At this moment in time I’m delighted to report an honour that’s fairly unique: Slaw made the ABA’s list. With all due respect to Simon and my other friends,
at the end of the day, it’s absolutely not rocket science what Slaw does.
It’s a 24/7 nightmare but we shouldn’t of underestimated the readership.

Slaw

Moderated by Simon Fodden, professor emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Slaw was start­ed largely for the legal research and IT community in Canada, but it may soon transcend its tech designa­tion. The name Slaw was chosen in deference to Salon

While on Twitter I recently came across Mari Moreshead who does “client services and community management” for CourtCanada.com. I had never heard of CourtCanada and so checked their website and asked if I might interview her for the purpose of reporting back to Slaw readers.

CourtCanada was started in 2006 by former bankruptcy lawyer Gregory Azeff who is the company’s President and Chairman of the Board of Directors. CourtCanada is currently comprised of two services:

InSolve – a bankruptcy case management system, first beta tested in February 2007 and released in final version January 2008. For cases in the . . . [more]

Every year a ‘Vendors Forum’ is held as part of the annual meeting of the Canadian Law Libraries Association (CALL). In recent years the forum has evolved into a series of simple product presentations by the legal publishers. The most recent meeting held in the spring in Saskatoon was no exception.

In earlier years, the forum was a bit more exciting with panels of representatives of legal publishers frequently under the gun as they were asked pointed questions on the legal information issues of the day. Some thought that the questions were too tough and that the forums themselves lacked . . . [more]

There’s an interesting, long article in the New York Times Magazine, “Google’s Gatekeepers,” in which the author, Jeffrey Rosen, takes a look at how Google copes with the various demands of governments and citizens to remove or block material thought to be offensive in one way or another. Rosen, a law prof at George Washingto, concludes with a swipe at lawyers (and, presumably, their bosses):

Given their clashing and sometimes self-contradictory missions — to obey local laws, repressive or not, and to ensure that information knows no bounds; to do no evil and to be everywhere in a

On Nov. 27, 2008, I attended a session hosted by the Toronto chapter of the Legal Marketers Association (LMA) on Social Media Success.

The event was moderated by Max Valiquette of Youthography, and featured a panel with Parker Mason of CNW Group, Michael Rabinovici of AR Communications Inc., and Stuart Wood of Torys LLP.

Wood claimed his firm didn’t know he was there. But the event was promoted on the LMA website, and as he soon found out, he was part of an impromptu podcast when Mason revealed he was recording the session.

Full audio . . . [more]

I am very busy this week with additional, ongoing preparations and adjustments, as are all my colleagues and co-workers, as we move into the thick of renovations at the Priestly Law Library. If you’re interested, we have a renovations website up and running. It contains some architectural renderings of what the finished product will look like, as well as some background on the principles governing the design, as well as updates on progress, photos, etc. Have a look. We expect to be finished by next Sept! . . . [more]

Thanks to Random Musings from the Desert, I discovered the Typealyzer. It tells you what Myers-Briggs type you are, based upon analysis of your blog content. Needless to say, I pointed it immediately at SLAW. I figured that it would have some trouble coming up with a typology, given the number of personalities that contribute to the blog. Disappointingly, it came up with a fairly valid identification in a short while. SLAW is:

ISTJ – The Duty Fulfillers

I had occasion to cancel a credit card and get a new one recently, which made me look at and think about credit card numbers. I suppose that I’d always thought of them as a more or less random string of integers, maximizing the number of such strings that would be available to banks etc. (10 X 10 X 10 etc. for each integer place…) and making it just that bit more difficult for criminals to suss out a number.

Turns out I couldn’t be more wrong: credit card (and bank card) numbers are highly structured entities and only make . . . [more]

The Canadian Press is reporting that the planned extension of US passenger screening is going ahead next year. Unlike existing rules, which require airlines to provide passenger information for flights headed to the US, the new rules will require them to provide this information even if the flight is only traversing US airspace. (See: The Canadian Press: New U.S. air security rules create turbulence in Canada.)

This raises a whole host of issues, particularly on the privacy front. The names are being scrubbed against the US no-fly list, which is notoriously of dubious quality. It has interfered with the . . . [more]

Some time back I wrote about typefaces and why lawyers might want to care about which face they put forward. Of course, the choice of typeface isn’t the only aspect of the print world (whether on paper or in pixels) of interest: how the text is laid out is an obviously important feature affecting readability, one element of which I want to touch on in this post.

That element is justification, by which I mean whether or not the text is made to line up on the right edge of the column in what is sometimes called “flush right.” There . . . [more]

Voici le discours . . . [more]

Since it’s important, here it is – in English .

No time for a witty comment . . . [more]