The Amendments

I recently had an opportunity to speak with a representative in the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta in connection with Alberta’s new obligations surrounding notification and disclosure of outsourcing arrangements involving personal information. On May 1^st, Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Amendment Act, 2009 amended the provincial Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). Now, while I’m not an Alberta lawyer, it’s clear to me that the amendments impact all organizations that collect personal information from residents of Alberta. I have worked from time to time with my firm’s Alberta office when PIPA privacy issues . . . [more]

This week in biotech, regulators ran amok.

On the plus side, the FDA approved two new drugs this past week, including one — prostate cancer drug Jevtana — months ahead of the FDA’s deadline.

The FDA also moved this week to regulate LDTs (laboratory developed tests) more closely. Most direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests fall into this category, and a series of letters from the FDA to DTC manufacturers last week is evolving into broader action.

Health Canada also took action this week, with the goal of soliciting reports of adverse drug reactions directly from patients. Unfortunately, the benefits . . . [more]

This is simply too good not to pass along.

The website ThinkGeek (“Smart Stuff for the Masses” — robots, zombie blood, all edges brownie pan, and more ejusdem generis) — got a 10-page Cease & Desist letter from the 475-lawyer firm, Faegre & Benson, on behalf of their clients, the U.S. National Pork Board (delightfully at pork.org). Seem ThinkGeek had made use of the phrase “the new white meat,” and the NPB took the view, through their lawyers, that this trespassed on their registered trademark, “The Other White Meat.”

The only catch? The page that the NPB . . . [more]

The new Google Scholar Blog announces that it’s now possible to get email alerts when material that matches your query is added to the index. Full instructions are given on the page linked to above; but here I’ll reprise a paragraph from that page, broken down into steps and using a search for a legally relevant matter as an example (i.e. with the “legal opinions and journals” option selected). Click on the green links to see a cropped screenshot of the results and the blue links to see the actual results in a new window.

1. To create an alert for

What makes a website a great experience from an end user’s perspective? This topic was recently discussed at a meeting of legal knowledge managers in Toronto where Kerri McKenna from imason and Heather Ritchie from McCarthy Tétrault shared some excellent tips and challenged some myths. Most of the tips are common sense, with the key to web usability being consistency – within the site itself and with web design standards and conventions.

One of the best tips is to maximize the use of white space between paragraphs and in the left and right margins which makes the site easier to . . . [more]

In an editorial in today’s Star, Roy Romanow and Tony Gagliano describe a new report (pdf) by the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) which suggests that Canadians have even less time than before, despite our efforts to create a society with more leisure time. Romanow is the Chair of the CIW Advisory Board and offers an introduction to the report.

They point to several key factors:

• technology allowing us to carry our work home
• client expectations for service at all hours
• suburban sprawl leading to longer commutes
• globalization and urbanization forces

These trends are likely to affect . . . [more]

Unfortunately for them, polar bears currently don’t have a vote in a jurisdiction that matters enough to anyone in power.

Jocelyn Stacey and Shaun Fluker (University of Calgary – Faculty of Law) have posted The Polar Bear is Not a Species at Risk in Canada (Contrary to what the Rest of the World Thinks): When is a Decision Not to List Unreasonable in Law? on SSRN.

 Here is the abstract:

There is general scientific and ethical consensus that the polar bear species is in peril and in need of protection if it is to avoid extinction. However Canada has

Rats, I missed Bloomsday, an event I like to note here on Slaw. It happened last Wednesday, which was June 16, the same date on which, in 1904, Leopold Bloom wandered through Dublin as Joyce’s Ulysses.

My Bloomsday offering to our readers is a Joycean oddity, by Lance Wakeling (whose Private Circulation is often good), Stately, plump Buck Mulligan. On this site you’ll find all of Ulysses serialized as it were . . . one . . . word . . . at . . . a . . . time. You click on a word and the next . . . [more]

Sympathy is not evidence upon which a jury may find in favour of a litigant.

After a two-week trial in a medical malpractice claim, the jury found cause-in-fact [factual causation] was established on the balance of probability. However, the trial judge ruled that there was no evidence whatsoever to support the finding. The judge dismissed the action.

Salter v. Hirst, 2010 ONSC 3440 (Ontario Superior Court) is a reminder to lawyers and litigants of the expensive consequences of not having the necessary evidence and of not asking the necessary questions, even if one has a tragic injury, a sympathetic . . . [more]

Canadian Lawyer magazine has the results of its June survey out.

The findings show that younger associates are making less hourly rates, especially in Western Canada, largely due to the recession. And areas such as real estate and wills are not proving as profitable for smaller firms. . . . [more]

I was reading an interesting article in the Lawyer’s Weekly today on the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Morelli, [2010] SCC 8. In his article, “Reforming Search & Seizure” (sadly, not available online), Professor Benjamin Goold makes the following comment that I tripped over while reading:

Although Justice Fish almost certainly went too far when he claimed that it is “difficult to imagine a search more intrusive, extensive or invasive of one’s privacy than the search and seizure of a personal computer,” the fact remains that such a search represents a serious infringement of an

I’m a member of the eLawyering Task Force of the American Bar Association. Our purpose is to promote practising law over the Internet. When I joined in 2004, we were a marginal group within the ABA. Things have changed. Our e-mail discussion group has over 120 members. We have had people attend our teleconferences from as far away as New Zealand. A member of the ABA Board of Governors attended our most recent meeting in Las Vegas. And in the past year, co-chief Richard Granat has been profiled as a “Legal Rebel” in a recent ABA Journal series . . . [more]