Click on image to enlarge it.

Roll your own at Bitstrips. . . . [more]

More to the point, maybe, can you?

If you had an iPhone — and Everyday Looper — you could at least try. Reggie Watts, comic and musician, wows Sirius Radio interviewer, Ron Bennington, with an improvised concert on the only equipment he managed to bring to the interview.

I’ve tried to think how lawyers might make business use of Everyday Looper on their iPhones, but it’s Friday, so I didn’t try very hard. But if you can come up with ROI ($5.99) ideas, by all means let us have them. . . . [more]

As social media tools become easier and simpler to use, more of their value seems to be draining away. The last few years have seen an unmistakable trend towards social media tools and habits that push the absolute minimum of effort and commitment, with the result that the promise of social media — better communication, broader networks, stronger personal connections — is in danger of falling by the wayside.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

The new ReTweet (RTs): Time was, if you saw a tweet you liked, you copied-and-pasted it into your own screen, prefixed with an . . . [more]

Have you come across a QR code yet? See this as an example:

All you need is a QR code reader built into your mobile phone – either natively within Android phones, or a free QR app for the iPhone. Then scan the code, and instantly your phone will execute one of a number of predetermined tasks:

• hotlink the phone’s browser to a URL – scanning the above image, for example, takes you to the homepage our blog at Stem;
• initiate a phone call;
• display an image, business card, etc;
• download a v-card;
• or display a simple text message, to

A little late to the party by comparison with other provinces, the Law Society of Upper Canada is now seeking comments on how best to treat the practice of “unbundling” legal services in the rules of conduct. Specifically, a report (undated) prepared by the Policy Secretariat, “Unbundling” of Legal Services and Limited Legal Representation, [PDF] has made a number of proposals for change in the rules governing lawyers and paralegals, and the law society invites responses to these.

In this context, the society means by “unbundling”:

… the provision of limited legal services or limited legal representation. It is

On 4 and 5 November 2010, The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is hosting meetings on Emerging Licensing Modalities, as part of its initiative on Facilitating Access to Culture in the Digital Age. These are global meetings with speakers and participants from around the world, with representatives of a variety of stakeholders. Many speakers are experts in their fields and countries. Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig will be the keynote speaker. The Themes for the meetings are:

Licensing Content Online: New Trends
Competition and Licensing of Music
Software: Tailoring Licenses to Markets
Research and Education: Emerging Licensing Platforms . . . [more]

Recently a male partner said to me that while practicing law in a firm has always been more challenging for women, he believes that today it is almost impossible. This bold statement surprised me – not because I am unaware of the many challenges that women lawyers face but because I look at how far we have come over the past 30 years and cling to the hopeful belief that progress is being made.

When I remember how challenging it was for women to obtain articles or be kept on as associates with the assumption that women would leave as . . . [more]

My assistant came across this YouTube video. It had me laughing out loud. The comments in it are hilarious, and biting. It is worth a look.

. . . [more]

When LexisNexis announced its new Lexis for Microsoft Office (LMO) product this past February, Simon Chester briefly discussed this new product here on SLAW.

The foregoing LexisNexis press release describes the product as “a new set of research capabilities that will enable legal professionals to access content and services from LexisNexis and other sources while operating directly within Microsoft Office applications.” LexisNexis has more info here. The product was formally launched earlier this summer in the United States with the company now exploring introducing it in its other markets.

Earlier today I attended a lunch / demo by . . . [more]

Is anybody – any international body – studying the legal basis for jurisdiction over personal information as it crosses national borders, or considering the law that should be applicable to such PI?

This could be thought of as ‘law applicable to the cloud’ in these days of cloud computing, though I don’t think it’s limited to that.

The Hague Conference on Private International Law in April 2010 noted [PDF p.18] as an ‘additional subject’ for work, more I think in the lines of a watching brief:

The Council invited the Permanent Bureau to continue to follow developments in the following

I’ve been asked to speak early next year on how information and privacy issues are shaping the future of employment law. In preparation, I’d like to share three developing thoughts here that relate to: (1) the impending clash between information governance and personal use of corporate IT systems; (2) internet use and the “virtualization” of workplace harms; and (3) labour stability, departing employees and information-related harms. Part 1 is below. Parts 2 and 3 will follow. Please comment.

What does the “information governance” movement mean for employers?

In my view, the building pressure to govern corporate information is bound to . . . [more]

The great Code of Hammurabi, nearly 4,000 years old, was written in cuniform script in Akkadian, a lingua franca for much of the middle east and north Africa at the time.

Thanks to the efforts of scholars at Cambridge, you can now hear what it might have sounded like. (Obviously, there’s no way to know with any certainty how Akkadian sounded, but certain clues, comparisons, and good guesses can give us an idea.) Here is a link to an MP3 file on Slaw’s server; you can also access the recording on the Cambridge site.

The . . . [more]