A project that may seem a bit different from Stem’s usual path, this past Monday we launched a new blog to track information and issues related to lawyers facing addiction. This latest website, the Lawyer Addiction Blog, will be tracking the flow of information coming from LAP programs across North America, and increasingly, from around the world.

To provide a bit of background here, on Monday Stem also announced a new client, The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center. As I described with a bit more detail on Stem’s blog, I view this relationship as a rare opportunity; to pair . . . [more]

Can we stand to hear about one more Toronto-based event?

Parliament 2009: What Kind of Country Will We Have?
A Forum Exploring Parliamentary Democracy in Contemporary Canada

is an evening being hosted by the The Churchill Society for the Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy

Date: Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Time: 7:30pm – 10:00pm
Location: Campbell Conference Facility, Munk Centre for International Studies
Street: University of Toronto, 1 Devonshire Place
City/Town: Toronto, ON

Please register by emailing awards@churchillsociety.org
by January 18, 2009.

Description

The political crisis that occurred before the Governor General prorogued the most recent legislative session on Parliament Hill caused . . . [more]

I want to take the opportunity to let Slawyers know about a law reform symposium that the LCO is organizing for this coming May 12th and 13th, in collaboration with Lorne Sossin, the Director of the Centre for the Legal Profession at the University of Toronto. It will be held at U of T. The Symposium will explore the interrelationship between theory and practice in law reform and will include people with strong opinions about what law reform should mean and activists who have played a major role in reforming law, and will be based on an attendee participation format. . . . [more]

Just posted to the CanLII blog:

CanLII invites you to a user meeting in Toronto

CanLII is pleased to invite you to a user meeting in Toronto on February 11 2009. On the agenda:

• demo of SATAL – the point-in-time legislative system soon to be launched on CanLII;
• creation of a CanLII users group;
• demo of APIs developed to streamline use of CanLII content by institutional users.

The presentation will be followed by a cocktail. They ask you inform them if you plan to be present.

For more info, check their blog post for time, location and RSVP contact . . . [more]

I hadn’t seen before today the Master of Laws Guide which assembles in a single site comparative information for foreign graduate students contemplating the choice of schools where to study.

Back in the last century, when I had to face the same question, one was reduced to talking to law school teachers and colleagues about what they knew of a particular school. The amount of sheer misinformation that this generated was extraordinary. A law school’s reputation (for good or ill) lingers long after any facts may have changed.

My own advice (when asked by students) is to pick people not . . . [more]

Here’s a link to a survey from the Law School Survey of Student Engagement, as reported in (hat-tip to) Inside Higher Education, Writing Lags in Law Schools.

The discussion on Legal Writing is interesting, and I don’t know of any reason why a Canadian survey would be terribly different . . . [more]

The professional social networking site LinkedIn has slowly been making a number of changes that are making the site increasingly useful. I am still finding my way around, but changes I find of interest:

• the addition of third party applications that allow me to do things like share my presentation slides (via Slideshare) and to see recently added presentations of others, and to see what my contacts are reading with the Amazon.com application;
• increased and improved functionality of groups, allowing those in a group to have a discussion;
• suggestions of people who I might know who are on LinkedIn

As Simon Fodden pointed out earlier, one of the greatest limitations of Twitter is the amount of unwanted “noise” it produces,

What has to happen for Twitter to become useful and enjoyable for me is the introduction of filters or channels or folders… I need to be able to group them by my own taxonomy and then, depending on what I”m up to, screen out the noise and leave the signal.

A new service by LexBlog might help legal professionals accomplish this.

LexTweet gathers tweets from legal professionals on Twitter, which effectively creates a legal channel. The service has . . . [more]

Here’s a third in the series of short posts about Google, appropriately enough about a short form of searching, this time. A Norwegian with the screen name of Mr. Calzone has created a site that makes short work of the otherwise long Google search string: no need to go to his website first, no need to download an app: simply put your search term at the end of the string http://gog.is/ Thus, for example, a search for “slaw” would be http://gog.is/slaw. You can use more than one search term if you separate them with commas or + signs, so avoiding . . . [more]

Not content with the blue ‘g’ announced this spring (too close to too many other icons?), Google has introduced yet another favicon:

This design is based on submissions by the public. I’ll get used to it, but at first sight it seems to me to try to do too much with too little space. . . . [more]

Just for fun I looked at how many pages Google throws up when you feed it “slaw.ca” in the search box. I’m wowed to be able to say the answer is a staggering 350,000 — or, to use Google’s more careful estimation “about” 350,000. Herewith the unaltered digital-image evidence:

Sure, there is a sprinkling of BBQ sites that got in somehow, but basically it’s turtles all the way down. . . . [more]

The traditional rule in common law provinces is that that the producing party is responsible for the immediate costs of the production of its documents to the other party. While British Columbia does expressly address the costs of electronic discovery, in Ontario, Rule 1.03(1) provides that the Rules of Civil Procedure shall be liberally construed to secure “the just, most expeditious and least expensive determination of every civil proceeding on its merits”. The cost of documentary discovery under the present regime may easily overwhelm the amount at issue in the litigation. One legal writer has called this the perfect storm. . . . [more]