Two very good columns were posted here recently on the topic of looseleaf legal publications—one by Susannah Tredwell; the other by Ruth Bird. Ruth in particular painted a very negative picture of the looseleaf—basically the care and feeding is too onerous—and predicted its demise within the next 10 years.

Susannah referred to an article in BoingBoing; the comments on the article are most entertaining—mostly cries of woe from people who had been forced as part of their job duties to file looseleafs. From the tone of some of the comments you would think that looseleaf filing is a . . . [more]

The September/October 2010 Issue of Law Practice Magazine focused on law firm professional development and how to build talent.

I think one of the must read articles from that issue is Building A Better Talent Game Plan: Best Practices for Training and Developing Lawyers by Marcia Pennington Shannon.

When making decisions about lawyer development and training programs, many firms focus mainly on how it will affect the short-term bottom line – especially when the bottom line is hurting due to a struggling economy. The article sternly warns against doing this: Giving the short shrift to professional development today can have . . . [more]

Today’s wire service announced the merger of McMillan (as McMillan, Binch, Stuart, Berry, Dunn, Corrigan & Howland ultimately slimmed down to) and Lang Michener.

The Post, Gazette, and Globe all carry the story.

Here is the video of McMillan leader, Andy Kent, and the western and eastern leaders of Lang Michener commenting on their ambitions and achievement. The new firm vaults into the top dozen of Canadian firms by size and gives McMillan a reach beyond Calgary, with Lang’s Vancouver and Hong Kong offices. There will be 400 lawyers affected by the merger, which is slated to occur . . . [more]

Inspired by Ted Tjaden’s custom search engine that principally queries Canadian law firms, I’ve put together a Google Custom Search Engine for Canadian law blogs. The engine queries only the 249 blogs which are currently on the Canadian law blogs list maintained by Steve Matthews at lawblogs.ca.

As I explain on the page, because Google doesn’t let you rank your CSE results by date, I’ve given you the option of looking at results from the past day, a week, a month, or year.

What would make this really useful, of course, would be an RSS feed for your . . . [more]

A ZDNet article by Denise Howell caught my eye. It is titled Four legal predictions for Foursquare. David Canton mentioned foursquare in this recent post and Connie’s post about RockMelt and its integration of social media inspired me to write.

Foursquareand other location-based social networking tools offer an interesting service: easily find members in your community of interest. The privacy commissioner website offers another perspective on geolocation: unique rsks, mostly by a user not knowing what private information they are sharing.

Denise’s post sums up the legal issues for Foursquare as:

1. Location-savvy privacy standards and penalties
2. Service-side

. . . [more]

In addition to our post last Monday, here is the video of what happened at Dalhousie Law School during the Wickwire Lectures.

Our thanks to Richard Devlin and his colleagues for making it available. Wickwire Lecture 2010

Be patient with it loading – it’s a 1350 MB beast of a file, which will load wonderfully on university broadband, but may be slow to load on the computers of mere mortals. . . . [more]

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]