The Federal Register, the daily journal of the United States Government including changes to rules and regulations, is celebrating its 75th anniversary, has relaunched its website and re-envisioned their services. Federal Register 2.0 is organized like a daily newspaper and is part of the open government initiatives under the Obama administration.

This video (which also appears on the new website under “About Federal Register 2.0”) provides additional detail about the history of the Federal Register and the changes:

Also note the website is using images from photo sharing site Flickr made available for use under Creative Commons licensing. . . . [more]

I’ve run across a few interesting tools for making reading the web a bit easier. Depending on what you are after, one of these might suit…

Readability

a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

Read it Later

One reading list, everywhere you are

Use the bookmarklet to add things to your reading list, then sign in to the site later when you have the time to read. Designed for the longer-form materials that actually require some time and concentration.

Flipboard (iPhone and iPad only)

World’s first social magazine

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In my last column, I said that asking how many people you need in your law firm marketing department is the wrong question: you need to know what you want to achieve and how quickly you want to see results. I also said that the key marketing appointment is the person who is going to lead the charge, whether that person is a lawyer in the firm, a staff person, or a consultant. The important thing is to have someone making the decisions, based on a goal. 

Once you know what you want to do, finding the kind of help . . . [more]

R. v. Bomberry, 2010 ONCA 542

[9] At approximately 3:45 a.m., [the deceased’s] car stopped at an intersection about five blocks away from his apartment. The vehicle was half on the road and half on the curb. [The deceased] was in the driver’s seat and had suffered a single stab wound to the chest. Expert evidence indicated he would have died rapidly from the injury. Expert evidence also indicated that he was killed while sitting in the driver’s seat, likely by an assailant sitting in the front passenger seat. There was some evidence to support the conclusion that [the deceased]

. . . [more]

In Weber v. Canada (Minister of National Revenue), 2000 CanLII 14993 (F.C.), http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/doc/2000/2000canlii14993/2000canlii14993.html, Hargrave, Prothonotary, described and then disposed of the respondent’s argument:

[8] Mr. Weber’s main issue is that, in his view, Revenue Canada made an offer to him, in the form of the Tax Certificate, to settle at $110,650.81: critical here, in Mr. Weber’s view, is the dollar sign with one bar through it. Mr. Weber’s submission is that a Canadian dollar sign has two vertical bars, but a peso has only one vertical bar. The offer, being in Mr. Weber’s view, in pesos, worth about seventy-five

. . . [more]

Google has released their estimate for the number of books: 129,864,880.

They also offer a full explanation of their counting methods, with some interesting quotes:

• “we can’t rely on ISBNs alone is that ever since they became an accepted standard, they have been used in non-standard ways. They have sometimes been assigned to multiple books: we’ve seen anywhere from two to 1,500 books assigned the same ISBN.”
• “We trust OCLC and LCCN number similarity slightly less, both because of the inconsistencies noted above and because these numbers do not have checksums, so catalogers have a tendency to mistype

. . . [more]

Introduction: Citizen Lawmaking Online

Citizen lawmaking seems ideally suited to today’s Web. Government social media and online deliberation resources, coupled with widespread access to broadband in many nations, and much improved Internet access to laws, combine to furnish citizens with abundant means for participating in the creation of laws online. The category of information and communication technologies (ICTs) that enable online citizen involvement in lawmaking has many names, including eConsultation, eDemocracy, eParliament, eParticipation, eRulemaking, and Dr. Beth Simone Noveck’s “collaborative democracy”.

In the U.S., citizens in many jurisdictions already have the . . . [more]

We note, with mixed emotions, the passing of Canada Law Book, a company whose roots in Canadian law go back a century.

Here is the announcement that it is being acquired by Thomson.

* 04 Aug 2010

Thomson Reuters Acquires Canada Law Book
Combined content and services provide true online and print customer advantages

Toronto, Canada, Aug. 4, 2010 – Thomson Reuters today announced the acquisition of Canada Law Book, a division of the Cartwright Group Limited. Canada Law Book will be aligned with Carswell, a Thomson Reuters business headquartered in Toronto. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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The Canadian Judicial Council is a source of publications that should interest lawyers. The most recent report is The Canadian Justice System and the Media [PDF], a 2010 update to their publication of the same name in 2007. Although written explicitly for the benefit of members of the press and other news media, the section on Publication Bans and Other Restrictions on Media Coverage provides a handy review of the law in this area.

The Council commissions more frequent analyses on technology and its impact on the judicial system. For example, thus far in 2010 they’ve released four pieces by . . . [more]

Ontario Bill 68, The Open for Business Act, 2010 was recently tabled in Legislature. The aim of the Bill is to create a more competitive business climate in the province, while protecting the environment and public interest. Among the over 100 proposed amendments to various pieces of legislation, broadly stated, the upcoming changes would:

On Wednesday in an Official Google Blog post, Urs Hölzle of Google informed us that Google Wave would no longer be developed:

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

Hölzle goes on to give some hope that some of this initiative may live on in other ways:

The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have

. . . [more]

Markus is a successful lawyer who does great work for clients and who burns out assistants on an annual basis with sarcastic comments and angry outbursts. Jeffrey is a managing partner who likes to lead his firm like a drill sergeant at boot camp. 

I am on a mission to contribute to making our law firms better places to work. One of the big questions I keep grappling with is why do smart, talented, hard-working, ethical people – lawyers – make such a mess out of management? 

One of the answers is found in one of the best reads on . . . [more]