Date: Friday, May 14, 2010
Time: 8:30 am to 1:30 pm

I am excited to be able to participate in this year’s CBA BC Branch Women Lawyers Forum Education Day event. Along with Elizabeth Watson and Stacey Handley, I will participate on a leadership panel which will be led by Marion McAdam of Fourth Wall Project Management & Consulting. Marion has worked extensively with women who are leaders already or who are aspiring to become one within their own context. In conjunction with this, she has also done a considerable amount of research on emerging and changing trends in . . . [more]

This week saw the release of Canada’s 2010 federal budget. Maybe next year, I’ll see if blogging qualifies me to join the lock-up; but for 2010 I stuck to web-based review and analysis:

• The budget was fairly popular among the science and innovation crowd — though reaction to the budget followed faithfully the degree to which each constituency’s requests were funded.
• The full list of relevant line items is here; but this post is a good starting point to focus on the top budget items for biotech and other knowledge-based industries, including an increase in basic research

This year’s Legal IT conference, Legal IT 4.0, is scheduled for April 26 and 27th. Each year the conference looks at information technology and its impact on the law. I was fortunate to attend last year’s conference, and found the audience and presenters to be a stimulating mix of thought leaders and those new to many of the concepts.

The program has largely been set, and the 50-plus speaker roster is being finalized. The subject areas being covered:

Day 1:

• Cyber crime
• IT in courtrooms
• Tech Showcase – written communications
• e-Discovery
• Early adopters
• Tech Showcase – research and

Watching Canada win gold in men’s hockey and landing our nation the Olympic record for most gold medals won by any country in winter sports was an unforgettable experience. The national celebration and the pride and the joy we are all experiencing at being Canadian is something to savor.

“Own the Podium” – never liked it. Seemed so un-Canadian, so boastful, so competitive, and yet… how effective. As a brand “Own the Podium” named the dream and captured the aspirations of our athletes and fans.

As we return to life as usual what else can we take from these games? . . . [more]

I thought I’d draw Slawyers’ attention to a new student-run blog on international law, Legal Frontiers, run by law students at McGill University (my own alma mater). The site officially launched in January, and the content so far looks very interesting. Check it out and post a comment. . . . [more]

There may be stars in your eyes, soon. Google has introduced a search facility that lets you star certain search results, in effect marking them as “faves” the way that Google Reader does. Then those items will show up in a special box at the top of your searches — whenever they’re relevant, of course.

The Official Google Blog uses the example of having “starred” your favourite football teams’ websites. A subsequent search for “nfl,” for example, will bring these up in the star box.

In my view, the idea has merit as a substitute for bookmarks in certain contexts. . . . [more]

As many of our readers surely know, Google has been reassessing whether to continue its operations in China following a series of hacking incidents that allegedly originated from that country.

Prof. Ronald Deibert of UofT revealed today that the hackers also attempted to access Google directories, which was not widely reported when the story first broke. Deibert is one of the experts Google is consulting with on how to respond to the incidents.

Despite the The Investigative Powers of the 21st Century Act (IP21C) that was tabled before the prorogue, Deibert claims that cyberspace generally operates in a policy vacuum . . . [more]

Lawyer, Slawyer, and newspaper columnist David Canton has teamed up with rtraction, an Ontario IT company, to produce PolicyTool. The notion is that businesses need policies in place to govern a variety of employee practices but can’t always afford the services of a lawyer to devise them; PolicyTool invites you to answer a number of questions and feeds the answers into well-drafted “boilerplate,” resulting in a “comprehensive and informed framework for your legal counsel to quickly create a binding policy.” PolicyTool does the initial drafting; and a lawyer engaged by the user will tweak and approve.

At the . . . [more]

And how are we feeling today?

A feeling might be the most private thing — experience — we have. It seems to happen deeper inside us than our heady thoughts. But very very often, what inside will out. And nowadays that outing of our feelings takes place on the internet, thanks to the facilities of Twitter, Facebook, Buzz and all the usual suspects.

What if someone collected all of those expressions of emotion and made them available to the curious? If someone did that it would look like We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. These guys build . . . [more]

Every now and then it is “improving,” as the Victorians used to say, for a lawyer to be caught up in the toils of another profession, in order to recapture the client experience of uncertainty in the face of an opaque problem. I’ve had the fortune, recently — I wouldn’t label it “good” — to be in that situation and it has occurred to me, not for the first time, that there is a way to make the experience better for the lay person, a way that is all too seldom taken. My small suggestion is that professionals who deal . . . [more]

Last night UWO Law hosted a presentation by law and undergraduate students of the trial scene from Merchant of Venice. Following the play, an appeal was heard to the Western Law Moot Court, featuring an all-star line-up.

Shylock’s sentence was appealed by Earl Cherniak, QC, and the Attorney General of Ontario Chris Bentley represented Antonio.

The bench in the appeal consisted of Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada, Justice Eileen Gillese of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, Antoni Cimolino, General Director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Professor James Purkis from the Department of . . . [more]

Oh, all right: I’m only sidling up to the matter of predicting the technology/internet future, a venture that would have foxed even the greatest classical soothsayers, surely. The current augur of the moment is Google Vice President of Global Ad Operations, John Herlihy, who, according to SiliconRepublic.com, told a conference recently that “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.”

As of 9.30 GMT this morning, this was the top Twitter trending topic in the UK, according to The Independent. (Fortunately or not, it’s since been . . . [more]