“. . . along came a spider and sat down beside her. . .” Which might give anyone pause, not only arachnophobes. These arthropods, which have two legs up on insects, don’t fuss me much — I was taught as a child never to harm a spider — something about bad luck — and so those that do cosy up to me usually get taken outside with some care. Even so, I can’t imagine doing what seventy people in Madagascar did not too long ago.

The intrepid Madagascarians (?) collected golden orb spiders (click to see – arachnophobe warning) . . . [more]

For many years now my firm, Adler Bytensky Prutschi, has enjoyed the opportunity to host a student placement for Osgoode Hall Law School’s Criminal Intensive Program (CIP). This week, for the first time in the history of our involvement with the program, we were informed that “due to low enrolment in the course this year” a student would not be assigned to us.

While I am only hypothesizing, I fear that this storied program’s current enrolment woes are tied directly to the continuing erosion of our legal aid system. Barely a decade ago when I was a student in . . . [more]

What is it about lawyers and librarians that we spend so much time thinking, talking and trying to change the way our professions are perceived? A search through the literature of both disciplines reveals what amounts to an obsession. I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised, given that “client-focused” is a key characteristic of both groups. We worry about how we are perceived because otherwise we run the risk of losing business. If we don’t articulate our value, we’re expendable. 

SLAWyer Jordan Furlong has taken on the task of articulating the value of the legal profession in his Law 21 . . . [more]

In a moment of boredom, or curiosity, I decided to play with Google’s “Wonder Wheel” gadget, which Google introduced in May 2009. Simon F mentioned it at the time. The gadget (feature?) is available by clicking on “show options” wherever that appears on one’s search screen.

On the basis of familiarity, if nothing more, I decided I’d run some searches based on my surname. “Smythe” spelled with a “y” isn’t that common.

In any event, the “standard view” search on “Cheifetz” lists my sister, Dr. Rona Cheifetz, first, and me second. I wouldn’t quibble about that ordering. It  . . . [more]

When Dominic Jaar became the CEO of the Canadian Centre for Court Technology, he immediately set out to constitute several “IntellAction” working groups. One of these groups had the mandate to promote the modernization of court web sites in Canada by way of producing guidelines on topic.

Dominic knew this was an area of strong interest to me, so he asked me to lead the group. We built the membership last September to include fair representation from the judiciary, lawyers in private and public sector practice, the Courts Administration Service, a few other areas and a journalist to represent . . . [more]

In legal documents it’s the job of print to deliver the message smoothly and then get out of the way as fast as possible. Lots of things go into making this possible, as any book or magazine publisher will tell you, including the choice of typeface, point size, space between lines (leading) and colour of paper. Yet, when it comes to the preparation of legal documents the profession seems to be willfully ignorant about what makes for persuasive print, favouring remnants of the typewriter age combined with bad aspects of word processing technology.

I want to focus now on only . . . [more]

A colleague was asking me recently about volunteer or work opportunities for lawyers abroad and I immediately thought of the work of the International Development Committee (IDC) of the Canadian Bar Association (I was fortunate to be on the committee for 6 years and participate in several missions to Africa). Most of their work is funded through the Canadian International Development Agency or other external funders (i.e., the cost of their overseas work does not come from CBA member dues) and is intended to support the rule of law in developing countries (among other things). Recent IDC projects have included . . . [more]

This might have been better as a comment responding to Omar’s post just prior to this one, in which he lamented the lack of a Canadian Citer, but since it involves Javascript, I was afraid it might not survive intact as a comment.

I know it’s not quite what Omar wanted — that’s way beyond my ability — but faute de mieux I’ve refreshed a tool I put together a couple of years ago: Javascript bookmarklets that search CanLII. As I’m sure most of you know, the idea behind a bookmarklet is to make these little patches of . . . [more]

Michael Lines previously mentioned Jureeka, the web browser extension that links to legal material online, which can only be used with Firefox and Chrome.

Cornell law has launched a similar extension called Citer, but allows integration with IE, Safari, and Opera as well.

Bonnie Shucha explains how it works,

With Citer, you select an area of text on a web site that contains the cite you would like to look up, click a button in the browser bookmark linkbar, and Citer will attempt to transfer you to a page containing the content.

Jureeka is a

And who wouldn’t — get it, that is — with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and AI prof Nigel Shadbolt advising? Data.gov.uk is HMGovernment’s open access data site, containing three thousand data sets. The public is invited to take the data, manipulate and mix it how they please, and let data.gov.uk know if they develop an interesting application as a result.

As they say on the front page:

We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data. These are our first steps in

I just listened to an IT.Can seminar where Frank Work spoke about the current privacy landscape from his perspective. Some of his thoughts:

We are awash in data that we can’t seem to turn into anything useful. For example, the data that was available on the attempted airplane bomber. Comments were made by the US government that they had intelligence about this individual. Frank’s point is that they really only had data – they were unable to turn it into intelligence.

He sees a trend for organizations to collect huge amounts of data, and try to turn it into intelligence . . . [more]

The United Nations’s Dag Hammarskjöld Library in New York has developed a new page with links to information on Haiti. It includes reports, statistics and other resources about the country.

As well, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and ReliefWeb continue to issue updated information on the Haiti Earthquake disaster.

The CBC site has information on how to help. . . . [more]