December 6th is an on odd date in history with many tragic events; odd that it is also St. Nicholas Day, and the 2010 version of December 6th brought with it a storm surge/weather bomb that few expected in this region. December 6th is the anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre in 1989. Those of us who remember that time likely have vivid memories of it, so much so that I don’t feel that I am able to do that event justice in this forum; I will focus on another event which December 6th marks the anniversary. Actually, I’m . . . [more]

If your researches take you into the area of human rights, you might want to avail yourself of a relatively new topical search engine, HuriSearch. One of the projects of the interesting HuriDocs, HuriSearch offers you a fairly sophisticated front end, allowing you to query any of four types of source (NGOs, national human rights institutions, academic institutions, and intergovernmental organizations), search in any of sixteen languages, and use word variations if you wish. As well, search results can be filtered by facets: source type, source organization, country, and document format.

Better yet, you’re offered a permalink to . . . [more]

The 2010 CLawBies–or Canadian Law Blog Awards–are now open for nominations.

How to Nominate in 2010:
This year’s nominations deadline is Tuesday, December 28th, and the methods remain the same as in previous years. Publicly nominate a Canadian-authored law blog using ANY of the following:

1. Tweet your endorsement on Twitter.com with the hashtag text: #clawbies2010. We’ll be monitoring!
2. Email your favourite blog, including a couple sample posts or any other notable highlights, to Steve Matthews at steve@stemlegal.com. We’d prefer a public nomination, but this is still acceptable.
3. Write a blog post about three other Canadian law blogs

There is an old adage that goes: “a good arrangement between parties is one where the contract can be put away at the end of the negotiation and never looked at again.” And who can complain with the apparent wisdom of this adage? It implies that the parties are so sufficiently well aligned and cooperative that a written contract is merely a formality, and that any circumstances can be accommodated through rational and cooperative behavior. I’ve never met a businessperson who did not subscribe to this adage. And I myself never questioned its apparent wisdom until the past 24 months . . . [more]

Stem Legal has relaunched the Canadian Law Blogs List at Lawblogs.ca started by Steve Matthews in September 2005. The List is an open directory of Canadian blogging lawyers, law librarians, marketers, IT professionals and paralegals (essentially anyone blogging in the legal industry in Canada).

Along with a new look, the new site features:

• browsing by practice area, by province, by industry topic, and latest additions
• subscription to LawBlogs.ca by RSS feed or by email to be notified of blog additions to the site
• a sample of recent blog posts from the various blogs on the front page

The Canadian Centre for Court Technology is looking for a new chief executive officer. Dominic Jaar — a former blogger on Slaw — who held the position of CEO for two years, has resigned to become associate partner in charge of Canadian e-discovery and information management practices at KPMG, the company that bought out Jaar’s consulting firm, Ledjit.

The CCCT position announcement, from board member Chris Walpole, is available in both HTML and PDF. The role is currently considered half-time and requires the following abilities, among others:

You must be bilingual, possess a post-secondary education, and have knowledge

The back page of the “Report on Business” section of the Nov. 29/10 Globe and Mail is a full page add for a type of electric space heater. The word “free” appears repeatedly on the page. The first words under the picture that occupies the top 1/3 of the page are, in bold, in block capitals, in larger size than the balance of the caption: “FREE MIRACLE HEATERS ARE ON THE WAY“. 

 The picture is of a man – (undoubtedly) an actor – who looks like a friendly Amish grandfather. I want to believe that no Amish community is . . . [more]

On December 9, 2002, Bill 213, the Justice Statute Law Amendment Act, 2002, overturned the previous prohibition in Ontario against contingency fees, the last province in Canada to do so. The history behind this introduction is detailed in the Supplementary Report to the Ontario Civil Justice Review.

The policy reasons for supporting contingency fees was that it would theoretically increase access to justice and save clients money by moving away from a billable hour system. The concerns included that the lawyer might become an “interested party,” there would be less incentive to settle, and there would be more . . . [more]

Here’s a sentiment that more than a few Slaw readers will agree with, I’d guess:

Technology rocks! Especially when it’s available to the world and doesn’t cost a thing. But learning about it? That’s not so great.

This is part of Google’s explanation for why they set up Google Demo Slam, the target of today’s fillip. (You’ll need to have Flash installed to use the site.) The notion is simple: make a video doing something unusual with one of Google’s tools and they’ll host it on this site. To fulfill the promise of the “slam” in the name, they . . . [more]

At last night’s Maple Leaf debacle, both the Leaf players and the team ownership & advertisers were extremely successful in their “giveaways”. That wasn’t a good thing for the Leaf players. Enough about that. I’m going to talk about 3 of the ownership “giveaways”; that is, contests resulting in prizes being awarded to people attending the game.

In one, a man won a trip for 2 to Las Vegas. He had to answer three questions. The cynic would say the difficulty was determined by the fact that the questions would be posed to a member of the “Leaf Nation”. Leave . . . [more]

My last column addressed an odd feature of current legal periodical publishing: a number of legal publishers do not expose interoperable metadata for their periodical articles on the free Web, and do not sell or license individual periodical articles online.

We saw that these practices seem unusual because they are inconsistent with industry trends, and because these publishers already use digital publishing processes, have access to free or low-cost ejournal platform and ecommerce software, often have access within their own corporate families to expertise in implementing such software and services, and, given the size of the global market and the . . . [more]

The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has provided a guide explaining How to Decipher a State Department Cable:

“This guide … might come in handy as you peruse the 251,287 Department of State cables recently released by wikileaks (…)”

“At the Archive, we have lots of practice reading declassified government documents. Since we will be using this space to share with you some documents from our trove of government releases, we thought it would be useful to give you some tips on what to look for in these documents. Several of our experienced analysts have created