Some new stories from around the world:

Honey – I forgot to renew the domain name

That’s the story out of a free public website in Massachusetts: The site provides the public with online copies of opinions from both the Supreme Judicial Court and the Appeals Court. C. Clifford Allen head of the SJC’s Reporter of Decisions office woke up to find that his website was gone and that a notice — “massreports.com expired on 11/08/2010 and is pending renewal or deletion” – was substituted.

If they did send a (renewal) notice, it must have been caught in

The world of biotech was all shook up this week:

In venture capital, GrowthWorks was stepping on Covington’s Blue Suede Shoes by soliciting votes against Convington’s planned acquisition of the VenGrowth funds, saying it wants time to make its own offer. The CPPIB handed a Big Hunk O’ Love to NorthLeaf Capital, turning over management of its $438 million portfolio of venture capital investments including Celtic, Edgestone, Lumira/MDS, Skypoint and Ventures West.

Meanwhile, Dr. Mick Bhatia’s group at the Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute at McMaster University found a way to make human skin cells sing “Any Way . . . [more]

When is a problem ‘your’ problem. This is a very big question for whose of us, likely everyone, who work in groups. Most organizations will have some kind of hierarchy for reporting, but does this always represent the hierarchy for communication?

For instance, today Westlaw Canada, and according to some tweets Westlaw in the US, is having some technical difficulty. [Note: This is not a criticism. Anything delivered with technology will have some downtime.] Should this information be shared, with whom, when, and by whom?

My answer to the question is: Yes, with the people who use it, immediately, . . . [more]

Is there any reason why Canadian law would not enforce value established, earned or conveyed in a virtual world, assuming the appropriate evidence were available? (Speculation on what kinds of evidence might be available is welcome, as is most speculation on this website.)

Here are a couple of articles about Facebook’s “online virtual currency”, the first largely favourable, the second mentioning some enforcement problems. (I can’t access FB from the office to see what its official view might be.)

• ThinkRisk, “If Only They Were ‘Virtual’ Losses…”
  (this one has links to other sources too)
• “Zynga on the

Unless you work at a very large law firm, odds are that you don’t have a dedicated employee(s) for writing proposals or responding to RFPs. And that’s okay – you should still go for it; there are just a few points you may wish to consider:

1. Don’t respond to everything. You can waste a lot of time and money if you respond to proposals if you don’t meet the requirements. Read the RFP document carefully and consider if you truly are a good fit. 
2. Ask for clarity. Sometimes there are mistakes or vague statements in RFP documents; you might disqualify

On November 16 at 10am PST the people at Adobe are putting on a free e-seminar to review the top new features of Acrobat X. It will include demonstrations of the top new features of Acrobat X Pro that will interest legal professionals, including:

• The new, easier-to-use interface.
• How to accurately save scanned documents directly to editable Word and Excel files.
• How to improve optical character recognition (OCR), even spot and correct OCR errors.
• The enhanced Redaction capabilities that help save time and improve productivity.
• How to automate, standardize, and share multi-step tasks for PDF production— using the new Action

At last week’s second annual MILOfest, the official Macs In Law Offices conference, I was pleased to have the opportunity to share the results of Clio’s inaugural Apple in Law Offices Survey.

The Apple in Law Offices survey was undertaken as an attempt to quantify what seems to be a rising trend of using Macs, iPads, iPhones, and other Apple products in law offices. While the number of anecdotes of PC users switching to Macs, BlackBerry users opting for iPhones, and iPads being embraced is no doubt on the rise, there is a lack of hard data to . . . [more]

The Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Toronto Chapter is holding its first full-day conference at the Four Seasons in Toronto on November 30, 2010. Called “The Changing Face of Legal Marketing,” it’s intended for lawyers as well as law firm marketing staff. The two keynote speakers are Mitch Joel and Adrian Dayton, both experts in online marketing. Another highlight is Nat Slavin, who will be speaking at the end of the day on Five Things Clients Want You to Know and Do in 2011.

Registration and program details are available online, of course. . . . . [more]

This is the second of three contributions focusing on certain peculiarities of Quebec’s civil law legal environment within North America (Part I can be found here).

While outsourcing and sophisticated professional IT services agreements typically deal with quality and performance issues through mechanisms such as service levels, penalties and credits, warranties and other related concepts, one will occasionally come across a client request to have the vendor commit to using “best efforts” to achieve a certain desired result. Vendors typically bark at this as they fear that such a commitment might be open-ended and require the deployment of resources . . . [more]

The big news from London is that Norton Rose is taking over Deneys Reitz, one of South Africa’s largest firms – and African firm of the year in 2006 – and the Canadian firm Ogilvy Renault. The expanded firm will fly under the Norton Rose flag.

The two firms will formally join the Norton Rose Group on 1 June 2011. This will raise the firm’s head count to over 2,500 lawyers spread over 38 offices.

Norton Rose Chief Executive Peter Martyr commented

This is a very exciting move…Canada and South Africa are increasingly influential economies for our clients

If you are a law firm starting from scratch looking to build an intranet, what would you do? Would you emulate many of the big US and Canadian firms and implement MS Sharepoint? Or look for a different solution? So often firms look over each others’ shoulder to see what the other is doing. But with intranets one size does not fit all.

I am currently in Washington, DC for KM World 2010 and was fortunate to have a good discussion with Gordon Ross, Vice President of Open Road Communications Ltd., web consultants and creators of the social intranet . . . [more]

Although two of my columns have already been posted on this blog, I never really officially introduced myself to the readers. As the youngest columnist in the Slaw family, I’d very much like to share my background and the road I travelled to date on my professional journey! 

The Early Years 

My story begins in the summer of 2002 when I left my family and moved to Montreal from Haiti to begin my postsecondary studies. I immediately enrolled to College Jean-de-Brébeuf and quickly developed a particular affinity for science and the law. This affinity for both those fields would stay . . . [more]