This article is about batteries that you can use to provide backup power for your laptop. The emphasis is on the two external batteries that I haved actually used: the Tekkeon myPower ALL MP 3450 and the Duracell/Xantrex XPower Powersource Mobile 100.

The bottom line? I bought one of each. The Tekkeon was better designed for the specific purpose of use with a laptop, as I’ll explain below. The Xantrex, however, was a battery that could more conveniently be used as a power supply for a variety of devices.

In the Fall of 2009, I bought a Dell Mini . . . [more]

We are all undergoing training at my place of work on the newest versions of word processing and e-mail programs. At a session today, talk got around to the the need to be careful about the “metadata” that is created whenever we create and change a document.

It so happens that the American Bar Association website has recently updated its list of professional ethics opinions from around the United States concerning the handling of metadata:

(…) the term refers to the embedded stratum of data in electronics file that may include such information as who authored a document, when

. . . [more]

I recently pointed to an Ontario study showing that up to a third of residents face legal problems, and the majority of those problems are in family law. The study also looked to Internet resources as part of the solution for self-represented litigants who cannot afford counsel.

There’s a new show being launched featuring a sitting Ontario Family Court judge called Family Matters with Harvey Brownstone. Justice Brownstone is well known in Canada for his public speaking, which includes almost every law school in the country, and his book on family law, Tug-of-War.

With the new show he’s . . . [more]

or why some people suggest there was an even better reason for Sidney Carton meeting the fate he met.

 2010 ONCA 230 and 2010 ONCA 400. 

There are court proceedings whose existence is explicable (to me) only on the assumption that the client found a lawyer who would represent the client for a fee that the client was prepared to pay and the lawyer prepared to accept. 

It’s my view – I know others disagree – that in this country lawyers who practice civil litigation are not ethically required to accept a brief just because it’s in their area . . . [more]

Bill C-32, introduced today into the Canadian House of Commons, is being called the Copyright Modernization Act. The government has set up a site called Balanced Copyright. On the site are fact sheets, FAQs, a news release and a backgrounder. A copy of the bill at first reading was posted later in the day on the Parliament of Canada site. . . . [more]

Circle September 22 and 23, 2010 on your calendar to attend the inaugural Canadian Forum on Court Technology at the Brookstreet Hotel in Ottawa.

This post comes from the Practice Tip column in the most recent issue of LAWPRO Magazine (which will hit the desks of Ontario lawyers in a few weeks). A hat tip to LAWPRO claims counsel Pauline Sheps for suggesting this great tip – unfortunately it is a malpractice claim scenario she sees all too often.

Many wills include one or more bequests to charitable or religious institutions. In spite of the testator’s good intentions, these bequests often lead to claims when there is confusion over which institution was to receive the bequest. These mistakes often come to light only when . . . [more]

I’ve talked on Slaw before about IBM’s Many Eyes, the project from their research lab that lets you upload data and turn it into visualizations of various kinds. Now they’ve developed a version called Many Bills, a way of searching through the bills presented to the U.S. Congress (during 2009) to find and present topics buried within these lengthy documents.

A search for [copyright] for example yields 61 bills and 106 sections within them that touch on copyright. Each bill is presented as a narrow stripe (50 to a very wide page, in this case), with the sections . . . [more]

HeinOnline is now offering an add-on subscription for archival Canadian and Australian legislation with the following scope:

Acts of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1901-2008

Acts of the Parliament of Canada, 1792-2007

We are in the process of subscribing so I have not been able to test the feature of being able to search across the full text of all Acts or to narrow the search to a specific year or just the Tables or Tables of Contents. Presumably it is also browsable.

With this content, and with the likely future content of other Canadian legislative material being . . . [more]

The new copyright bill is expected today. There has been much anticipation about what it might contain. That is understandable given that several failed and controversial attempts have been made to pass a reform bill over the last few years. And that there were extensive hearings around the prior bill last summer that attracted a significant amount of commentary. And that digital media is considered by many (e.g. the Canada 3.0 initiative) to be a crucial part of the economic future of Canada.

The anti-spam and privacy bills introduced last week are important bills that have effect on business and . . . [more]

This is my first column for Slaw, and I have been trying to decide where to begin. I’d like to tell you a bit about the story of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, but also want to share some of our resources and projects. Since Simon has promised that there will be more columns to follow, I‘ll keep this one focused on just one of our online resources — the Inventory of Reforms.

First though, a bit about the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice. The Forum was created in 1998 to foster knowledge and understanding of civil . . . [more]

Last weekend I finally got down to perusing David Wotherspoon and Alex Cameron’s Electronic Evidence and E-Discovery, recently published by LexisNexis. It looks like a great book, but thanks to David and Alex I’m just writing to pass on some useful case citations that deal with the extent to which a court will examine the reasonableness of a record retention rule.

First, in Ontario v. Johnson Controls Ltd., 2002 CanLII 14053 (ON S.C.), Cameron J. of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said:

There is no evidence of any document retention or destruction policy. A policy with

. . . [more]