I’ve pushed a few of CanLII’s RSS feeds to Twitter, thinking that some folks might find it handy to learn when new judgments are available. Specifically, I’ve created Twitter accounts for announcements about new Court of Appeal judgments from British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. I’ll likely add accounts for other courts of appeal in due course. (I’ve checked with CanLII and they’re comfortable with this.)

I’ve gathered these under the rubric CanCourts and have put up a simple website explaining what I’ve done.

Please let me know if you experience any difficulties using these Twitter feeds. . . . [more]

Another year of interview insanity has come to an end and my firm, Adler Bytensky Prutschi, has happily matched with an outstanding candidate who we have very high hopes for in the 2010-2011 articling year. While this fact on its own is likely of little interest to Slaw readers, the technophile lawyers who follow this blog on a regular basis may be intrigued to hear how twitter – for the first time in our firm’s history – became unwittingly a very central part of our interview process.

Having started a legal twitter feed some months ago (www.twitter.com/prutschi), I . . . [more]

I like to look for patterns. Not for handicrafts like one of my knitting pals, but rather patterns in data.

I recently had the ~opportunity~ to look for patterns in lobbyist registrations. Unfortunately for me, there are almost as many registries as jurisdictions. The Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada is the federal government registry. It has an excellent database with great search functionality and many options for accessing this information:

* Recent Registrations
* Search the Registry of Lobbyists
* Search Monthly Communications Reports
* Statistical Reports
* Multimedia Tutorials
* Login
* Guides to registration . . . [more]

The Legal Resource Centre (LRC) recently launched a new blog: Blogosaurus Lex.

The LRC is the publisher of the magazine LawNow and of the legal information website Access to Justice Network.

It was registered as a charity in the late 1970s and its mandate is “to contribute to, advance and promote the legal knowledge and education of the people of Canada.” It is based in Edmonton, Alberta.

According to the initial post on June 22, 2009, the blog will feature:

• new happenings at the Legal Resource Centre (LRC)
• community engagement with other public legal educators and sharing

A while back I wondered about how “elderly tweets” would fare in discovery in an action. I was concerned that it might be difficult to exact the intended meaning from the brief blurt of yesterday. This concern was premised on the fact that no one (at least no one I know) deletes tweets, and so they stay lodged on Twitter’s server.

A recent article on ReadWriteWeb, “10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets,” by Sarah Perez, refers to the Twitter API Wiki’s Things Every Developer Should Know, where we learn that, indeed, “Twitter still maintains a database of . . . [more]

There has been lots of controversy over privacy issues relating to various services offered by Google and many others. Those issues are often not easy to come to grips with because they are in the context of previously unknown territory. Speaking of unknown territory, The Onion has a parody news report entitled “New Google Service Lets Privacy Critics Opt-Out, Relocate to Remote Village“. . . . [more]

I’m very pleased indeed to announce that Dan Michaluk has joined us at Slaw and will be contributing on a regular basis.

Dan is a Toronto lawyer who works at the management-side employment law boutique firm Hicks Morley. Dan is known at Hicks for taking a four-year surfing sojourn after his articles and says he’s given up trying to explain that he actually did do some meaningful work in business and technology in his years away from the practice. Back at Hicks since 2003, Dan now represents management in a wide-range of matters, but does a significant amount of work . . . [more]

The front page of today’s Globe and Mail sports a big photo of Ontario MPP Lisa MacLeod attached to the article “Can a busy female politician give reliable evidence? A judge says no” by Jane Taber. The lead paragraph runs as follows:

Lisa MacLeod is a young female politician who commutes to her job at Queen’s Park from Ottawa and leaves her husband, Joe, and four-year-old daughter, Victoria, at home. Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham of Ontario Superior Court said this is a big distraction for the 34-year-old woman and as a result he felt he could not accept

The Register reports that a California lawyer has written to the Chief Justice of that state to object to the state Supreme Court’s practice of passing lawyers’ briefs on to the commercial publishers, LexisNexis and Westlaw, who then sell access to them. It seems from Edmond Connor’s letter to the court that he is principally concerned about the profit-making aspect of the situation as a violation of copyright, rather than about the simple public availability of documents prepared for litigation.

At an earlier time all briefs filed with the California Supreme Court had been copied four times and placed in . . . [more]

Well, I can confirm that this past week conformed to my expectations for excitement, and not just because the Toronto garbage strike ended. In fact, confirmation was in the air:

• Most notably, the U.S. Senate confirmed three high-profile nominees: Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Francis Collins was confirmed as the director of NIH, and David Kappos was confirmed as the director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
• Two other U.S. developments confirmed the trend towards adoption of electronic medical records: 1) The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) was

According to CBC News and The Canadian Press, a newer type of email scam has taken advantage of a Toronto-based medical professional. The fraudster hacks into the person’s email account, changes the password so the person cannot access it, and then sends email to that person’s contacts. The fraudster, posing as the email address owner, claims to be stuck in a foreign city and needing financial assistance to get home. He or she asks for a modest sum, enough to purchase a plane ticket home, and has it transferred via a Western Union account. Out of 400 people contacted . . . [more]

The latest issue of LAWPRO Magazine – Changing Direction: Thinking Differently About Your Law Practice – is in the mail and on the web. Download entire magazine here (PDF format, size: 3.27MB)

Our cover stories this month all ask the question: Which kind of lawyer will you be? Legal guru Richard Susskind describes the five lawyer types he predicts will be in future demand. Karen Bell examines how some lawyers are innovating and resetting the legal services model. This article also contains a series of checklists to guide lawyers on the new skills and tools lawyers can use. In Strategic . . . [more]