A “Round 2” edition of biotech highlights:

• Round 1 of this week’s IPOs (yep, that’s IPO with an “s”, as in more than one) was a draw, with shares of Cumberland ending flat on the day; but Round 2 — Emdeon’s offering the next day — was a knock-out, leading some (ok, me) to suggest the markets may be opening up to the idea of biopharma offerings.
• Round 2 of Amgen’s study showed that genetic differences really do correlate with response to their medicine — Vectibix — in the treatment of colorectal cancer. Score this one for personalized medicine

One of the quotes I go back to often is a quote from a 1945 paper by the economist Hayek where he says:

The economic problem of society … is not merely a problem of how to allocate ‘given’ resources – if ‘given’ is taken to mean given to a single mind … It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society … a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. (Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society

Simon has drawn our attention to Peter Schwartz’s comments on the “Reinvention of Legal Research” that appear in the Huffington Post. The premise of the post appears to be that legal publishers are suffering because they are no longer able to impose “per-minute and per-use pricing structures” which allowed publishers to use law firms as information wholesalers. According to Schwartz, this pricing model facilitated cost recovery by law firms who passed these charges through to their clients.

The flaw in this argument, in Canada at least, is that it has been more than a decade since flat rate pricing models . . . [more]

The Law Commission of Ontario (LCO/CDO) has an ongoing project on the possible reform of the law of crossborder litigation, particularly the matter of judicial jurisdiction. A consultation paper has been prepared by Professor Janet Walker, a scholar in residence with the LCO/CDO, and comments were invited from members of the profession.

The Ontario Bar Association submitted its response to the consultation paper this spring, and has made its work available online in PDF. . . . [more]

Congratulations to Slaw and The Court founder Simon Fodden for being featured in the article “The Paperless Chase” by Emily White in the July/August 2009 edition of National, the Canadian Bar Association magazine (see pages 38 & 39). Simon talks at length about Slaw, law blogging, and technological change.

In the article, Simon explains:

I think there are a good many lawyers who would like to write much more than they do…Of course, they write memos and opinions, but I think they’d like to expand on a topic. And blogs give them that opportunity to do that.

White also . . . [more]

Michael Carabash, a recent Osgoode graduate who has set up with his own practice and marketing services, just released a free online book for legal marketing.

I’ve been sharing some ideas with him and Garry Wise recently, and there are a couple of projects in works that may be interesting.

Although Carabash’s book covers what many of us would consider the basics, there are still lots of lawyers coming up speed. The U.K. government is paying £160,000 a year for these specialty services.

You can get the book for free here. . . . [more]

The excellent Stéphane Cottin has launched a collaborative bibliography on researching French legal information, using Zotero as the collaborative tool. The project is described in an associated website (in French); and the bibliography can be found at the Zotero Groups site Recherche doc juridique. At present there are over 300 entries in the bibliography/library.

Stéphane was until recently Chef de service du Greffe-Informatique et de service Bibliothèque – Documentation at the Conseil constitutionnel, France’s high constitutional council whose principal duty is to rule on the constitutionality of proposed legislation. He is currently working in the Prime Minister’s office, . . . [more]

Every now and then you may wish to use a feature in your browser to check out which of the sites you visit have set cookies on you machine — those tiny morsels of text that get sent back and forth between your browser and the machine serving up web pages so that your site-specific preferences are known and respected. They are by and large benign, but, given that they track some of your progress through the web, they can be used to inform advertisers of your interests. And, because cookies can carry personal information, they represent a privacy risk, . . . [more]

Slate has an excellent article up on the opening of micro-blogging standards. The piece is titled To Live, Twitter Must Die, but the content isn’t nearly so sensational.

I really like the message here. There are dangers anytime we put too much faith in a single company, and expect them to police the balance between their own business interests surrounding a proprietary technology, and the greater access to that web technology. Especially when we grow to depend on it. This article references Twitter’s dominance with micro-blogging, but it could have easily been Google’s relationship to internet search.

I also . . . [more]

The August 2009 issue of Law Practice Today, the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s webzine was just published.

Read the Law Practice Today “Wellness and Balance” issue here.

All sort of great articles on how you can find balance and wellness in our very busy world, including:

• Achieving Life/Work Balance Through Effective Time Management by Kathleen Brady
• How to Take a Vacation from Your Law Practice by Sheila M. Blackford
• A Lawyer’s Tale: Recovering from Depression by Keith Anderson
• Job Satisfaction: Little Things Lawyers Can Do to Make a Big Difference by Dan Millman
• Putting Up With Nothing—How To Do

One of the most important figures in popular music died this week, and I’m going to join the crowd eulogizing him. I’m talking about Lester Polsfuss, orse. Polfuss, a.k.a. Red Hot Red, Rhubarb Red — and Les Paul.

Les Paul, along with Leo Fender and Adolph Rickenbacher, was one of the inventors of the solid body electric guitar — that’s a recent version of Gibson’s Les Paul Standard model you see to your left — the idea being that hollow body electric guitars could be played only so loud because of feedback from the body’s resonance. And though he . . . [more]

One doesn’t normally expect a Blog quite as focused as the Huffington Post to spend much time on the legal publishing industry but Peter Schwartz’s post on the Reinvention of Legal Research is worth a bit of attention.

A couple of extracts:

When online legal research platforms were proprietary, online publishers imposed per-minute and per-use pricing structures. This pricing model facilitated client cost-recovery and allowed publishers to use law firms as information wholesalers. Because information is now a commodity, law firm clients will no longer pay for online legal research. New flat-rate pricing models for online research products reflect this