Ever since I set up a shingle four years ago to consult independently, I have been asked periodically as to whether I do legal research. Most recently, a few people have asked if this is a service I provide for the public. My response until now has been that I really don’t know of anyone who does any substantive legal research for the public. It would be great to have the great collective mind of the Slaw community work on a solution since it is something I haven’t been able to crack myself.

Some libraries (public and academic) may be . . . [more]

♬ Why can’t people just get along
What a world it would be
If we could all just have fun
‘Cause it don’t do nobody right
When it comes down to a fight hey
Why can’t people just get along…♬

Music and Lyrics by David Lee Murphy and Minnie Pearl.

Monday Oct 24th to Friday Oct 28th is Cyberweek 2011. Cyberweek is a conference focusing on the world of Online Dispute Resolution. Since ODR is an online method of resolving disputes, it stands to reason that Cyberweek would be a world-wide online conference!

Cyberweek is hosted by:

• Werner Institute

The library of the Supreme Court of Canada recently updated its online bibliography about the court. New material from the period 2008-2011 has been added.

The bibliography contains articles, textbooks, earlier bibliographies, rules of practice and statistics about the Court.

Speeches by Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada as well as scholarly articles about the court’s rulings are not included.

[Cross-posted to Library Boy] . . . [more]

Ten months ago, the two Simons sat at the back of the Supreme Court of Canada and watched the argument in Crookes v. Newton, one of a number of Internet defamation cases coming from British Columbia. The decision was handed down this morning as 2011 SCC 47, (October 19, 2011). Among the intervenors were Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Samuelson-Glushko, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, NetCoalition, British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Newspaper Association, Ad IDEM/Canadian Media Lawyers Association, Magazines Canada, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Writers’ Union of Canada, Professional Writers Association of Canada, PEN Canada and Canadian . . . [more]

ITBusiness.ca had a story yesterday about a Humber College professor named Tom Green who uses @tomgreen as his twitter name. Fans of comedian Tom Green have been campaigning him to give his twitter name to Tom Green the comedian, who uses @tomgreenlive. 

While it is an amusing story, and professor Tom Green has every right to keep his twitter handle, there is a lesson here.

Even if you are not a social media fan, and you don’t have an immediate desire to tweet or update your facebook status, it is a good idea to at least register your name . . . [more]

Canadian Law is an iPhone app, put together by Lunaform Software, a German based company. The cost is $4.99. The app’s purpose is a little more modest that its name suggests – it provides offline access to over 700 Federal statutes. This includes the full text of all statutes (but not the regulations) in English only. Once the app has been downloaded one does not need to be connected to the Internet to view and work with the statutes.

I reviewed the app on an iPad 2, but I expect that it works the same on an iPhone. As . . . [more]

The Federal Courts Rules Committee has asked that the Discussion Paper on a possible global review of the Federal Courts Rules should receive wide distribution to members of the public and the profession. The final version of the paper has been posted in both official languages on the web sites of the Federal Court of Appeal and the Federal Court.

For Slaw readers the most interesting issue under discussion is

advancements in information technology are encouraging more and more litigants to become actively involved in the litigation process, even if they do not ultimately seek to represent themselves before the

Hats off to the judges present and past (four retired judges) of the Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal who are giving up evenings in November to provide educational sessions for islanders on PEI’s courts, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, public law, criminal law, civil law and family law. It will also include a tour of the Sir Louis Henry Davies Law Courts building where participants can see the courtrooms, holding cells, law library and public areas.

The free sessions will take place November 8, 15 and 22 starting at 6:45 p.m. and registration is limited to 50 people. . . . [more]

Last week the most severe outage in RIM’s history crippled BlackBerry users’ abilities to use e-mail, BBM, and the Internet in general for over three days.

The outage highlighted two deeply concerning issues with RIM. First, it is almost beyond comprehension how a single point of failure could bring RIM’s global network down for this period of time. In the face of fierce competition from Apple and Google, RIM had been able to depend on real-time and reliable e-mail delivery as one of its key competitive differentiators. Not any more.

Worse, the company’s response has come across as arrogant, aloof, . . . [more]

I had written about the Just A Click Away project in January 2011. Just A Click Away is a Canada-wide initiative on public legal education and information (PLEI).

It organized a successful conference in Vancouver last February on how to use Internet and social media technologies to better educate the general public about the law.

Just A Click Away is continuing its efforts to bring the law closer to every Canadian and has just announced that it has received funding for Phase 2 of its work with a focus on “Supporting a Culture of Sharing”.

Phase 2 involves 4 organizations: . . . [more]

♬ Listen,
Do you want to know a secret?,
Do you promise not to tell? ♬

Lyrics and music by Lennon/McCartney.

At last week’s Pacific Legal Technology Conference held in Vancouver, BC, Canada, “The Cloud” was one of the hottest topics in the Conference. Of course the REPORT OF THE CLOUD COMPUTING WORKING GROUP from the Law Society of British Columbia was recognized as a leading document in terms of lawyers looking for a thoughtful analysis of moving to the cloud.

One of the other hot topics within lawyers using the cloud is the security in and . . . [more]

The OIPC BC released Guidelines for Social Media Background Checks yesterday. The Guidelines were developed “to help organizations and public bodies navigate social media background checks and privacy laws.”

The Guidelines outline the privacy risks associated with the use of social media to screen and monitor current and prospective employees, volunteers and candidates, including:

The collection of potentially inaccurate personal information;

The collection of too much or irrelevant personal information;

The inadvertent collection of third-party personal information; and

The overreliance on consent for the collection of personal information that may not be reasonable in the circumstances.

The Guidelines also provide . . . [more]