Thinking about using the free Google applications to run your practice? Have you read their Terms of Service? Wait, you’re a lawyer, of course you’ve carefully read their terms of service. Well humor me…let’s give it a look-see anyhow.

Change is in the Wind

4.2 Google is constantly innovating in order to provide the best possible experience for its users. You acknowledge and agree that the form and nature of the Services which Google provides may change from time to time without prior notice to you.

The first reaction most folks have to this is “O.K., cool, they’re going to . . . [more]

Wilson and LaFleur first to market

The first ipad application reached the Canadian legal research market just before the year end as Lexis Nexis joined Wilson and LaFleur in offering French language texts through an ipad. Using a free application developed specifically for Wilson and LaFleur publications, the two publishers have taken a small but significant step in making their content available to their customers by means of an ipad.

The titles offered by Wilson and LaFleur include:

1. Code civil du Quebec
2. Code criminal
3. Lois du Quebec
4. Droit des affaires
5. Code de procedure civile

The . . . [more]

If you’re not familiar with Instapaper, may I suggest you take a moment now to click on that link and get acquainted? Too busy? See, that’s the whole point. Instapaper is for you because you’re too busy — too busy now, at least. It’s a way to lodge the text of an interesting web find in a personal archive so that later, when you do have the time, you’ll be able to read it. It’s free and it’s easy.

And when “later” comes, you can read your saved gems in your computer (iPad, iPod, laptop), of course, or on . . . [more]

In updating my law-related movies page last night for movies from 2010 for my legal research and writing website, I was only able to come up with the following 4 movies but wonder if I am missing any (and arguably True Grit is on the periphery of being a law-related movie but it was so good that it was hard to resist including it). Thoughts?

The Conspirator (2010). Directed by Robert Redford and starring James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Kevin Kline, Evan Rachel Wood and Tom Wilkinson. James McAvoy plays the young lawyer assigned to defend Mary Surratt (played by

. . . [more]

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is about to start in Las Vegas. The CES officially runs from January 6 to the 9th, but there are several press conferences today for new product announcements. The show is huge – 2700 exhibitors, and over 100,000 attendees. Most of the major electronics brands will be there showing off their latest computers, cameras, TV’s, home theatres, and accessories. (With the notable exception of Apple.)

One of the hot items this year will be tablets. As I’ve mentioned before, (and I’m certainly not the only one) tablets will forever change how we consume . . . [more]

Many areas of publishing, to me, are bizarre. For example, visit the Frankfurt Book Fair and see tiny stand after stand, staffed by families, displaying delightful books, over which they have slaved, yet nobody’s making money. Publishing is often seen like that; resembling academic and religious endeavour, done for the greater good rather than profit. It’s not my view but neither, mostly, is it any of my business how others think and behave.

When it comes to legal and professional information publishing, you’d think it would be different. With customers such as fat, succulent lawyers, accountants, tax advisers, big corporates . . . [more]

The beginning of the year is a great time to look back and to look ahead. This week, I’ll look back at the top stories of 2010:

1. Canada’s 2010 Federal Budget had some juicy bits for biotech, venture capital and innovation, including the elimination of Section 116, which was long held up as an example of an unnecessary barrier to foreign investment.
2. The top three reasons why biotech companies should use social media — their customers, investors and peers all do.
3. Personalized medicine continues to attract tons of attention, not least because people expect it to be

. . . [more]

Translating these five leadership categories to a law-firm environment, we can see the clear parallels for a law firm to achieve transformational results.

If you’re ever in the mood to drop back a good few yards to get some perspective, you might want to take a look at the Philosophy of Law section of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP). You’ll have almost a dozen essays to choose from:

• Feminist Jurisprudence
• Human Rights
• Just War Theory
• Law and Economics
• Philosophy of Law
• Legal Positivism
• Legal Pragmatism
• Natural Law
• Punishment
• Right to Private Property

The essay on Philosophy of Law might be a good place to start, as it does a tour d’horizon of various theories of jurisprudence: analytical, normative, and critical.

The IEP . . . [more]

The federal cabinet was just shuffled. I have been waiting, impatiently, to post this. News was slow to filter my way, until I found this site, which offers live tweets. Well done Toronto Star.

For those who just want news without any commentary iPoliticsca tweets:

Kent, Ablonczy, Fantino and Menzies are the new four in Cabinet #cabshuff #cdnpoli

I suppose I could have tuned in to CPAC, but like many web video services, it doesn’t play nice at the office.

What is your favourite method for watching political news? . . . [more]

A speaker at one of our conferences a few years ago, announced that he advised young lawyers not to admit to knowing anything about IT, otherwise they would damage their career prospects at most firms. In other words … they’d get dismissed as geeks. 

That comment prompted at least two attendees to no longer bother with lawyers as a market. One of them was the developer of a reasonably popular document assembly program. He now describes himself as a marketer of legal services, and puts his development skills into building better tools for his new business rather than tools for . . . [more]

A couple of years ago I posted on the few offerings about law that were available on iTunes U, Apple’s semi-successful attempt to corral some serious podcasts and videos. I’ve had another look and find that the corpus has grown — though it hasn’t exploded in the way I imagined it might — and now contains a fair number of worthwhile lectures, both audio and video.

Searching for law in iTunes U isn’t particularly easy. There’s no category for it per se, and it’s variously plunked in other slots in the roster of topics. And searching for “law” . . . [more]