This morning’s Intapp Law Firm Risk Management Blog features a piece I recently published in Managing Partner Magazine in London entitled: “Managing Screens,” which explores the tension between tightly controlling access to sensitive client (and firm) information and fostering internal sharing, which I characterize as: “the potential of exploiting collective professional knowledge.”

“What has changed is that, in the past decade, so-called ethical screens have proliferated within law firms. Ethical screens are what used to be called Chinese walls: institutional mechanisms combined with technological safeguards and personal undertakings which ensure that confidential information is tightly protected.”

I am among a decreasing number of Canadians who are unilingual. I am grateful for a small innovation that Canlii has made to their main page. They added a check box for remembering your language selection.
Thanks CanLII.
Merci. . . . [more]

Not that Research in Motion needs more bad news and Apple more positive press, but today Apple launches a significant update to its operating system along with its new cloud service.

I am looking forward to testing out both new developments since I continue to more heavily integrate my iPad into the practice of law (in addition to amassing more Zombie games, including the highly addictive Call of Duty: Zombies HD; my joy in slaughtering zombies, albeit only in a video game app, is causing me concern, although there are apparently no moral issues in killing the undead . . . [more]

Chas Rampathal, the General Counsel and Vice President of LegalZoom is giving the lunch keynote at today’s PLTC 2011 in Vancouver on the Future of Legal Practice.

LegalZoom is a company that is responsible for 20% of the corporate formations in the US last year.

This is a live post: . . . [more]

We mourn the passing of Steve Jobs, whose singular achievements are recounted by the HuffPost, MTV on his impact on music, Washington Post , Wired and the Daily Telegraph.

For the legal community, the perspective is slightly different. Jobs contributed to a host of patents reviewed here. Law firms toyed with Apple computers for a while in the 1980s, but currently the only firms that are using that platform tend to be IP and media law firms who are following their clients – the creative community has always loved Apple machines. And of course there are . . . [more]

I’m new to the cloud, just having opened a Dropbox account a couple of weeks ago. Still even to a newbie like me its clear that cloud computing on a larger scale can raise many legal issues about privacy and security. As it turns out the potential new law and policy issues are many. To address these issues the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law is hosting an all-day conference on Friday October 14 entitled Cloudlaw: Law and Policy in the Cloud. The conference will consider the issues that may arise . . . [more]

One thing guaranteed to get attention and create buzz is any new Apple product unveiling – whether or not one is an Apple fanboy / fangirl. Yesterday’s was no exception. It was noteworthy in part because of the absence of Steve Jobs. But Tim Cook and other Apple executives did not disappoint.

Various products were updated, but the new iPhone 4s gets the most attention. Here is a summary from the Canoe Tech blog about the 4s and its introduction in Canada. Here is a link from the Apple site that has more detail and a couple of videos. 

One . . . [more]

Way back in March, LexisNexis Canada announced an app for Quicklaw on the iPhone. Ted Tjaden covered this new development with a review. The app was updated recently, and I thought it might be worthwhile checking out the new features, including an enhanced search interface and results list.

My personal test of the app found it a bit buggy: app shuts down if you go back to the app from the “view in browser link”, view in browser asks for a client id rather than transferring. This may have been due to settings on my device, or my internet connectivity. . . . [more]

There’s a new player in the flash mob market. Vibe is a Twitter-like app for the iPhone that lets you communicate with other Vibe users anonymously. There is no login, no sign-up, no registration: it’s strictly download and play. Moreover, you shape your “vibes” by the distance you’d like them to travel and the length of time you’d like them to live. If you “Whisper” your vibe travels no more than 50 metres from where you are, “Speak” and the radius is 500 metres, etc; and like the tapes on Mission Impossible, your vibes can self-destruct after 15 minutes, 1 . . . [more]

Medical data is one of the most sensitive types of data and, like lawyers, some doctors have reservations about storing confidential client data “in the cloud.” The security of storing Electronic Health Records and related data on-premise is perceived by many doctors to be more secure than cloud-based alternatives.

This thinking is challenged by a US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) study that assesses the root cause of significant data breaches involving health information. The study finds the top causes of breaches of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to be:

• Physical theft of devices /

Way back in December rumours were flying about the social bookmarking site Delicious. Various reports had it that owner Yahoo! would be closing it down. Slaw’s own Steve Matthews even put together the post R.I.P. Delicious tracing its pending demise. Many people looked for an alternative and exported their bookmarks to other sites in anticipation of it being closed. Some of those alternative services welcomed the new members with open arms, even creating tools for transferring the bookmarks over.

Fast forward: an announcement came out in May 2011 announcing the sale of Delicious to AVOS, owned by YouTube . . . [more]