On February 9, 2010, David Cruickshank spoke at UWO Law on “The Business of Law: Hot Topics and Emerging Trends in the Legal Profession.” Cruickshank is a partner at Kerma Partners in New York City, and provides professional advice to law firms and other services.
My notes from his talk follow. . . . [more]
Here’s a selection from the last week or so of tweets that I and others think might interest those who don’t use Twitter or who don’t follow the authors of these tweets. (Apologies for having lost a week somewhere.)
The source is shown by the @xxxx at the end of the retweet. If none appears, it’s because I’m the source.
If you are on Twitter and read or publish something that you think we should re-broadcast here, simply include the hash tag #slawca in the tweet or retweet. If you’ve published something on Slaw, there’s no need to use that . . . [more]
Out-law.com reports a recent decision of the Court of Appeal for England and Wales, R. v. Sheppard and Whittle, upholding a conviction for publishing hate literature though the material was stored on servers in California.
The connecting factor was that a “substantial measure of the activities” of the accused took place in England.
This is consistent with the Canadian decision in Citron v Zundel (Canada Human Rights Commission), where the material was also on a California server.
The English (and Welsh) Court held that the material could be held to be published without evidence that anyone actually read it. . . . [more]
We haven’t heard much on Slaw about the legal situation with LawBuzz yet.
It’s been covered by the Law Times, Precedent, PRWeb, and Michael Geist, so I won’t go into the details of the case. A blog established by unknown authors (I asked) has also been set up dedicated to the suit. Some potentially defamatory posts were made about AdviceScene, resulting in litigation that has again raised some serious questions about online comment.
I was first exposed to the site in my first year of law school, when a member of our Student Legal Society . . . [more]
Well, there are a number of important issues coming to the surface as the Olympics open. Created by Canadians for Canadians, these issues are not Olympics-related, but are Olympics-occasioned.
And probably others I have missed… . . . [more]
What shall we name the baby?
Put aside the fact that relatively few names work for boys but anything at all seems to go for girls nowadays, there are the matters of nicknames, faux pas with initials, unfortunate translations . . . and then rhyming.
Laura Wattenberg does a riff on rhyming on the Baby Name Wizard site, starting with the fuss that gets made of the fact that nothing rhymes with “orange.” What, she asks sensibly, rhymes with “purple”?
What’s it got to do with names? Well, she asks us to compare two names, Kayden and Faith. Although Faith . . . [more]
As today is the opening of Vancouver Olympic Games, I thought we could celebrate in the Slaw way, which is by looking at the legal aspects of the event. In looking at the Olympics there has been no small amount of legislative activity both Federally and in B.C. regarding the games. I’m not going to get into the court activity in this post.
Federal
The IOC is always extremely vigilant in protecting their trademarks and in Canada an act has been passed to guarantee that:
The Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act, S.C. 2007, c.25
There is the small . . . [more]
Most of us today are blithely heading for our own personal data disasters. We generate and store vast volumes of information, but few of us really look after it.
So says the New Scientist. And then there’s the matter of professional data. Ever since solicitors invented deed boxes and tying docs up in pink ribbon — £31.08 for 109 yards — lawyers have fretted over the safe storage of information. Now that much of what’s important isn’t amenable to loops of ribbon or even file folders, old practices alone are no longer adequate.
The New Scientist piece introduces two . . . [more]
I dislike waiting. Someone doing a word association test would never blurt my name as a response if the word “patience” was provided. Lucky for me, tomorrow ends the wait for the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Tercon Contractors Ltd. v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of the Province of British Columbia by her Ministry of Transportation and Highways.
There is a considerable amount of commentary about Tercon available from a wide variety of sources on the web:
In the U.S. there’s a League of Technical Voters the aim of which is to motivate and assist “technical experts to improve lawmaking and governmental process.” Citability.org, a project supported by that league and other organizations, is tackling one small part of the lawmaking-improvement process by urging “advanced permalinks” on American legislatures. Their complaints about the situation outside commercial databases are familiar:
We’re used to seeing law firms breaking new ground in deploying technologies for marketing purposes, but I hadn’t seen a law firm sponsoring a television channel – and one devoted to matters legal.
What’s even more remarkable is where it’s coming from. Not some US powerhouse, or a tech-savvy firm in rural Canada.
No this news comes from Bucharest, (which as Simon reminded us Romania outranks Canada in its electronic infrastructure), where Juridic TV, the first television channel dedicated to public legal information, was launched online on February 8 and will broadcast an around-the-clock daily programme. . . . [more]
Three cases that are making their way through the Ontario court system have a few things in common: they’re all recent, all under the Class Proceedings Act, they’re all significant claims and they all name prominent Toronto law firms as defendants. . . . [more]
This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada | Ce projet a été rendu possible en partie grâce au gouvernement du Canada