I am normally skeptical when it comes to “vendor” panels or demonstrations, but Rick Borstein of Adobe did such an entertaining demo of Adobe 9.0 for lawyers at the Canadian Law & Technology Forum last week that was also useful and showed a number of improvements to the product.

His blog – Adobe for Legal Professionals – provides lots of great tips (I learned more about the annoying problem when OCR’ing with Adobe when you get this message: “Acrobat could not perform recognition (OCR) on this page because the page contains renderable text.” – Rick mentioned that the newest version . . . [more]

Ecojustice, formerly Sierra Legal Defence Fund, and pro bono lawyers from Paliare Roland Barristers, counsel for Friends of the Earth, have appealed the Federal Court decision in Friends of the Earth v. Canada (Governor in Council), 2008 FC 1183 (CanLII).

The court in that case held that it could not deal with the issue of whether the Minister of the Environment had failed to comply with the duty imposed on him under s.5 of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, 2007, because the issue under the legislation was not justiciable. . . . [more]

In tough economic times it is more important than ever to make sure your clients are happy with the work you did for them. A post-matter client survey is one of the best ways to collect information about what clients thought about the services you provided.

Make sure your survey is structured to help you identify specific areas for improvement. Ideally, it should include some open-ended questions.

LAWPRO’s booklet, Managing a Better Professional Services Firm, included a sample post-matter client survey. An electronic copy of this survey that you can adapt for your firm is available at www.practicepro.ca/servicesbooklet. . . . [more]

I want to do a little bragging today (on behalf of a number of people). Yesterday (November 24, 2008), the Attorney General introduced in the Legislature reforms to family law, including on division of pensions on marital breakdown. Now, this was a project the LCO undertook a year ago. . . . [more]

The internal policy of the Canadian Human Rights Commission concerning the accommodation of mental illness has been published [PDF] by that organization as a model that may prove helpful in the development of such a policy by other organizations.

[via Thoughts from a Management Lawyer] . . . [more]

Yesterday saw the release of Windsor Law Professor Richard Moon’s long-awaited report on Internet Hate Speech and the jurisdiction of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The editorial writers are lapping it up – here is the Globe and the National Post, as well as the CBC’s more measured coverage.

The principal recommendation of this report is that section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act be repealed so that the censorship of Internet hate speech is dealt with exclusively by the criminal law.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson has described the Moon report “an important contribution” to the discussion . . . [more]

♫ So you want to be a leader
See how high you can climb
If you want to be a leader
It takes guts and sweat and time

Can you take it on your shoulders
Be proud and strong and free
Can you look them in the eye and say
Come this way follow me…♫

Words and music by ImprovAndy

Winston Churchill once said: “We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.” These are dark days and the gloom is growing darker. Economies are faltering world-wide, industries and corporations are looking for bailouts . . . [more]

At Slaw we’ve referred from time to time to the practice in some US courts of declining any precedential value to cases.

This week’s Minnesota Lawyer brings the debate into sharp focus with discussions of a recent case that appears to have been buried, despite its value. The case involved whether punitive damages could be awarded in defamation cases.

In Canada, the proliferation of electronically accessible case law of dubious value makes one nostalgic for the days when a stroke of the DLR editor’s pen could consign such case law to non-existence. . . . [more]

There’s a possibly apocryphal story of Lord Denning MR changing his mind on who won an appeal after the judgment had been released to the WLR so that the WLR version has the plaintiff winning 2-1 while the All ER version had the defendant winning 2-1. [Challenge to those who have free access to Lexis – was there such a case?]

But this week’s Lawyer’s Weekly refers to a case being redacted by the Supreme Court of Canada after it had been released. The deletion was a reference to the Federal Government’s withdrawal from the Charter Challenges programme.

The counsel . . . [more]

From national politics let’s turn our sights to the local variety: Bob LeDrew over at Flacklife has picked up the newsdurhamregion.com story of Oshawa City Councillor Robert Lutczyk who claims to hold the copyright on the name “University of Ontario Institute of Technology” among other names. Thing is, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology already existed before he supposedly copyrighted the name in 2005. . . . [more]

On Friday, Google launched its “SearchWiki,” a way of customizing your own search results. I gather that they’re rolling it out according to some pattern, which means you may not see this feature in your results for a few days yet.

What you will see is illustrated below:

If, for example, Slaw hadn’t come up top in my results in a search for “slaw,” I could have moved it up there with the arrow, and ever after it would be first. For me. Which is what I don’t quite get: why exactly would I want to fix the results of . . . [more]

Everything I know about social media I learned from PR professionals in my brief career in that field prior to law.

Neville Hobson (a social media guru in the U.K. who hosts one of my first podcast subscriptions, For Immediate Release) launched an RSS feed yesterday that combined over 60 of the best PR blogs around the world.

He based the selection on a PR Network previously created by David Jones, a local PR guru based in Toronto (he also hosts one of my other first podcasts, InsidePR).

I thought it was a great idea, so I . . . [more]