My inspiration for this column comes from hearing Steven Levy and Rick Kathuria speak about legal project management at the Legal IT Conference on April 4^th. Steven very effectively described the “Seven Habits of Effective Legal Project Managers” which included creating a project charter, clarifying stakeholders, minimizing waste and building a communication plan. Rick talked about how this was put into practice at McCarthy Tétrault through the implementation of a legal project management framework that involved the following four stages:

LPM Framework Define Plan Monitor Evaluate

So far, most of the focus in legal project management has been . . . [more]

We’ve blogged before about the useful work done by Public Legal Information and Advice sites like CLEO, and its sister organizations in British Columbi and across the country.

I’ve found it surprising that the Website of the Public Legal Education Association of Canada is “Under Construction” though details of its work can be found in Red Deer, Alberta.

In Ontario, CLEO is looking for volunteers to help it redesign its website.

We need your input

In the coming weeks, we will be asking you, our community of users and stakeholders, for your feedback in a variety of

. . . [more]

In DC today, the Law Library of Congress unveiled its Strategic Plan for the next five years. While the entire Plan is interesting, Slaw readers may be particularly interested in the Library’s Social Media strategy:

Strategy 6.

Commit to adopt industry standards and best practices while monitoring emerging trends and cutting-edge practices.
objectives:
1) Update law library data contained on the public website by adding xMl and RDf as available formats for all data and e Pub for published reports by September 30, 2015.
2) Conduct an ongoing review of all law library data contained on the public website

. . . [more]

The explosion in the tablet world combined with the movement to cloud computing is a game changer in legal technology as demonstrated at ABA TECHSHOW 2011.

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

. . . [more]

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) –

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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

. . . [more]

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

. . . [more]

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]