It’s that time of year again! The 2009 Canadian Law Blog Awards (CLawBies) is now open for nominations. Categories will resemble last year’s when the nominations were first opened up to the adoring Canadian law blog audience. From the blog:

How to Nominate in 2009:

Between now and Monday December 28th, publicly nominate a Canadian authored legal blog using ANY of the following methods:

1. Tweet your endorsement on Twitter.com along with the hashtag text: #clawbies2009. We’ll be monitoring!
2. Email your favourite blog, along with a sample post or two, or any other notable highlights to Steve Matthews at steve@stemlegal.com

Another (hopefully) welcome diversion for all those toiling in the legal field. Head over to Precedent Magazine to read my latest story. Gearing up for the Games covers my efforts to design the perfect Vancouver 2010 get-away for the upcoming Olympic Winter Games without re-mortgaging my home. . . . [more]

The Cross-Border Biotech Blog had a very blawg-y week this week with three posts on legal issues affecting the biotech world, thanks in part to my lovely and talented legal writer/spouse/editor/CMO Audrey Fried-Grushcow.

I kicked things off with a post on three need-to-know Canadian patent decisions that impact pharma, biotech and generics companies, pulling together three Ogilvy Renault bulletins into one executive-summary-level overview of key recent developments.

Audrey picked up the legal theme with a post noting oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court for a case under the False Claims Act (FCA) in which amici curiae PhRMA and . . . [more]

Simon Fodden’s recent tweet about Wikipedia deserves some greater scrutiny. The linked paper discusses how and when Wikipedia should be used in court, some of the controversies attached to it, and even citation guidelines.

The most recent controversy around Wikipedia, and there are plenty to come I’m sure, surrounds Ron Livingston, an actor in Office Space who starred briefly in Sex in the City. Well it’s Livingston’s sex, or rather his sexual orientation, that is at the center of a current dispute with Wikipedia.

Livingston married Rosmarie DeWitt last month, and yet his Wikipedia entry has been repeatedly . . . [more]

Google is always releasing new features or apps. Here’s a rundown of some released recently that may have relevance for lawyers…

Personalized Search for everyone

googleblog.blogspot.com… – Permalink – Similar

Google’s website/wiki building application now provides users with a range of templates that take most of the fuss out of formatting a website — at least, if you have a fairly specific purpose in mind. The basic “web page” template, though, offers users a lot of easy-to-customize features. Lawyers may find the intranet template useful. The barrier to publishing on the web keeps dropping; now there’s no excuse.

New site . . . [more]

Herewith a second week’s-worth of material found on Twitter that might be of some interest to our readers. The bit.ly URL will take you to the web page that the tweet mentions.

Please join in this retweeting exercise. Simply attach the hashtag #slawca to any tweet of yours or any retweet you make; and I’ll consider your contributions for inclusion in that week’s post.

• @NinjaLawyer If software programmers use pair-programming to generate cleaner code, should junior lawyers use pair-drafting? – by @conniecrosby
• @practicehacker Why stop at pair-drafting? I say crowdsource all drafting needs. People are not reliable but concept should

Even now, Litigation Support is a rather nebulous field. I know people with IT, law clerk, lawyer, training and records management backgrounds in jobs with the title of “litigation support” or “eDiscovery” something-or-other; but their fundamental core skills are obviously very different. This, along with a lack of key job descriptions, has caused some problems for the still young eDiscovery industry. How can you find the right person for the job when “Proficient in Concordance” can mean anything from knowing how to enter data to being able to write CPLs (Concordance’s proprietary programming language)? Is a Litigation Support Specialist someone . . . [more]

While some lawyers are very tuned into social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, many have yet to realize the communications potential of these tools. The newest issue of LawPRO Magazine aims to change this.

Here’s a sample of the topics covered:

• Social Media: Why? An overview of how social media are changing the legal landscape;
• Social Media: What? A guide through the many social media available PLUS inteviews with five lawyers who walk the social media talk;
• Social Media: How? A primer on social media as marketing and networking tools in law practice; and
• Social media pitfalls to

Another story from the U.K. today.

The British High Court ordered the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to reveal the information of an editor who made two entries on Wikipedia that would reveal private and confidential information about a woman and her child. The identity of the editor is allegedly a co-worker the woman is in a dispute with.

Justice Michael Tugendhat indicated the woman had good reason to believe she was being blackmailed. . . . [more]

I’ve joked previously that the Google crowdsource traffic feature was a free ambulance chaser application.

A British firm has developed a iPhone application specifically intended to document all the details necessary for future litigation, the iPhone Car Incident Assistant application (iCIA). The Times Online reports:

It appears ambulance chasing has gone digital after Bott & Company, a law firm in Manchester that specialises in personal injury claims, has developed an application for the iPhone that prompts people involved in an accident to record insurance and witness details, take multiple photographs, store GPS information and click through to a

A meditation of sorts, today, on forgetting, re-membering, progress, civilization and all the small stuff like that. But fear not: I won’t be blathering on about these imponderables: I’ll do my best to let you consider them.

The material on which to meditate is a hoard of art work — at least, that’s how we might see it now — produced by what has come to be known as Old Europe. Around seven thousand years ago, in an area about the Danube River, groups of people settled, lived, worked, played and made artefacts for something like a millennium and a . . . [more]

I don’t know how long this has been going on, but some courts are sending judgments to CanLII with hyperlinked tables of contents. Plain old text TOCs are nothing new, of course: long — long, long. . . — judgments pretty much demand them. But courts seem to have discovered that, because they create and submit their judgments to CanLII in MS Word format, it’s fairly easy to construct a hyperlinked table of contents.

A search for [table of contents] turns up recent “hot” TOCs from Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, and Ontario.

This is, of course, . . . [more]