Luigi Benetton has published a nice article called “Knowledge Management Know-How” in the current edition of The Lawyers Weekly.

The article quotes me and fellow SLAW contributor Dominic Jaar, but what I like about the article are the viewpoints from others in the industry and the wide range of tips and advice on best practices.

What I find with knowledge management is that there is usually never a single approach or method and varies a fair bit depending on the type of organization, its culture and staffing.

In fact, there has been lots of discussion in the . . . [more]

Two disparate articles caught my eye this morning that are worthy of pondering.

Apple has sued Samsung claiming that Samsung’s tablets violate Apple tablet patents. Some of the features in question are actually part of the Android operating system, not just the tablet itself. In Australia, sales of Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 are on hold pending court action. Setting aside the legal issues, and the debate over whether such patents are a good or bad thing for innovation, consider this point of view by Mike Masnick of Techdirt:

But, really, all Apple has done with this lawsuit is

If you were planning on working through the summer without taking a holiday, think again. Vacations aren’t just for fun, relaxation and time with the family, they can provide crucial recuperation for your mental muscle. When you don’t take vacation, you lose important recovery time, and over the long term your work (and you) may well suffer.

Here’s why: Our bodies work in rhythms. Our brain does too. Throughout the day we cycle through longer periods of energy exertion and shorter periods of recuperation. Our minds can maintain optimal focus for 60 to 90 minutes before needing a 10 minute . . . [more]

For the last few months a colleague from our marketing department and I have been attending SMBYEG. This is the 140 character form of Edmonton’s (Edmonton International Airport code being YEG) combined with the abbreviation for Social Media Breakfast. Not everyone who attends has a Twitter handle, but #SM users are certainly in the majority.

Social Media Breakfasts serves two main purposes:

• Face-to-face networking: Bring together marketers, PR pros, students, entrepreneurs, and social media practitioners and enthusiasts of all stripes over breakfast.
  
• Education: Through panel discussions, presentations, case studies, debates, and breakout sessions … teach, share, and learn social

Last month, the Barreau du Québec came out with a report entitled “Les avocats de pratique privée en 2021” or The private practice lawyer in 2021 (the document is available in French here). Practicing lawyers from large, medium and small law firms were consulted in the preparation of this study.

We learn that in Quebec alone, approximately 113 000 people are associated with the legal profession, either as lawyers, paralegals, notaries, stenographers, bailiffs, etc., making this report relevant for a number of people.

This one hundred plus page document provides an interesting overview of the legal private practice as . . . [more]

Most of us have participated in or been invited to a golf tournament in our careers. Often these are over-the-top affairs with great meals, fantastic prizes and cost a huge amount of money. Over the years there has been a change in the landscape so more and more tournaments have added a charitable component but still offer great meals, fantastic prizes, and still cost a huge amount of money — yet now the competitors help pay for it.

Golf tournaments come in all shapes and sizes. From the bare bones — half day shotgun tournament followed by dinner — to . . . [more]

In this ten-minute video, best-selling author Seth Godin talks about a fundamental shift in today’s business world that includes marketing, social media and a move toward openness. He says: “You are going to have to change if you want to be there too.”

Yahoo! Futurist: Seth Godin

Some food for thought. A quick summary:

1. Marketing needs to be responsible for the product.
2. You need to measure interaction.
3. The only asset that gets built online is permission to talk to people.

I wonder about the first point and how it can be applied to a law firm? I almost think . . . [more]

It used to be that packet ships would carry the post across the ocean, always running the risk that they might founder and take messages — and lives — with them. Now we only have to worry about routers and servers, and rarely if ever are living beings harmed should one of these electronic packet pushers go down. But they do go down. And now, as then, it’s not always easy to figure out whether the break in communication is systemic or more personal.

Recently, for example, Netflix encountered serious problems with streaming that lasted, on and off, for a . . . [more]

The Ontario Court of Appeal just uploaded a speech by Chief Justice Winkler on labour arbitration and conflict resolution, although it was initially presented at Queen’s University on November 30, 2010.

Justice Winkler’s views on labour law reform have been of considerable interest, especially considering his holding in Fraser v. Ontario, overturned this year by the Supreme Court of Canada.

In this speech, Justice Winkler provides four recommendations for labour law reform:

1. Shorten grievance procedures
2. Conduct discovery and productions within grievances, and not arbitration
3. Select arbitrators who are more immediately available
4. Conduct hearings with proportionality

As Adeyemi Alfred-Adekeye learned, you don’t mess with Cisco Systems Inc. And as Cisco learned, albeit a little late, you don’t mess with the Canadian judiciary.

The tangled story, told in full in the latest judgment [PDF] and glossed in the ars technica article, goes like this in brief: . . . [more]

We’ve all heard about Web 3.0, the semantic web which will be machine-readable, meaning that the substance of our communications will be the ground of action for programs.

Well here’s a shocker for those of us who have not connected the dots. You will read the web, and your browser will also read the web, but in addition websites, browsers, and other software will read you. What they learn in the process will affect the sorts of content that is made available to you.

We already see this in rudimentary forms when Amazon make suggestions to you, or when a . . . [more]

R v. Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd., 2011 SCC 42 is necessary reading for all Canadian lawyers giving advice about any aspect of private law obligations.

This case fits very nicely into our discussion about the need to avoid ambiguity in statements about law. It also shows how often ambiguity in the language actually used is too often associated with the writer(s)’ apparent confusion relating to the meaning of the concepts discussed.

Maybe the Court meant to make some of the assertions that the text of the reasons literally makes. And maybe they “misspoke” themselves.

Time will tell. 

But, in . . . [more]