These days, service levels are an integral part of outsourcing relationships. Reflecting the principle that “What gets measured, gets managed.” , the parties to an outsourcing relationship will establish specific metrics to be achieved by the supplier in performing services under the agreement, e.g. 99.99% server uptime in an infrastructure outsourcing or a call abandonment rate of less than 6% for help desk services. The service levels will be linked to penalties for failure to perform and termination rights in the event of consistent under-achievement. Suppliers may not love the idea of committing to service levels, but they recognize the . . . [more]

French laws against the niqab -- and against cross-dressing.

I thought for my first post on the shiny new Slaw format, I should talk about a shiny new object. Over a million iPads have been sold so far. Many comments about the iPad can be found on Slaw, including my thoughts that the iPad will be the disruptive tipping point that will define the category. This kind of device will fundamentally change how we consume information.

Several competing products are expected to be on the market within the next few months, some of which will address some of the iPad’s missing features. Of course, fans will say that the . . . [more]

Water law issues, public trust doctrine, virtual water, Maude Barlow, environmental issues, water use and management in Canada: Ted Tjaden

Love hurts. Never has that expression been truer than in the misguided Kafkaesque labyrinth that forms the core of Canada’s domestic violence courts. Domestic violence charges are in a pitched battle with impaired driving cases to see who can destroy the crumbling foundation of our nation’s criminal courts first. They form a massively disproportionate percentage of the court’s daily caseload to the point where many courthouses have had to set aside an entire day each week just to deal with the volume of administrative set-date appearances. Only a small fraction of these domestic abuse cases involve repeat offenders, personal injury, . . . [more]

The Smarter Legal Model – More from Less
by Trevor Faure
published by Practical Law Company, 2010
price: £250

“Insight into how General Counsel reconfigured an in-house legal department simultaneously increasing legal coverage, lowering costs, while managing headcount”.

Trevor Faure is General Counsel for Ernst & Young Global Ltd. From relatively humble beginnings he has forged a hugely impressive legal career, beginning as a London-based barrister at one of the top commercial law chambers, leading to positions as in-house senior counsel with Apple, serving as a Legal Director with Dell and then as VP and General Counsel with Tyco . . . [more]

This week’s issue of The Lawyers Weekly (vol 30., no. 3, May 21/10) has an article on the first page crowing about the successful dismissal, under Quebec legislation, of an action found to be a SLAPP (a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) action. The article continues on p.3 under the caption “Decision will ‘no doubt discourage’ abusive suits and SLAPPs.”

I’m going to put aside (what is to me the obvious) conflict between anti-SLAPP legislation and the “not plain and obvious that the action must fail” threshold which, in substance, is all that is needed on the merits issue for . . . [more]

Came across a cool Twitter app I didn’t know about yesterday: Twapper Keeper. Twapper Keeper lets you create an archive based upon hashtag, keyword, or person. All the relevant tweets are gathered in one place, and they can be exported and downloaded. The Twapper Keeper interface is easier to use than Google and this app gives you a great way to archive tweets from a conference, archive trending hashtags or keywords for historical or analysis purposes, or just for saving your own personal tweets. There are only 7500 Twapper Keeper archives now, but I am sure this number will grow. . . . [more]

Tarantino and Chodirker front Heenan's media group for this effort.

The relationship of legal information to context is a key dimension of recent developments in legal informatics scholarship and innovation. These developments range from investigations in law and psychology to political and moral theory, from explorations in artificial intelligence and law to legal information theory, and from research on the legal Semantic Web to the creation of new applications that help nonlawyers contextualize legal information.

Professor Guido Boella, Dr. Guido Governatori, and colleagues are exploring ways to model legal contexts to aid automated legal reasoning. In their recent paper these scholars show how defeasible logic can be employed . . . [more]

This week in biotech, everyone was taking up a challenge.

• Grand Challenges Canada was launched this week to spend $225 million of the Canadian government’s money on 5 “grand challenges” over a 5-year period. The first task — a grand challenge indeed — is to create a new class of point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. Along with the X-Prize’s ventures into healthcare, we are seeing an interesting experiment in the ability of prizes to drive innovation.
• In a sign of progress being made globally against basic health challenges, this week with fewer children are dying as malnutrition, HIV and TB all

. . . [more]

This is a bit of a global pot-pourri drawn from what I’ve been reading from elsewhere.

Access to Justice in Australia
Another Thomson/West acquisition – this time a Brazilian publisher was acquired
Harvard Law Library joins the Chesapeake Project
The Guardian picks up on Rob Martin’s hyperbolic rant against Canadian Legal Education
An English law firm outsources all of its non-billable activities, including its law library, IT and knowledge management.

. . . [more]