Law firms ask a lot from their lawyers: work hard for long hours, respond immediately to clients and colleagues, accept and promote the firm’s culture, support overall firm profitability, and so forth. But law firms give a lot back, too: steady income and predictable bonuses, centralized resources, shared overhead costs, exposure to clients, and general collegiality, to name a few.

But the most essential thing law firms do for their lawyers is to share their brand — to give their lawyers the boost in personal prestige and profile that comes with being associated with a respected name and identity. Set . . . [more]

Two stories on cell phones, with a question or two:

1. An article from London Review of Books (“Short Cuts” by Daniel Soar) on how cell phone location records and use records can categorize the users — for marketing, for finding terrorists (or people who may be terrorists …), etc.

Is there a cure for this, besides just using land lines? Or is it a problem, rather than an opportunity?

2. A judicial decision in US district court [opinion of Magistrate Judge | order on appeal] saying that the state needs reasonable and probable grounds before . . . [more]

It was being reported generally yesterday (BBC News, New York Times) that hackers, a group called Anonymous, broke in to Governor Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email accounts and copied some material which they then made public.

It doesn’t seem as though the material taken will in any way compromise or even embarrass the Governor — except in so far as it reveals her injudicious use of a large public email system in connection with government and important personal matters. It’s unlikely that any of us will suddenly find ourselves nominated for vice-president of a country, even a small . . . [more]

Ever since Adrian Lurssen over on the JD Scoop blog from JD Supra posted the suprising list 145 Lawyers (and Legal Professionals) to Follow on Twitter last week, I have had a dramatic increase in lawyer, law student, and law librarian followers to my own Twitter account. I was surprised to be placed at #2 on the list, only behind our own Steve Matthews in the #1 position. Wow! Well, Steve gets special Twitter link love for having created Legal Voices, a website pulling together a number of key legal Twitter feeds.

I was asked by a friend in . . . [more]

Librarian Elisa Mason, who has worked at the UN High Commission for Refugees and the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford, has created the Forced Migration Guide using wiki software.

The guide offers descriptions of resources for the study of refugees, internal displacement and human trafficking.

“The principal audience for this guide is students in a higher education setting who require an introduction to the main research tools and information sources in their subject area of interest. However, it should also appeal to novice researchers based in non-governmental organizations, governmental agencies, and international bodies who may not be familiar with the

That’s the implication of a piece in today’s NYT as part of its American exceptionalism series, entitled Supreme Court’s Global Influence Is Waning .

It has been surprising (in the twenty-five plus years) since the Charter was introduced, how little our courts regard the details of the US jurisprudence in their decisions.

I’m currently reading Toobin’s The Nine – and it also looks as if the US court is so ideologically riven that no court would look there for coherent principle.

The NYT piece doesn’t cite much research, though the following references are of interest:

From 1990 through 2002,

♫ So if I’m being honest with you and it seems like I’m being cruel
At least you didn’t get a rip off, a rip off, a rip off…♫

Words and Music by Ryan Adams, Brad Pemberton, Bradley Smith.

With news this week that a BC law firm has been hit by the counterfeit cheque scam that is washing over Canadian law firms, D. Ross McGowan of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP sent me this Fraud Alert, which I am posting to Slaw.ca with his permission:

Fraud Alert: Beware of “New Client” Cheque Scams

Every week the newspaper headlines name . . . [more]

An article in today’s Globe and Mail, “Wine drinkers are voters too,” by Beppi Crosariol, talked about a crackdown by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario and Manitoba Liquor Control Commission on the practice of direct importation of wine from British Columbia. The infraction, it seems, is of a 1928 statute, the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. I-3 (considerably updated over the years). The kick in this act is in section 3 (1):

Notwithstanding any other Act or law, no person shall import, send, take or transport, or cause to be imported, sent, taken

Students from the University of Ottawa have just launched a labour and employment law blawg. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this new project develops – congratulations to the Employment and Labour Law Student’s Society Blog.

Hat tip to Michael Fitzgibbon at Thoughts from a Management Lawyer . . . [more]

There have been a few articles recently talking about a new proposed method of digital rights management called Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem. The idea is to control what we do with video purchased online, and allow us to use it on multiple devices. See this LATimes article, and this TechCrunch article.

One problem with DRM is that it never really works. Someone always finds a way around it, so it does nothing to stop pirating on a commercial scale. And it usually causes problems for the average consumer, and puts undue limitations on what we can do with . . . [more]

Google Labs has created GAUDI, Google Audio Indexing, a technology that “uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video.” At this stage it seems that they’re only indexing speeches by politicians, but the interesting thing is that Canadian politicians are among the bunch (no separation of Birch and States?) as you can see from this graphic of Jack Layton talking of “health.”

Try running a search for “harper” and enjoy the results.

Given that law is a verbal profession, this technology has the capacity to be . . . [more]

The most powerful and complex information-processing tool we have sits between our ears. But are we making the most of it? This September, instead of defragging the hard drive, give yourself a mental tune up to ensure you are making the most of your primary information processor.

I turned to three experts for their take on maximizing brain power: John Medina, neuroscientist and author of Brain Rules; David Allen, productivity coach and author of Getting Things Done; and Gina Trapini, lead editor of the blog Lifehacker.

Tip number one: Sleep to excess, I dare you!

Adults do . . . [more]