The Ontario Ombudsman — office of, one presumes — is now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Ont_Ombudsman

It’ll be interesting to see how this organization uses the tool. The ratio of @ private replies to useful content is running just a trifle high for my taste. There’s got to be a way to exclude these cryptic messages from a stream. . . . [more]

I have just received my copy of Canadian Contract Law, 2d ed (Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2009) authored by SLAW’s own Angela Swan (with the assistance of Jakub Adamski).

At 959 pages and the most recent treatise on the topic, it stands to be an important addition to the Canadian legal literature. . . . [more]

The the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada and IP Osgoode have inaugurated an IP Writing Challenge. The winner in each of three categories — law student, graduate student, professional — will receive a $1000 prize and the publication of the work. Works in either English or French are eligible. The precise rules are set out on the IP Osgoode website, but a brief description of the scope of eligible essays is set out below:

Entries must develop a thesis of importance in an emerging area of intellectual property law from a Canadian, comparative or international perspective. Topics can be

In a comment to the recent post by Patricia Hughes, Justice B. T. Granger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice referred to a set of slides for a presentation he had given at the 2008 CBA Canadian Legal Conference in Quebec City entitled “The Future is Now: Improving Access to Justice: The Need for Lawyers and the Judiciary to Go Electronic.” I thought that this was a presentation that might interest more than a few Slaw readers and got in touch with Justice Granger, who kindly agreed to let Slaw publish the slides.

Of course because this was about . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association‘s Young Lawyers interest group has released a podcast episode “Taking the Nightmare out of Networking“, a half hour interview with Pippa Blakemore, Strategic Business Partner at The PEP Partnership LLP, in Reading, UK by Sarah Klinger, Chair, Young Lawyers-CBA on how to get over awkward face-to-face networking. She gives suggestions on how to conduct conversation to draw people in. Well worth a listen! . . . [more]

Slaw’s own Ted Tjaden is quoted in this week’s Lawyers’ Weekly on whether the free access to the law movement has reached the point of such reliability and comprehensiveness that it can be considered as an adequate substitute for the commercial giants. Canlii’s Daniel Poulin comes to the defence of Canlii.

“I rarely use free resources,” Tjaden said.

“We have the luxury of having one of the better-equipped law libraries in a Canadian law firm with extensive print resources and online subscriptions.

“Although free search engines do supplement the legal research I do, we continue to rely on the value-added

Today’s Free Press has a piece by Chip Martin on the history of the University of Western Ontario law school – and a nice tribute to Ivan Rand. There’s a new biography of Rand on the horizon by Bill Kaplan which will likely deal with his involvement in the founding of the state of Israel.

There’ll be big celebrations all year in London Ontario. . . . [more]

Those of us who were trained to look at the documents – always the documents as I.F. Stone taught – will find the attached documents on the torture of those detained at Guantánamo Bay detention centre both fascinating and chilling.

For the record here are the links: . . . [more]

That’s the proposition advanced in an interview with Justice Ginsburg reported in the NYT and the Post yesterday. She comments on the comparative law question:

“Why shouldn’t we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article from a professor?”

For Slaw readers, the most interesting line is:

The Canadian Supreme Court, she said, is “probably cited more widely abroad than the U.S. Supreme Court.” There is one reason for that, she said: “You will not be listened to if you don’t listen to others.”

This . . . [more]

They say the key to a good golf swing is in the follow-through. Hopefully the same is true of blogging, because this week on the Cross-Border Biotech Blog saw a lot of our trends and stories revisited with new developments and new perspective:

Electronic medical records drew a lot of attention this week, with the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference and the first EMR implementation by a large hospital group being topped by an even larger and more influential implementation — the U.S. military.

Budgets and bailout issues were also active. There was good news . . . [more]

If I was honest with you, I would admit that I read with glee the flurry of news reports noting that Facebook and other Web 2.0 media (such as Twitter, Yammer, and Friendfeed) had surpassed email as the preferred form of communication particularly for teens and young adults today. If you pardon the pun, the inner geek in me let out a loud Yahoo!

For years I have been struggling with the notion that email had become the place to work for many lawyers. It seemed that a bad technology had taken root to the point that it would be . . . [more]

Twitter was a certainly a hot topic at ABA TECHSHOW last week. Loads of active Twitterers were tweeting away there, and many more attendees where trying to learn more about it. Are you still trying to figure out what Twitter is, and more importantly, what it might do for you? My good friend Jim Calloway, the Practice Management Advisor at the Oklahoma Bar Association, has a special knack for explaining technology in a practical and very understandable way. To learn more about Twitter read this great article he posted on the OBA site earlier this week: Twitter: The . . . [more]