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

. . . [more]

The November-December 2010 CBA eNews provides links to some new and updated content from the Canadian Bar Association on the following topics:

– FAQs on Solicitor-Client Privilege and Confidentiality

– Guidelines for Practicing Ethically with New Information Technologies (PDF)

– Guidelines for Ethical Marketing Practices Using New Information Technologies (PDF)

– CBA Code of Professional Conduct 2009

I also note the CBA Practice Link article entitled Beyond First-Generation Knowledge Management that cites me and a number of colleagues working in the KM field. . . . [more]

Every year, our organization, like many others, donates money to a viable and worthwhile cause. Let’s not kid ourselves, not all the reasons for these donations are altruistic.

The Washington Post carried a story on Tuesday about a Virginia man who was acquitted of a charge of failing to stop for a school bus that was unloading passengers. His lawyer made an argument, accepted by the court upon appeal, that the relevant section of the statute had been misdrafted, ever since it was changed in 1970, and was missing a critical “at,” rendering it meaningless.

Here’s the section in question:

A person is guilty of reckless driving who fails to stop, when approaching from any direction, any school bus which is stopped on any highway, private road or

. . . [more]

Jane was a family law associate in a large firm where she hoped to be made partner within 2 years. While she had a good client base including clients whom she had brought to the firm and excellent billings, she felt that she was invisible to most of the partners.

She didn’t work in a large practice group and had no apparent champion who might speak for her at the partnership table. She often felt that the partners saw her family practice as a sideline service they were happy to provide their corporate clients provided they didn’t have to touch . . . [more]

A new study by the University of Toronto and Tufts University states that appearance matters a great deal when it comes to judging people in a new study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. “This includes clothing, posture, and hairstyles, but the real window to judging people is the face. We developed a method to measure facial power and found that it is a strong predictor of law firm profitability."

eHealth has been a major and controversial topic lately. A lot of time and effort has been spent on it, as there are many issues such as costs, privacy, security, and standards.

I had an encounter with the health system recently, and from my observations as a patient we need to keep this initiative moving, find ways to solve those issues, and stop using paper. I paid particular attention to the paper and documents that were created. Throughout the process, I was asked the same thing multiple times. (Confirming who I was and what they were going to do multiple . . . [more]