Here’s the paper-thin justification: the law is not always and only framed in words; sometimes images become relevant, even crucial. Accordingly, Slaw, as your premier law blog, feels it a public duty to report on Google’s brand new Image Search function. As described (in words) on the Official Google Blog, there are half a dozen innovations:

Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.

Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get

Let me introduce you to Document Cloud (DC), an online service funded by a very substantial grant from the Knight Foundation.

Document Cloud directly addresses a concern that I’ve expressed a number of times here, that online news stories often refer to, or depend on, documents that are themselves not made available to the reader. Occasionally, of course, a link to an outside source would suffice. But at other times it would be most sensible to lodge the document in a secure place, and, better, a place that would help the referencing news organ to embed it in the . . . [more]

The natural objective of companies entering into outsourcing contracts is to get the best possible terms. The parties assemble working teams which include legal, technical, business and operational personnel. The teams spend weeks, if not months, in negotiating the terms and conditions. While the negotiation team members are very familiar with the end result, the rest of the team members may have very little knowledge of what has been negotiated. With the exception of the operational team members who will stay on to deliver the services or to manage the account, most of the negotiating team will disperse after the . . . [more]

What Slaw talks about, the world talks about tomorrow. Well not quite. No illusions about our reach.

So we’ll just put it down to coincidence or the zeitgeist that John Gregory’s mention of Henry VIII Clauses (he initially undervalued the monarch at a mere VII) here triggered global interest. But a few days later, the English legal press revealed that the Lord Chief Justice spoke on just this subject.

Lord Judge, who as Lord Chief Justice is head of the English judiciary, was speaking at the annual Lord Mayor’s dinner for the judiciary, the day before John Gregory’s comment; . . . [more]

This week in biotech was the same all over the world. E&Y brought their “Beyond Borders” roadshow to Toronto and walked a crowd at MaRS through a retrospective of 2009’s biotech successes and failures.

One interesting feature of this year’s report (pdf) was the uniformity of trends among different countries. No matter where you were in the world, a few things were true:

• Revenue was up;
• R&D spending was down;
• There were lots of licensing deals; and
• By the end of 2009, companies had returned to their normal levels of cash reserves and operating runway.

More data is coming to . . . [more]

I have been very impressed with all the new columns here on Slaw.ca. Fantastic work, everyone! Hopefully others have also stopped by on a daily basis to check out the column each day in addition to the daily blog posts.

For readers looking for more, here are five other law-related blogs — by bloggers not already featured as columnists or contributors on Slaw — that I consider “must-read”:

• Michael Geist’s Blog – Michael Geist not only tracks intellectual property issues in Canada, but also he influences them. This blog is essential reading for those of us interested in copyright, digital

Let me expand on this idea: people will continue to do business with people they like. 

Seems like a pretty simple concept, doesn’t it? Yet so many people miss out on business opportunities simply because they do not come across as likeable. I’m not here to tell you to become best friends with everyone you meet, but if you present yourself as a likable person it will go along way to getting more business.

Everyday we interact with all different kinds of people from the coffee barista, to your boss or your clients. Unless you are a hobbit, you will . . . [more]

I suspect we’ll be hearing quite a bit about a new suit filed by David Cowling of Mathews, Dinsdale & Clark against two former employees of his firm. Jim Middlemiss seems to have broken the story first on the National Post, and it was quickly picked up by the huge American blog Above the Law, so I won’t repeat all of the facts here again or provide too much commentary on the case.

Although Middlemiss points out the similarities to the LaCalamita case and the George Hunter suspension, there’s one important difference. The employee here, Sarah Diebel, . . . [more]

At a session at the Fourth International Legal Ethics Conference at Stanford Law School yesterday afternoon Freddy Mnyongani Senior Lecturer of the Jurisprudence Department at the University of South Africa told us that today has been marked by the United Nations as Mandela Day, in honour of the great man’s 92nd birthday.

On Mandela Day people are called to devote just 67 minutes of their time to changing the world for the better, in a small gesture of solidarity with humanity, and in a small step towards a continuous, global movement for good. . . . [more]

At a session at the Fourth International Legal Ethics Conference at Stanford Law School this morning Laurel Terry pointed us to a very elegant model for organizing legal information. It was developed a decade ago by the Project on International Courts and Tribunals. Simon noticed the link in the post here, but didn’t drill down.

The PICT Research Matrix is the first comprehensive, systematic and holistic mapping of the international judicial system. It encompasses 18 international judicial bodies, grouped in six clusters according to their geographical scope and/or subject-matter jurisdiction. For each institution, 29 issues, grouped in five . . . [more]

I’m trying to find out why I’ve received, on my office email, last week, political spam in the form of a few messages that purported to be email from Rob Ford’s campaign, whining about his treatment by the Toronto Star.

I assume that was part of mass emailing. There’d be no reason to specifically send that form of email to me. I’m as likely to vote for Ford as would have been for, say, Jakobek. One of my partners? Maybe. Me? No.

Assuming the email is from his campaign, directly or indirectly, I wonder what list of email addresses it . . . [more]

The European Community has placed a new online front end on its law-related offerings, aiming to make it easier to find what you want amid the welter of languages, systems, and regulations. The recently launched European e-Justice Portal contains sections directed at the public, businesses, the legal profession, and the judiciary. Within the Legal Profession section are the following resources:

• Law – providing general information and links with respect to the laws of the union, member states, and international treaties
• Case law – offering links to databases containing judgments for these various jurisdictions (and notably lacking any references to WorldLII