Every day, Canadian courts and tribunals help resolve thousands of cases under the rule of law in a civilized, fair, impartial and independent manner. Technology has held, for decades, the promise of increased effectiveness and better efficiency. Ah… The plain enjoyment of one’s day at work when the right information is at your fingertips! If the technology objectives are simple and the outcomes easy to imagine, then why is it so difficult to rejuvenate courts and tribunals with better technology?

We strive for justice on demand that is simple from a litigant’s point of view. For example, simple cases with . . . [more]

Imagine a tool that would round out the existing built-in spell- and grammar-checking tools in Microsoft Word, but instead of simply correcting errors, this tool would make your writing more concise. This tool exists, and it’s called WordRake.

You can think of WordRake as an automated editor. Gary Kinder, a lawyer and writing expert, codified many of the patterns he saw while editing documents into a set of rules that WordRake utilizes while processing a document.

Here is example of WordRake’s automated editing in action:

WordRake is a powerful add-on to Word, and is one of the only . . . [more]

My post Why Can’t You Just Make it Work Like Google? last week surprised me by going viral. Well, as viral as a blog post about information management can go. It certainly seems to have struck a nerve with people from all across the legal industry. It turns out that making search work effectively inside the organization is something a lot of people are attempting to tackle. After posting it, however, I realized there is also a reason why you would not even want to use Google as it functions out on the Internet for use inside the organization.

Allow . . . [more]

Search engine rankings are largely the result of mathematical algorithms and repetitive bots which crawl the Internet. Search engines have historically enjoyed considerable immunity from defamation and libel claims, given that they present themselves as automated organizers of information and not publishers of the information itself. That may change soon, especially where the statements are false and the plaintiff contacts the search engine requesting that the results be modified or removed.

The Supreme Court of Victoria in Australia has ordered Google and Yahoo to pay damages for failing to modify their search results. Michael Trkulja, a prominent member of the . . . [more]

Two privacy stories raise interesting issues.

1. Journalistic violation of privacy: PIPEDA s. 7(1)(c) gives an exemption from the rules about collection of personal information for journalistic purposes.

Section 32 of the Data Protection Act (UK), by contrast, provides a journalism exception only if, in addition,

(b) the data controller reasonably believes that, having regard in particular to the special importance of the public interest in freedom of expression, publication would be in the public interest, and

(c) the data controller reasonably believes that, in all the circumstances, compliance with [the provision being violated] is incompatible with the

The First Annual BAILII Lecture was given on 20 November by Lord Neuberger, the President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. The event was hosted by the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP at their premises in Fleet Street , London.

BAILII stands for the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, which makes English jurisprudence and statutes available for free via the Internet. It is the equivalent of CanLII.

Entitled No judgment, no justice, the lecture focused on the importance of clearly written judgments and their wide dissemination:

1. Access to Judgments carries with it access to law

A CNET article entitled Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans’ text messages says that “State and local law enforcement groups want wireless providers to store detailed information about your SMS messages for at least two years — in case they’re needed for future criminal investigations.”

This issue keeps coming up – the Canadian lawful access attempts are another example.

Attempts to force the preservation of this type of communication are tremendously invasive and wrong on many levels. To me, it is no different than asking phone companies to record and save phone conversations or the post office to . . . [more]

How many knowledge management and IT professionals have heard this refrain? Why can’t we just use Google (or something like Google) to find documents inside our organization? Why do we need to spend time and money organizing documents and adding indexing or classification or a taxonomy?

The problem lies with a significant difference between web pages on the Internet and internal documents: Google uses links from other websites as recommendations as to what is good content. It uses links plus a number of other things together in its secret algorithm–which gets changed periodically–to help its system figure out which web . . . [more]

The month of December has arrived, and so have the 7th annual Canadian Law Blog Awards — a.k.a. the Clawbies! Our public nomination period runs throughout the month; and with the list over at lawblogs.ca closing in on 400 blogs, the choices are better than ever.

Please head over to the Clawbies.ca site for the complete details, but here’s a quick summary of how the awards work:

• Everyone is invited to nominate three of their favourite Canadian law blogs by tweeting (#clawbies2012), emailing, or blogging their choices. And we’re saying it clearly this year: don’t nominate your own blog.

In the fallout surrounding the American FBI investigation of CIA Director David Petraeus, you may have come across stories about how he attempted to hide his digital email trail. Utilizing a jointly held email account, messages between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell were left in draft mode, never to be sent and assumed not to leave a digital trail.

Well, leave it to the EFF to point out where things went so terribly wrong. Take a look at this tutorial released yesterday, on how to create an anonymous email account.

Some of the suggestions include:

• Using the Tor Browser Bundle;
• Signing

Last week the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) met in Geneva to further Member States’ negotiations on several matters.

WIPO published its SCCR 25 conclusions this week, and they are summarized in its SCCR 25 Update. The outcome of the negotiations is progress on three points: work toward a legal instrument to benefit visually impaired or print-disabled persons—the most concrete outcome, it appears (and attaining Canada’s endorsement); exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives and for educational institutions; and the protection of broadcasting organizations.

From the SCCR 25 Update:

Negotiations advanced to the

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the telecommunications arm of the United Nations, is hosting a World Conference on International Telecommunications starting Dec 3. The agenda includes gaining a role for the ITU on Internet governance. This is in part fueled by repressive government regimes wanting more control over the internet and its users. It has drawn huge opposition from human rights and free speech advocates. Also from companies such as Google. Vint Cerf – now with Google but considered the father of the internet – has come out very strongly against it.

This is a very bad idea. One . . . [more]