Google just officially announced that they are working on Project Glass – think of it as augmented reality heads up display glasses that works like a smartphone. This concept has been bandied about for a long time, but may be closer than we think.

I’m sure it will take a while before the mainstream legal software vendors will provide compatible software. And for those of us who have avoided glasses through contacts or laser surgery, the thought of wearing glasses again is not compelling. But the contact lens version might take a while longer.

But think of the possibilities. 

Face . . . [more]

One needs to do little else than glance at the ABA TECHSHOW 2012 conference schedule and exhibitor list to get a sense of how quickly and dramatically cloud computing is reshaping the legal technology industry.

Four years ago at my first ABA TECHSHOW, there was one or two companies doing what we today call “cloud computing” on the exhibit hall floor (I remember this fondly because this is where we launched Clio). This year I count over 30 companies on the exhibit floor that either provide cloud-based software or cloud-enabled applications.

In 2008 there were no conference tracks on the . . . [more]

A Committee of UK Members of Parliament has recommended that search engines should have to remove material from search results that infringe privacy. Here is a news report on the committee’s recommendations. Here is The Committee’s document.

It looks as if they are talking about material that has been found by a court to be an invasion of privacy, rather than having to make that initial decision. But once a court has found a story or a picture to offend privacy interests, the search engines should have to develop a method of hunting down that story or picture and . . . [more]

The Government has recently announced its intention to focus on Bill C-12, the Safeguarding Canadians’ Personal Information Act, its attempt to update PIPEDA in accordance with the statute’s last 5 year review (which incidentally was conducted over 6 years ago). Bill C-12 is a lackluster piece of privacy protection that, in spite of its name, arguably does far more to erode privacy than it does to enhance it. One commentator even dubbed it’s last incarnation the ‘anti-privacy privacy bill‘. As the legislation can be expected to reemerge as early as two weeks hence, a few of its . . . [more]

JURIST, the legal news and commentary website based out of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, needs money. Your money.

The well-known, pioneering news site explains that it is “anticipating a significant reduction in funding (meaning several tens of thousands of dollars) from our primary benefactors”.

It needs funds to:

• Redesign the JURIST.org website
• Fully develop a mobile version of JURIST.org, as well as iPhone and Android apps
• Increase outreach efforts to JURIST’s audience
• Develop new programming, including audio and video coverage, seminars and conferences that will directly benefit our community
• Cover costs associated with managing our

. . . [more]

Last week I wrote on The High Cost of Cloud Computing Due Diligence, and asked readers what thoughts they had on how the burden of cloud computing due diligence could be reduced.

In his post on The Myth of Due Diligence, David Whelan questions the assumption that we should apply more strict due diligence requirements to the cloud than to traditional desktop-based software:

If due diligence is called for – and something is, whether it needs that name or not – then it should apply equally to the wireless routers, operating systems, and locally installed software within law

. . . [more]

Blogger Attempts to Protect Content by Country: Redirects .com Blogs to Country-Specific Domains

Those of you who read the Globe and Mail may have seen in today’s paper the report by Jeff Gray, “Yes, Virginia, this is a rant from the bench,” reporting an edited version of what Justice David Brown had to say from the bench, Thursday, about Ontario’s paper-based document management system. I might not have called it a “rant,” which suggests a lack of control; rather, it’s a scathing and at times sardonic denunciation by a judge fully in control of his facts and his language. It concludes:

[17] If some may consider such criticism un-judicial in

. . . [more]

Here’s a good review of the law on shrink-wrap, click-through and ‘browse-wrap’ contracts . I expect the law of New York is much like the law in at least common law Canada on the topic. The comment is inspired by a recent dispute about Facebook’s ability to enforce its forum-selection clause. The author says that most lawyers would have thought that FB’s sign-up process was ‘bullet-proof’, but the court still made a thorough analysis of it.

The process required the person signing up to click on the terms of service to see them, In other words, the assent to those . . . [more]

I’m uneasy about the creeping commercialization of Google results, and its privacy policy revisions since Larry Page took over directing the company. That impression seems to be confirmed by this widely read description of the new culture at Google by James Whittaker.

Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions.

[…] . . . [more]

GPO Access, the online disseminator of official U.S. government publications, is shutting down permanently tomorrow, March 16th. It has gradually been replaced over the past two years by the new FDsys or Federal Digital System.

FDsys offers authentic, digitally signed PDF documents from dozens of different collections of U.S. Federal Government information (Congressional, Presidential, judicial and federal agency materials)

Some of the new system’s highlights:

• Information is preserved for permanent public access
• Search multiple publications at once
• Conduct complex searches
• Narrow, sort, and filter search results
• Access documents in multiple file formats
• Access metadata in standard XML formats

. . . [more]

If you have an iPhone 4S and have interacted with the voice control personality “Siri”, then you likely already know about its limited functionality outside the US market. So when the news came out a few days ago about Siri’s improved responses for queries about weather and time, it still left me feeling a bit underwhelmed.

Voice recognition technologies have been around for many many years now. In the legal space, because of lawyer dictation technologies, we know better than most about the slow rates of adoption. For 20+ years, there’s been a small community of lawyers dedicated to . . . [more]