The October 2013 issue of Connected is available online. The bulletin covers news about the impact of new social media on courts.

Most issues cover news from the United States, but there is occasional coverage of other jurisdictions.

In this issue:

• Courts and QR Codes
• Justices from 12 midwest states consider implications of evolving technology on the courts
• Australia’s Supreme Court of Victoria launches new social media initiative
• Ohio explores haunted courthouses across the state

The bulletin is published by the Virginia-based National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the Conference of Court Public Information Officers. . . . [more]

My last post discussed the viability of assessing a cloud provider’s financials as part of your due diligence process, and I concluded that requesting full access to a cloud provider’s financials is simply not a reasonable request to make of a privately held company.

How can you entrust your data to a company that you don’t know the financial health of, you ask? You plan for the worst. Expect the company will fail without warning, and plan accordingly.

To be prepared for this eventuality, look for the following in your prospective cloud provider:

Data Backup in Open, Non-proprietary Formats . . . [more]

I wrote last month on a recent conference, The Future of Law School. The backchannel and later discussion was considerable, as I’ve noted, and several others wrote about the rich panel presentations and their own ideas about the future of law school. Weeks later, I still find myself pondering ideas from it often. I’m thinking lately about the place of the law school and its connection—in Canada—to the university and its library.

The focus of the conference was where law school curricula are, should be, or could be headed. Participants and presenters discussed various factors that do or might drive . . . [more]

Stepping outside legal subject matter for a moment, did you know that top reviewers on Amazon are publicly listed? Amazon values this group’s contributions enough to maintain a Hall of Fame, and cultivates further engagement through its Vine program, where members are given a box of free samples (once or twice a month) in exchange for delivering a couple online reviews.

NPR has an interesting post about the amount of free samples that simply show up “out of the blue” for Amazon’s top reviewers. This despite the fact that “Vine reviews have fewer stars, on average” within . . . [more]

The announcement yesterday of the newly minted LeClairRyan Legal Solutions Center should provide another shockwave to an American legal profession that is already in distress.

National law firm of LeClairRyan (22 offices and 350 attorneys) and LPO UnitedLex (1,100 attorneys engineers and consultants), will now collaborate to provide “a wide range of support services and incorporate best-in-class technology and quality control processes which will be uniquely integrated into the law firm’s litigation and transactional practice areas….[allowing clients to obtain]….more comprehensive, value-based services at a lower and more predictable cost.

“The LeClairRyan Legal Solutions Center is an important part of . . . [more]

One to watch — but not spy on, perhaps: the Dark Mail Alliance is aiming to develop the software to enable email that has end-to-end encryption in order to frustrate government efforts to read your post. At the moment the alliance with the name that only Darth Vader could love comprises Silent Circle and Lavabit, though the invitation to join them is extended to any others who share their mission to develop and:

 . . . to open source the protocol and architecture and help others implement this new technology to address privacy concerns against surveillance and back door threats

David Canton in his post today praised the IT.CAN conference. I, too, attended, and I agree: it’s the one to catch for IT/IP folks. Among the many things that caught my ear was a small reference to sound marks — that is, trade marks for the ear rather than the eye.

These are new to me, and relatively new to Canadian jurisprudence, though when I thought about it for a moment I realized that they were a perfectly sensible addition to the IP roster. (For some support for that conclusion, see a 2010 post on IP Osgoode — and . . . [more]

Law enforcement has contacted us seeking assistance in investigating bad cheque frauds by someone purporting to be Joe Mathewson. He is using the email address Joe111mathewson@gmail.com and the phone number 647-760-4059. The following UPS account numbers have been used on frauds: A82A95 F9236V and F88481.

If any of the above information has come up in a matter you have handled or been approached for, please contact Tim immediately at fraudinfo@lawpro.ca or 416-596-4623 so we can gather further information for the police.

Cross posted at AvoidaClaim . . . [more]

The British daily The Guardian reports that the Supreme Court in the Australian state of Victoria wants to make the justice system more understandable for citizens by making its website more interactive and hiring a retired judge to blog about cases:

“[Victorian Chief Justice Marilyn] Warren said the court’s new interactive website would become a hub for the court’s communication with the public, who would be able to comment on the website, watch video on demand, debate in online forums, and download judgments and summaries.”

“She said employing a retired judge to blog the courts represented a ‘historic shift

Lawyers tend to think of time in units of .1 hour.

But that is eons compared to some other time measurements.

If you are having trouble getting your head around the concept and speed of quantum computing that Simon wrote about yesterday, consider time metrics for tech we currently have.

Peter Higgs and Francois Englert recently won the Nobel Prize for physics for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets. The actual existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider at . . . [more]

In a recent post the prolific and insightful Lee Rosen suggested that a cloud provider’s market dominance shouldn’t be your sole criteria when assessing the company’s prospective longevity. Instead, Rosen suggests a lawyer should adopt the Regan-era mantra of “trust, but verify,” and assess — essentially, audit — a cloud computing provider’s financials to prove out the company’s financial health. Rosen uses his diligence on his practice’s cloud provider, Salesforce.com, as providing a high degree of financial visibility that helped him gain a level of comfort with placing his practice’s data in the company’s hands.

Rosen closes his post with . . . [more]

North American courts are not really sure what to do about web scraping, where someone uses automation to take information in bulk from a web site and puts it on his/her/its own site in competition with the original site. Sometimes (but not often) doing this is held to be trespass to chattels. More often it has been held to violate the terms of use of the victim site, even if those terms are ‘webwrap’, i.e. never explicitly consented to. (In fact, it is freakishly rare for webwrap conditions to be upheld except against scrapers).

The federal court in Illinois recently . . . [more]