Each year at this time, the Toronto office of Blakes sends out a challenge to other Bay Street firms to organize food drives/fundraising on behalf of the Daily Bread Food Bank. Last year’s challenge raised an incredible $271,645. Can the firms do even better this year? Who will get bragging rights for the most food and dollars raised?

The law firm challenge runs Monday, November 23 to Friday, December 11.

From the Blakes memo that went to firms:

Daily Bread supplies 13 million pounds of emergency food. Last year, there was over 1 million food bank

I gained lots of insight from Day 1 at the LawTech Canada conference earlier this week.

Deloitte, one of the sponsors, had two good sessions on enterprise content management and on preventing information leakage. On the topic of enterprise content management, I realized that my paper on “The 7 Faces of Legal Knowledge Management” (here in PDF) was, in part, discussing enterprise content management without using that phrase (to the extent that most knowledge managers in the legal environment manage a wide variety of information across the organization).

There are, however, I think 2 main reasons knowledge managers . . . [more]

Ian Blue, a partner at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, has issued a challenge to the constitutionality of legislation that forbids importation of liquor into a province unless it is sold to the local liquor board or commission. The legislation is, curiously, federal, as we noted in a post last September.

Section 3(1) of the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act (IILA), passed in 1928, forbids the interprovincial movement of alcohol (and, presumably, other “intoxicating liquors”) except as part of a transaction involving a provincial agency. Yet, Blue argues, this provision is at odds with s.121 of the Constitution Act, . . . [more]

Steve just posted about the Kindle coming to Canada – certainly a noteworthy and overdue event. (I’m going to hold out for something that displays colour.)

Some other noteworthy things from the last few days (at least for those of us in the tech/legal/privacy world) include:

Ontario Privacy Commissioner report on the Smart Grid and privacy

Federal privacy Commissioner reports critical of Fintrac and the No Fly list

A new socialnomics video about the ROI of social media.

Twitterfeeds from two Canadian law tech conferences that gave a good flavour of the speaker messages.

Court rulings in the Apple . . . [more]

It’s the 6-inch International version (not the DX), so we still can claim to be capital of the digital third world. But my new Kindle was just ordered via Amazon.com (not .ca) and shipped to north of the border! ($311.06 USD, yes we’re getting hosed! see photo below)

The news stories are already across the Canadian media, but to cite a few: Gillian Shaw, National Post, Reuters

Full credit for the lovely photo below to Engadget.

. . . [more]

As Connie pointed out this is a week for legal technology focused discussions – both Ted Tjaden and I spoke at one of the Toronto conferences this week, though attendance was light in comparison to the record crowds at the Pacific Legal Technology conference, LegalIT and the Legal Futures conference of the College of Law Practice Management.

ALM are sponsoring Virtual LegalTech, a virtual trade show covering legal technology, which will take place Thursday. It features live webcasts and seminars, virtual trade booths, online networking, chatting, blogs, and more. “It’s everything you’d expect from a live conference, brought right . . . [more]

An announcement early today from Google Distinguished Engineer Anurag Acharya that Google Scholar now features major cases, as well as an ability to search in legal periodicals for case citations.

I thought initially it was just American, but searching on the following names brought interesting results:

Donoghue v. Stevenson 2380 hits
R. Drybones 849 hits
Delgamuukw 956 hits
Mabo v. Queensland 2770 hits

Google hat-tips “several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), . . . [more]

Two conferences have been taking place in Toronto simultaneously this week: Law Tech Canada (Insight) and Law Firm Leadership Conference (CBA). Some impressive leaders have been speaking at both conferences. I hope some write-ups will emerge soon here on Slaw. In the meantime, those of us not in attendance can follow some of the discussion via Twitter:

Law Tech Canada #lawtech

Law Firm Leadership Conference #lflc . . . [more]

I was taken by the story in today’s Globe and Mail about
“the new face of Canada’s Sikhs”. The story’s hook is that a young slate of candidates has been successful in an election to manage one of North America’s largest Sikh temples, one where there has been significant and violent tensions over the years between moderates and traditionalists. The Globe’s front page had a wonderful picture of a seated line of older, bearded, turbaned Sikh men, among whom sits Gursimran Kaur, a 19 year old woman who ran successfully on the youth slate. . . . [more]

Are you a librarian/archivist who also happens to be a Grateful Dead fan? Your dream job awaits.

The University of California in Santa Cruz is looking for an archivist to maintain the band’s archive (consisting of fan letters, photos, tour schedules, posters, recordings, and personal correspondence). The position is an academic appointment, it offers a salary of up to $68, 892, and it becomes available March 2010.

More information on this opportunity:

• Job posting
• The Grateful Dead Archive, University Library – Special Collections & Archives, University of California in Santa Cruz
• National Post article “Like, hey man, no running in

Take the newest search engine on the block for a spin. Launched today, Factery is not your father’s search engine: it doesn’t just throw up a raft of links. Instead it searches through a set of links to extract facts relevant to your query from the pages the links point to. At the moment, which is the alpha, experimental moment, Factery is pointed at those links that appear in Twitter and Yahoo Boss search results.

This is the kind of value added search functionality promised by semantic search engines — those that aim to understand syntax enough to recognize, in . . . [more]

A lot of lawyers and consultants out there have built profiles and reputations as “innovators” by promoting alternative billing as the answer to much of what ails the legal profession. I’m confused about what is so ground breaking.

Everyone seems to love to hate hourly billing these days. People argue that hourly billing values quantity over quality and repetition over creativity. Perhaps. But it also endures for good reason. It is simple to administer and easy to understand. Further, the marketplace corrects pricing irregularities and rewards efficiency. A law firm which can provide quality and creative solutions at a more . . . [more]