One year after the CBA Futures Report, the debate over ABS still rages on and appears to be the most contentious issue, even while foreign firms state they’re eyeing our territory for opportunities. Although there are concerns about professionalism, much of the resistance, especially by personal injury lawyers, is based in protectionism.

Yet ABS may be the great bait and switch of legal innovation. The alternatives to practice may not come in the form of other business structures, but in other technological structures which allow for law to be conducted in different ways.

Legal services rely on enormous amounts of . . . [more]

Friday July 31 is the 16th annual SysAdmin Day. A day to show our appreciation to the IT professionals who keep our computers, networks and apps working. For those of us who push the tech envelope a bit beyond a typical office setup, our thanks for not rolling their eyes every time we ask them for something new and different. And our thanks for using us as the test platform for new stuff.

In the interest of using your SysAdmin’s time most effectively, take a look at this amusing list. . . . [more]

Welcome to Vendor Quiz, a periodic feature here at Slaw in which we ask a legal marketplace supplier a series of substantive questions about their product or service. Our goal is to provide insight and guidance to Slaw readers who might be considering a purchase, and who would benefit from practical information with which they can make a more informed choice. Vendor Quiz is an advertorial service, with each post sponsored by the featured vendor.

Sync.com is a secure cloud storage platform that makes it easy to store, share and access your files from anywhere. The client’s privacy is guaranteed. . . . [more]

It’s nice to see that the processes involved in the creation of library linked data have evolved to a point where you might say they are approaching a degree of maturity. For a while now there have been a number of technical barriers including seemingly simple things like deciding which of the many programming languages to invest your time in or which of the many applications are necessary to accomplish your linked data goals. A number of useful tools have emerged in the last couple of years and there are now enough people who have tried them with some success . . . [more]

Here’s a cute but telling article on the privacy and security threats posed by wearable technology – things like smart watches and personal health monitors.

It’s a useful reminder that interconnected devices (Internet of Things stuff) are often lacking basic security or have only basic security, and they are often not updatable either. So they may be infected by security attacks that then get walked into an otherwise protected work environment and spring loose behind the firewalls.

Thus the suggestion of a Bring Your Own Fitbit policy. It’s not just the phones any more.

Views? Do you deal with such . . . [more]

From time to time various law enforcement and government types whine that encryption is a bad thing because it allows criminals to hide from authorities. That is usually followed by a call for security backdoors that allow government authorities to get around the security measures.

That’s a really bad idea – or as Cory Doctorow puts it in a post entitled Once Again: Crypto backdoors are an insane, dangerous idea: “Among cryptographers, the idea that you can make cryptosystems with deliberate weaknesses intended to allow third parties to bypass them is universally considered Just Plain Stupid.”

They build in . . . [more]

Earlier this month, Fastcase, an American-based electronic provider of U.S. primary law (cases, statutes, regulations, court rules, and constitutions), unveiled its list of Fastcase 50 winners for the year 2015:

“The Fastcase 50 for 2015 highlights entrepreneurs, innovators, and trailblazers — people who have charted a new course for the delivery of legal services. In law firms – including some of the nation’s largest – with new delivery models, legal tech startups, legal publishers, academia, and the judiciary, these pioneers are giving the world a first look at what’s next for law and technology.”

Simon Fodden, the founder of . . . [more]

CanLII has a new friend. Its name is Lexbox.

It’s a product from Lexum — the Montreal-based company responsible for the undergirding technology of CanLII — which first emailed me and a clutch of other legal research types back in late March with an invite to help test the experimental tool when it was still in a closed beta phase.

We were told then that the aim of Lexbox (and you can read a lot more about it here) is to simplify how lawyers store, monitor and share online legal information. Having kicked the tires over the past . . . [more]

The Intercept has an article entitled Chatting in Secret While We’re All Being Watched that’s a good read for anyone interested in how to keep communications private. It was written by Micah Lee, who works with Glenn Greenwald to ensure their communications with Edward Snowden are private.

Even if you don’t want to read the detailed technical instructions on how to go about it, at least read the first part of the article that explains at a high level how communications can be intercepted, and the steps needed to stop that risk.

Communicating in secret is not easy. It takes . . . [more]

Innovation means different things to different people – to some, it’s about a small tweak that makes a big difference; to others, it’s a complete disruption in the force.

In Canada, the discussion about legal innovation has lately become bogged down in the debate over alternative business structures (ABS). But that’s not where innovation begins or ends.

On July 23, Friedrich Blase of Thomson Reuters and Natalie McFarlane of LawLignment will host a CBAFutureschat to discuss favourite legal innovations – just what do you define as a legal innovation? What tools make your business model possible? What innovations have you . . . [more]

Why Googling about how to rob a bank is not recommended is just one item in the June 2015 issue of the U.S. bulletin Connected.

The bulletin, which covers news about the impact of new social media on courts, is published by the Virginia-based National Center for State Courts and the Conference of Court Public Information Officers.

It is a great place to find out about how courts are trying to adapt to the world of Facebooking judges, tweeting witnesses, Instagramming lawyers, and jury members doing their own research on the Internet. Most items are American but they have . . . [more]

There’s an interesting article in the recent issue of AI Magazine called “Truth Is a Lie: Crowd Truth and the Seven Myths of Human Annotation.” AI Magazine is considered the “journal of record for the AI community” and is a product of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a “delayed open access” journal which is nice because that means the articles are openly available 15 months after they’ve been published.*

One reason this article caught my attention is because I’ve been thinking about Kevin Lee’s comment on my post a couple of weeks . . . [more]