, and instead, to write a nomination post identifying three or more other blogs that made an impact on their professional lives. That . . . [more]

Apologies to other Slaw readers in advance. This post is mostly for BC lawyers interested in using CanLII to note up specific Supreme Court Family Rules. I shared these tips recently in a paper for a CLE and thought the general principle or method might be helpful to a broader audience too.

I’ll preface this post to say that 95% of the time, CanLII is a simply phenomenal tool. Deeply customizable search operators and a clean interface/search template. It’s a killer app for lawyers and others seeking to know the law. It is, however, strangely ill-suited to note up specific . . . [more]

JURIX 2015 takes place next week at the University of Minho, Law School, Campus of Gualtar, Braga, Portugal. This is the 28th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems providing a “forum for academics and practitioners for the advancement of cutting edge research in the interface between law and computer technology.”

This event begins with a day of workshops followed by two days of papers corresponding to the following agenda:

• Evidence and Facts in Law
• Case Law and Citation Networks
• Law for Legal Concepts
• Linked Data
• Data Retrieval and Analysis
• Deontic Logic
• Argumetation, Legal Decision-making
• Legal

A lot of attention is being paid these days to cyberthreats and cybersecurity. It seems widely accepted that such threats and security questions cannot be confined to the IT department any more, but they involve sufficiently critical threats to organizations that boards of directors have to get involved. When boards get involved, they turn to their counsel.

Some enterprising law firms in the US have published books on the topic. The blurb for this one strikes me as a bit over the top – and the threats they sketch have been real for years (off-the-shelf attack software available for . . . [more]

Cybersecurity was a major topic at the recent Canadian IT Law Association conference. It can be a daunting subject to ponder when dealing with various types of services, cloud providers, and the methods, standards and assurances available to lower the risk of a security breach. Cyber insurance to cover some of these risks is a growing field.

This Cyber Security Report Card (pdf) is a good high level summary of the things that businesses should think about when considering security issues for their organization. It was provided by one of the luncheon speakers, John Millar of Digital Boundary Group, . . . [more]

OK, Canada may be somewhat behind our neighbours when it comes to adopting rules around technological competence for lawyers, but at least “Digital Citizenship” is getting some traction—or at least with respect to standards for children and parents.

On Friday November 13, 2015, while two more states adopted a duty of technology competence into their codes—and while Canadian law societies maintained unanimous silence on such requirements for lawyers—British Columbia’s Office of the Information & Privacy Commissioner and Representative for Children and Youth, released Cyberbullying: Empowering Children and Youth To Be Safe Online and Responsible Digital Citizens. The Privacy . . . [more]

According to the English media, Facebook is thinking of generating an automatic warning to a member who posts a picture of a child to a publicly-accessible page on Facebook.

Is this a serious over-reaction to the threat that the kid – or the parents – face from such a posting? How many people are actually affected by predators of any kind using online pictures? What proportion are those victims of the numbers of people whose pics are on FB?

Is this a tactic by FB to appear to be concerned about privacy when its entire lucrative business model is . . . [more]

In R. v Cusick, the Ontario Superior Court upheld a search warrant of a computer where that computer was suspected of having been used to upload child pornography to a cloud storage service.

What one searches for, apparently, are ‘artifacts’ – digital traces of the child porn files that passed through the computer on the way to the cloud. The case notes the difference between uploading from the computer’s hard drive (in which case the files may also still be on the computer) and uploading from a USB drive or mobile device (in which case they may not be, . . . [more]

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” – Bill Gates

I predict that the first components of a litigation file to be completely automated are the drafting of:

• Common Pleadings (e.g. Statement of Claim for “slip and fall”);
• Affidavit of Documents; and
• Discovery Plans for common actions.

Why?

These documents are rule based, and computer programs love rules. I envision a computer program asking questions at the beginning of the file . . . [more]