Earlier this month, Kirk Makin of the Globe and Mail scooped an announcement of a major set of Reports on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, an inititaitive that started with the Chief Justice’s challenge to the Canadian Bar Association last summer.

The four Reports from Working Groups chaired by Justice Thomas Cromwell were officially released this morning:
Backgrounder
Report of the Court Processes Simplification Working Group
Report of the Access to Legal Services Working Group
Report of the Prevention, Triage and Referral Working Group
Report of the Family Justice Working Group

And a background literature review: Family . . . [more]

Legal researchers and law librarians have long worried about the lack of a coherent strategy in Canada to ensure the digital preservation and archiving of legal and governmental information. A case in point is Louis Mirando’s Slaw.ca post of Feb. 15th , 2013 on Library Budgets and Priorities: A New Year and a New Normal:

(…) when will we begin an organized, comprehensive preservation/digitization project for our historical law collections? Preservation must procede hand-in-hand with digital access. The Internet Archive and Hathi Trust (for monographs), and JSTOR and Ontario’s Scholars Portal (for journals – unfortunately not open-access) are a start,

Prof. Larry Lessig gave a superb talk, “Free Culture,” this evening at Harvard Law School. The talk is one of a series of special events Harvard Law professor and Berkman Center for Internet & Society director Terry Fisher organized for his 2013 Copyright course, in which I’m lucky enough to be participating. Like all the special events, Prof. Lessig’s talk was presented in person to Prof. Fisher’s Copyright law school class, via webinar to online course participants (including me), and to the public via archived webcast.

I took a few notes during Prof. Lessig’s engaging and stimulating talk, and . . . [more]

Each year the ABA Techshow offers a fun feature that has the audience bombarded by the URLs of dozens and dozens of interesting sites delivered at a relentless rapid pace by a tag team of IT experts. You can access the YouTube video used in that presentation. But in case you find it hard to keep up, I’m offering below a simple list of all of the URLs mentioned this year. You’ll discover, when you explore them, that they’re a mix of the useful and the amusing, which is no bad thing.

My thanks to this year’s four presenters, Britt . . . [more]

One thing I find consistent about privacy issues is an inconsistency in approach and viewpoint. What is and is not deemed acceptable seems to change dramatically based on several factors, including geographic location (which I suppose is really more of a cultural issue than a geographic one), whether it is about one’s own information or you are doing something with someone else’s information, and whether the party with the information is government or business.

Many times it comes down to issues of trust, understanding, surprise, and how public one wants their life to be.

An example is in this article . . . [more]

These are notes from a panel discussion by Ron Deibert, Professor of Politcal Science and Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, David Lashway, Partner, Baker & McKenzie, Washington, DC, John Woods, Partner, Baker & McKenzie, Washington, DC and moderator Theo Ling, Partner, Baker & McKenzie, Toronto on April 15, 2013 at the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association National Spring Conference 2013 in Toronto. Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own and . . . [more]

I have an OCD-like compulsion of checking to make sure my phone is on me or nearby at all times. Although I have a passcode lock on it, losing my phone is of great concern, and I’m certain I’m not alone.

There are ways to remotely wipe your phone, but if I did lose it I would probably just want it back. The first step there is knowing where it can be found.

Dom Deltorno of London, England lost his MacBook on Feb. 4, 2013 when it was stolen from his home apartment. In April 2013 the tracking service showed . . . [more]

We’ve touched on the afterlife of digital assets here at Slaw on many occasions. Google has just announced a new service that adds an interesting direction: allowing users to pass along the data behind (rather than the password to) their various Google services.

A new group of settings under Google accounts will allow for these directions, called the Inactive Account Manager. Users will have the choice of destroying their data after a set period of time, or to pass along their data to a trusted contact or contacts. Google will also try notifying you by text or your alternate . . . [more]

A not-new UK law was given regulatory effect this week and enables the British Library to archive the .uk web, just as it already receives legal deposit of UK print materials. The import of the new regulatory changes in effect April 6 is, I gather, that the archive can built by automated crawl, rather by permission for page-by-page grabs.

As the British Library explains, legal deposit of UK publications to identified libraries is, of course, a practice of long standing. The new regulations extend and entrench the program for UK digital materials:

Legal deposit has existed in English law

It’s astonishing how much has changed in my five years of attending ABA TECHSHOW.

At ABA TECHSHOW 2008, Rian Gauvreau and I launched the beta of Clio, which at the time was not only the first of a new generation of web-based practice management systems, but the one of the first of any web-based product to be exhibited at TECHSHOW.

At this first TECHSHOW, Clio prompted both admiration and fear among attendees: half the visitors to our booth were thrilled about the prospect of putting their data in the cloud (by the way, back then “the cloud” wasn’t even . . . [more]

There’s not much that the large law firms have as an advantage over mid-size and small firms. Their bloated overhead, high-priced rent, and unnecessary bureaucracy, all translates into higher operating costs passed on to clients.

There is one thing which does hold large law firms apart from the rest, and that’s the decades of institutional knowledge which is internally accumulated. As much as the law is constantly changing and evolving, much of it still remains the same, or is easily updated from precedents that have recently become obsolete. This realm, of internal legal memos and precedents, is the area where . . . [more]

The UK newspaper The Guardian has published a series of articles on Internet privacy – the right to be forgotten which addresses many of the issues surrounding the (occasionally embarrassing) traces we leave as we use online services.

Reading some of the articles got me feeling a little bit paranoid:

The internet has a long memory. But what if the pictures, data and personal information that it can pull up about you appear unfair, one-sided or just plain wrong? More and more people are claiming they have a “right to be forgotten” and are even trying to delete themselves from