CanLII has announced the appointment of Colin Lachance as the new president of the organization.

From the news release:

Mr. Lachance obtained his Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Alberta, and was admitted in to the Law Society of Alberta in 1998. He is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

Prior to joining CanLII, Mr. Lachance enjoyed a successful career at the virtual intersection of technology, law and public policy. Most recently he was the Director of Federal Government Affairs with a major Canadian telecommunications company. Mr. Lachance has also held the positions of Director

I try not to rant here at Slaw, but today, I am making an exception. Among all the political hoopla, famine, flooding and war, I am choosing to rant about something that with very little effort is easily remedied.
News Releases.

I follow news releases using RSS feeds for several levels of government. There is little that annoyes me as much as a news release that has no information in it. For example, Government of Canada Travel Updates.

Here is the headline from the News Releases page on the Canada News Centre:

09:25 ADT (Tuesday, Apr 19, 2011) –

In a recently released report, “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” [PDF], the White House proposes the creation of a voluntary system in which citizens, government agencies, and businesses could register, permitting the secure provision of multiple services and commercial transactions. From the executive summary:

In the current online environment, individuals are asked to maintain dozens of different usernames and passwords, one for each website with which they interact The complexity of this approach is a burden to individuals, and it encourages behavior—like the reuse of passwords—that makes online fraud and identity theft easier At the same

Over the past year, I have been working on a book about the evolution of legal information in my lifetime. It is probably one of those projects that will never be finished but it is worth trying. The vagaries of time and fate placed me in an excellent position to observe the shift in the tectonic plates of legal research. When I graduated from law school in 1974, the world of printed legal information was at the end of its golden age. The West National Reporter System, the American Digest System and Shepard’s Citators were ascendant. The cutting edge of . . . [more]

While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing are all the rage these days, one of basic tenets of SaaS – the pay-as-you-go, subscription-based pricing model – seems to be catching on in the traditional desktop software world.

Last week Adobe made waves by announcing $35/month subscription pricing for its flagship Photoshop product, which has traditionally retailed for over $1,000. Another giant in the traditional software market, Microsoft, has long offered subscription-based pricing for Microsoft Office, but is now also looking to bring Office to a hosted subscription-based offering via Office 365.

This shift isn’t entirely surprising – subscription-based pricing offers . . . [more]

I’m just back from a great ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago last week. I learned lots about legal technology and enjoyed the company of fellow technology enthusiasts. Wish you all were there, but as I know many SLAW readers were not, in lieu I offer a great collection of articles from the just released 2011 Techshow Tips issue of Law Practice magazine:

• Tablet Users Face Off: iPad versus Slate Shootout
• A Day in the Life of an iPad Lawyer
• A Look Inside the New Mac Apps Store
• Must-Have iPhone Apps
• 10 Tips for Getting Started with Open Source Software
• Google

I was surprised to learn, browsing through Bencher election material, that in the UK solicitors have lost the right of exclusive self-governance.

According to candidate Graeme Mew in the UK, self-governance of the profession has been “severely limited”. Solicitors in England & Wales, who used to be regulated by their Law Society, are now regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (“SRA”) which is overseen by a Legal Services Board (“LSB”). It is appointed by the government. According to Mew, “The obvious concern is that the governance of the profession will be influenced by government objectives which, in the UK, currently . . . [more]

Larry Lessig is famous for, among many other things, his dictum that “Code is law,” meaning that code in both legal and computer senses is a means of social control. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that people at his former home of Stanford University are working to see if they can actually make laws into computer code.

The wonderfully named Hammurabi Project from Stanford’s Center for Computers and Law is converting a few patches of U.S. legislation into machine readable C# in an attempt to express the logic and relationships of those provisions in a way that might allow facts . . . [more]

Services outsourcings and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings lie on nearly opposite ends of a spectrum of managed services that a service provider can provide a customer. Traditionally, they serve the customer in quite different ways and are considered to be separate services, but some service providers are offering “customized” SaaS services, which in essence lie in the middle of this spectrum of managed services. Only certain services can be offered both as a SaaS Service and through an outsourcing, but the breadth and complexity of SaaS Services, particular cloud-based SaaS Services, grows constantly.

Outsourcings are generally used to transfer responsibility for . . . [more]

The features on professional networking site LinkedIn change frequently, so it is worth spending some time periodically to update your profile.

Earlier this month I attended the AIIP (Association of Independent Information Professionals) annual conference. I took a bit of extra time to attend one of the pre-conference workshops put on by Scott Brown, owner of Social Information Group, on using LinkedIn. It was good to have a current, detailed look at the network and its current features.

Allow me to share a few things I learned:

• some of the formatting options are hidden under unrelated sections in

Public Safety Canada released an information paper, Social Media / Webmail / Smartphones: Networking with Risk,

The purpose of this Information Note is to raise awareness of some threats and vulnerabilities that have recently affected users of various social networking sites, webmail services and smartphones. These widely used communication technologies have taken on a significant role not only for individuals, but also for organizational communications and outreach initiatives. This document is aimed at providing organizations with an overview of some of the risks that are associated with using these technologies with the intent of promoting the use of applicable

In late 2008 I proposed that eventually someone would use a legal blog post as an authority in their factum. Here’s to one step closer to that goal.

I just noticed that a blog post of mine on Slaw about Ron Livingston was cited in an article by Rebecca Phillips in the Fall 2010 issue of the Campbell Law Review, Constitutional Protection for Nonmedia Defendants: Should There be a Distinction Between You and Larry King?

Phillips discusses statements made by social media users used in defamation cases and its conflict with First Amendment rights. In her conclusion she mentions . . . [more]