We southerners are rarely able to see the stars, let alone the true spectacle of the heavens, the aurora borealis. But never fear: the internet to the rescue. The Canadian Space Agency maintains the AuroraMax Project, which features a web cam pointed at the Yellowknife sky — after dusk, natch. So the insomniacs among us can watch live as the northern lights play up in the ionosphere.

Now, Yellowknife is currently on Mountain Daylight Time, 6 hours off GMT, with sunset at around 7:20 p.m. local time. If you’re not prepared to stay up to catch the best of . . . [more]

In conjunction with the release of his latest autobiography, The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry has produced a rather unique interactive iPhone app titled myFry. What really catches your attention about it is the app’s navigation system:

When I first saw it, I was immediately struck by its beauty. Its functionality, however, remained something of a mystery to me. The designer of the app, Stefanie Posavec, writes:

The app functions as a ‘visual index’ of key theme tags within the book, which have been divided into 4 major groups: People, Subjects, Emotions, and Fryisms (metaphors, similes, word play,

Legal Project Management has certainly become flavour of the month. I will be co-chairing a full one-day conference on the topic (on November 1^st, 2010 in Toronto). This is the first Canadian event of its kind and the fact that the conference is organized by the Canadian Bar Association and has both law firm and in-house counsel speakers suggests that the idea of applying project management principles to legal services has broad support and interest across the profession.

But while the topic resonates for many lawyers (with its prospect for increased budgetary certainty and potentially better outcomes), my experience . . . [more]

The fall 2010 session of the Supreme Court of Canada began earlier this week.

Not everyone knows that electronic facta filed by the parties in cases before the Supreme Court of Canada are available on the Court’s website. This has been so for cases filed since February 2009.

For example, if you want to find out about the arguments of the parties in upcoming hearings of the fall season, you only need to click on the style of cause (party name) link for a particular case.

For example, today, the Court heard an appeal in the case of Information . . . [more]

On Monday, November 15, 2010 from 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EST, I am presenting a teleseminar along with Hermie Abraham of Abraham Law, David Anber of David Anber’s Law Office and Phil Brown of the Law Society of Upper Canada, Prof Development & Competence on:

* Choosing the right technology to stay connected
* Collaborating with clients on the Web
* Addressing all considerations before going virtual
* Finding the simplest tools to make it work seamlessly
* Upholding confidentiality in the virtual office

Link to program page: http://ecom.lsuc.on.ca/cpd/product.jsp?id=CLE10-0110301
Link to printable program brochure: http://ecom.lsuc.on.ca/cpd/flyer.jsp?id=CLE10-0110301

Please join us! . . . [more]

In Friends of the Earth – Les Ami(e)s de la Terre v. Canada (Governor in Council) 2009 FCA 297 [leave to appeal dismissed 2010 CanLII 14720 (S.C.C.)] , the Federal Court of Appeal let the Canadian government get away with open defiance of a statute of the Parliament of Canada,the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, 2007 (KPIA).

According to the federal government, its defiance is no business of the courts, because the obligations in the KPIA are “not justiciable”. The Federal Court of Appeal agreed, but with the thinnest of justifications.

This country signed and ratified an international convention on the . . . [more]

My experience in private practice – and from my conversations with other sole practitioners in smaller markets, it was a common one – was that it was, at times, a roller-coaster. Billings were often feast or famine. To compensate, lawyers can develop a thick skin when it comes to dealing with difficult clients. Our tolerance level went up just for the sake of regular billings.

Another experience that I occasionally enjoyed – and again, from my conversations with other sole practitioners in smaller markets, it was a not uncommon one – was that it was good to terminate the relationship . . . [more]

The days when law students lament over whether they should “blog” are surely over when the Dean of Law has their own blog.

Lorne Sossin, Dean of Osgoode Hall, has just launched Dean Sossin’s Blog, where he “can draw your attention to topics that affect Osgoode, our students and the broader legal and academic community.” The sole post is from Monday, and provides a response to Maclean’s always contentious 2010 law school rankings.

It’s not off to a bad start, although there could be greater use of the hyperlinking function. There also appears to be a significant . . . [more]

Dan wrote yesterday about what to do if hackers steal your online accounts. As a companion to that, Yahoo!Canada has an article from Real Simple magazine entitled Scams Even you Could Fall For – And How to Avoid Them. 

It talks about things like phony gift card offers, mails that look like they come from your bank, sellers of fake items like event tickets, and fake charities. It also suggests some resources to use for checking to see if things are legit. Sometimes just doing a Google or Bing search will ferret out if something is a common scam. . . . [more]

Although duty-bound to report on the Ark Group seminar on Legal Project Management held last week in Chicago (led by Stephen Levy of Lexician and Patrick Lamb of the Valorem Law Group) — which I will do shortly — I will instead first post a SLAW travel tip that will highly recommend a visit to the iconic Farnsworth House about 1 hour outside of Chicago in Plano, Illinois (and yes, if you bear with me, there are several law-related components to this travel story, if only slight).

To hear about or see pictures of the Farnsworth House does not . . . [more]

Like many of my North American colleagues, I keep up with new law journal articles by subscribing to alerts from Current Law Journal Content (CLJC), the free table of contents service published by the Washington & Lee School of Law Library and the University of Texas Tarlton Law Library. Particular characteristics of certain of the commercially published law journals indexed in CLJC have recently puzzled me: the practices of these journals seem out of step with today’s norms for distributing metadata and content of scholarly and professional articles. Here’s what I’ve seen:

• Many of the articles in these

Earlier today I tweeted about a great article on the New York Times tech blog What to Do If Hackers Steal Your Online Accounts.

In hindsight, I think the advice in the article is very practical and relevant to just about everyone, thus making it worth sharing via a SLAW post with a far wider audience than just those that follow me on Twitter.

Over the years I have received more than few panicked calls from lawyers that have had their email accounts hacked, and more recently, from a lawyer that lost control of his Facebook page. Email and . . . [more]