Last week a new applications for this year’s award for members of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries was announced: the Janine Miller Fellowship established by CanLII to provide funding each year for one CALL/ACBD member to attend the Law Via the Internet conference. I think this is a fabulous opportunity for Canadian legal information professionals to get more involved in the free access to law movement.

From the announcement:

Janine Miller was an integral part in the vision and development of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) and served as Project Manager from its inception and later as

Google Glass is a cool concept. The thought of having a real-time augmented reality display brings interesting possibilities. In addition to possible courtroom use, take a look at 10 Compelling Ways People Plan To Use Google Glass, and 11 Kickass Ways Normal People Will Use Google Glass. Possibilities include surgery, education, gaming, and navigation.

One of the hurdles to adoption is the practical aspect of whether people will want to wear them. Especially those who have gone to great length and expense to not to have to wear glasses in the first place. And when having a . . . [more]

The Brits have launched a new quarterly magazine, “Legal IT Today.” From the editor, Joanna Goodman:

Our community is everyone interested and involved in legal IT: CIOs, IT managers and decision makers, vendors who develop IT products and services for the legal sector, strategic and technical consultants, educators, authors, speakers and bloggers and of course the end users – lawyers, managers and business support professionals in law firms and other legal services providers. We will feature contributions from across these groups in every issue as well as collaborating with relevant publications worldwide.

Here’s the table of contents for . . . [more]

I was doing some research into social media policy examples for a course, and came across Jaffe PR’s Social Media Policy Template for Law Firms and Attorneys. It is available for use and adaptation by lawyers and firms. Last updated in November 2012, this template was first published in 2008 and has been updated a number of times over the years as social media has developed.

From the introduction:

At Jaffe PR, we have made our best effort to outline a comprehensive set of online policies and procedures for using social media effectively and responsibly. This is our fifth

Last Fall, I read an article about the General Counsel for Kia who creates tests for his external legal counsel. The tests have nothing to do with law and everything to do with process. In one test, external counsel should have taken 20 minutes to complete a mundane task using an excel spreadsheet. The average time taken by Kia’s nine outside law firms? Five hours. Simon Fodden also has a great piece on this, here.

There are many takeaways from this, but an important one is that its shows that lawyers are not always the most efficient personnel . . . [more]

Social media is often touted as an important influencer on public opinion and political causes. The Pew Research Centre just released an interesting survey called Twitter Reaction to Events Often at Odds with Overall Public Opinion.

From the report:

At times the Twitter conversation is more liberal than survey responses, while at other times it is more conservative. Often it is the overall negativity that stands out. Much of the difference may have to do with both the narrow sliver of the public represented on Twitter as well as who among that slice chose to take part in any . . . [more]

There’s a series of three articles over on Law.com’s Law Technology News that you might find interesting. D. Casey Flaherty, corporate counsel for Kia Motors America, came to the realization that the billable hour was often spent in . . . well, unnecessary ways. Particularly:

[T]echnological incompetence is endemic to the [legal] profession; and the quantity of resources wasted on busywork is shameful.

As a consequence he devised a test, an audit, of potential outside counsel for Kia, and has run it nine times. His articles (The Origin of the Outside Counsel Tech Audit, Kia Motors Tests Outside . . . [more]

I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I’ve developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the third in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

Most months I spend at least a few days the air, traveling from Vancouver to one of the many destinations Clio’s business brings me. Surprisingly, I find the time on the plane to be some of my most productive, as I’m without the myriad distractions of the office . . . [more]

All Evernote users should immediately change their passwords.

The following text appeared in a post on the Evernote blog this morning (March 2, 1013) and is also being sent to all Evernote users as an email communication:

Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service.

As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset. Please read below for details and instructions.

In our security investigation, we have found no evidence that . . . [more]

The 2013 Law Via the Internet conference will take place in late September 2013 on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands (I admit, I had to look it up on a map).

The conference brings together people from the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) from different countries and continents that together form the Free Access to Law Movement.

The conference “tracks” will be:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access

The wireless industry has a trade show this time each year in Barcelona. Cellphone manufacturers announce their newest tech at the show. 

Phablets are a big trend. Several are included in this CNET slideshow of phones that were introduced. Phablets are smartphones with screens between 5 and 7 inches that are half way between a phone and tablet. So think of them as either smartphones with huge screens – or small tablets that can make phone calls.

Many people ridicule phablets by saying that you would look stupid holding it up to your ear to make a phone call. But . . . [more]

The methods for producing the results of research have been on the top of my to-do list. Perhaps my knowledge management hat is shading my outlook. I believe that an efficient, sustainable and reusable work product is a very important aspect of legal research.

My staff and I create memos to document our research output – not memos analyzing legal issues as that is a lawyer task, memos that contain a report of what information we find, how we found it, and often permanent links to that information. One problem that has evaded solution is the ability to link to . . . [more]