When I was chatting with one of my American colleagues at this summer’s ACLEA conference, our talk turned to our competitors. We agreed that our biggest competition is the free material on the web, rather than legal resources published by any other legal publisher. (We both publish secondary legal material: practice manuals and the like.) This set me on a train of thought about the funding behind all that free legal information.

With my belief in access to justice and to legal information, I can’t help supporting initiatives to make primary legal material and legal scholarship freely available online. I . . . [more]

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has announced the release of a handbook called PIPEDA and Your Practice — A Privacy Handbook for Lawyers.

According to the release, the handbook “describes best practices in managing the collection, use and disclosure of personal information, responding to requests for access to personal information, and the potential application of PIPEDA. The Handbook covers practical privacy issues that arise in the course of managing a law firm and conducting litigation”. . . . [more]

Many of my client firms don’t have a marketing professional on staff. Instead, they have a group of lawyers who are doing their darndest to make the best marketing decisions for their firm. 

They want to know the best practices for marketing decision-making and work flow systems. There are many good models and I’ll offer a hybrid of what I’ve seen work well. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but should provide you with some foundational elements to build upon to suit your firm’s culture, size and needs. But for a mid-sized firm with established practice groups, or at least . . . [more]

I agree, this is not news. Our lives are getting faster and we expect to know what is happening right now in the world, not what happened five hours ago or yesterday. For those of us who work with information and live online, television and radio are often not fast enough. We expect to hear about things as they happen.

Lawyers need to stay on top of what is happening to clients so they can help respond in a timely manner. As librarians, the challenge is pulling information together so that those we serve are up to date. In the . . . [more]

There can be many causes of automobile injuries. Fortunately carjacking is not a common cause of injuries in Canada, but when it does happen how should insurance companies treat them? Justice John Murray of the Ontario Superior Court dealt with the issue of an assault while operating an automobile this week by in Downer v. Personal Insurance.

On Feb. 26, 2000, the plaintiff was filling his car with gas at a gas station in Scarborough on a Saturday evening. He was counting his money for payment in his car with his internal lights on when we was approached by . . . [more]

Attention: what follows is not me, my head shot to the left is not representative of the following paragraphs. Over the summer we have had a library school intern working in multiple capacities at the Sir James Dunn Law Library as our student reference assistant. During this time Amanda (Andie) Bulman has become a fan of Slaw and I thought that as the summer is drawing to a close I thought I would give her a chance to craft a post for Slaw on what her experience has been like over the past several months. I gave her a . . . [more]

Hi-hat, clash, crash, ride, sizzle—and a dozen more variations. These are cymbals, an instrument that dates back to the edge of antiquity but is as modern as a rock band drum kit. The best, I’m informed, are made in Turkey and likely by the venerable cymbal maker Zildjian, which has been making especially resonant cymbals ever since one Avedis, an Armenian alchemist in Constantinople, devised a particular mix of copper, tin, and traces of silver — a form of bronze — in the year 1618. The fame of his cymbals reached the Sultan, who took him into court to . . . [more]

Just a few days ago, we all missed the 30th Annual Intergovernmental Budget Conference, held August 22 – 23, 2011, Victoria. According Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat, it is an event open to the Federal-Provincial-Territorial, Deputy Ministers.

Who knows what goes on at these things. Epic snoozefest or hedonistic free for all… do we have any first-hand reports? It does sound like it has the potential to be a pivotal meeting, and it is remarkable how meager is its presence in google. . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has grown significantly in the last few years. A Gartner Executive Program survey of more than 2,000 Chief Information Officers (CIOs), representing 50 countries and 38 industries, found that cloud computing is the number one technology priority for 2011. Fully 43% of the CIOs expected that a majority of their IT will be running “in the cloud” within four years.¹ In its updated June 2011 forecast of Information Technology spending, Gartner stated that cloud computing expenditures are likely to rise by 16-20% per year through 2015, representing 4% of global IT spending by the end . . . [more]

The LISNews library-related site has been running a series on IT Security for Libraries.

The most recent part covers 20 Common Security Myths:

1. You have nothing important to steal
2. Having antivirus software makes you completely safe
3. Using Mac/Linux makes you safe
4. Patches and updates make things worse and break them
5. You can look at a site and know it’s safe and not serving bad stuff
6. Using a firewall makes you safe
7. Complex frequently changed passwords make you safe
8. Avoiding IE makes me safe
9. If an email comes from a familiar face it’s ok
10. If a link comes from

Slaw news — for those who read Slaw only via RSS or email.

On Slaw you’ll find a brief excerpt of this week’s SlawTips posts. The links in the following will take you to the full versions, along with 100 more tips. Advice you can use — short and to the point — every Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday.

• Tuesday: Technology: Turn Luddites Into Gurus With Lynda.com
• Wednesday: Research: Make Your Own Office Consolidation
• Thursday: Practice: Keep Turnover Low

You can subscribe to SlawTips by RSS or email. . . . [more]