I attended the Social Intranet Summit in Vancouver on October 26^th and 27^th, a conference sponsored by ThoughtFarmer, a vendor of social Intranet software. The audience was a mix of Intranet managers from Marketing, IT and Knowledge Management departments. There were some terrific insights shared at this conference which are useful for anybody about to implement or upgrade a social Intranet. Here is a short summary of some of the key learnings.

What is social Intranet software? According to the experts, social Intranet software combines traditional Intranet elements with social collaboration features such as “rich user . . . [more]

The Minister of Culture in the UK hints quite strongly that an Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) system would be established to resolve situations where alleged inaccurate personal information is posted to the Internet.

Google’s been speeding things up lately, as you’ll know if you’ve turned on Google Instant for your searches. (See Google’s Instant Search: An Alphabet Book.)

Now Google’s rolling out Instant Preview, which, as the name suggests, lets you get a preview of the site itself. I’m not one of the lucky rolloutees yet, but Google, ever solicitous, has a Google Labs site that will let you play with the new feature. You’ll know when it arrives in your neighbourhood, because a small magnifying glass icon will a appear beside each of your results.

A click on it brings up . . . [more]

I recently read an interesting article called “For LPO clients, small is beautiful”. What makes it interesting is it highlights the valuable role of “smaller” LPOs. 

The survey supports the view that global companies outsourcing legal work seem to prefer doing business with smaller companies. The survey conducted across 6,547 clients globally shows that smaller vendors, including LPO vendors are satisfying more clients and to a greater degree compared to their larger counterparts. The survey was conducted by the Black Book of Outsourcing in 2010. 

UK-based Datamonitor’s Research Director, Eamonn Kennedy, said in a press statement, “Although feedback . . . [more]

This week in biotech was very stimulating, with public funds flowing to a variety of projects.

The Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE) got two new members this week and Minister of Research and Innovation Glen Murray (or @Glen4TC as he’s know to his tweeps) travelled to St. Catharines and Hamilton. ONE is what we’re now calling the network of organizations across Ontario that help innovators commercialize ideas.

The U.S. deployed its $1 billion Therapeutic Discovery Project tax credit/grant stimulus program this week, which was launched just 7 months ago as part of the health reform bill. Interestingly, . . . [more]

Perverse as it may be in November to contemplate Spring, today’s postings on the law of time and Bills prompt me to dredge out the wonderfully quirky piece of parliamentary draftsmanship, A.P. Herbert’s Spring Arrangements Bill.

The statute is referred to in Drafting Cayman Islands trusts, by James Kessler, Tony Pursal at page 148.

A.P. Herbert was the MP for Oxford University and a passionate advocate for Newfoundland independence – which made him a bete noire of Joey Smallwood in the Book of Newfoundland – see Peter Neary’s Newfoundland in the North Atlantic World, 1929-1949. Herbert’s . . . [more]

Bills that have introduced in Canada and Nova Scotia

On Friday Adobe announced two new products that demonstrate the company is increasingly embracing cloud-based technologies.

The first product, Adobe SendNow, allows you to send large files to a single or multiple recipients. While this is not a new concept, Adobe adds several features that provide value to lawyers. SendNow allows you to set expiry times for how long a document will be available for download, and allows you to confirm that a document has been viewed by the recipient.

The second product, Adobe CreatePDF, is a cloud-based version of Adobe Acrobat that allows you to convert a . . . [more]

new social web browser launched today

ON lawyers volunteer in the classroom

Most of us outside Saskatchewan put our clocks back an hour yesterday, and we’ve now returned to what some might call “God’s time”. Of course, when it comes to the o’clock, it’s actually the law that disposes, and the law’s been setting our watches backwards and forwards for just over a hundred years. At the beginning of the last century, the English builder, William Willet, found a champion in Parliament to get his scheme passed for recapturing “some of the hours of wasted sunlight in the spring, summer, and autumn.”

Perhaps fearing that a jump of a full . . . [more]

My computer will never be the same again. If you click on any program and select the About option (often on the Help menu), you can see what version of the program you have. Google Chrome tells me I’m at 8.0.552.0. But part of me is convinced that if I check back in an hour or so, that number will have gone up, or at least gotten longer. The pace of incremental change to my software applications and operating systems is accelerating. My computer is on a hamster wheel. And these minor changes, happening behind the scenes, can have an . . . [more]