The Sedona Conference Institute is offering the 1st Annual Sedona Canada Program on Getting Ahead of the e-Discovery Curve, to be held at the Boulevard Club in Toronto on October 23 – 24.

This information-packed Conference will include panels focused on (1) The Sedona Canada Principles; (2) Management of Electronic Information; (3) Cost-Shifting and Sanctions – Judicial Advice; (4) Legal Holds: The Trigger and the Process; (5) Multi-Party, Multi-Jurisdictional, Class Actions & Other Complications; and (6) Cooperation with Opposing Counsel on eDiscovery
Issues.

For a complete agenda, a run-down on the faculty, and a registration form, visit the Program . . . [more]

As Michel-Adrien Sheppard reported here last week, the Supreme Court of Canada has a newly refurbished website. It was in fact launched over the weekend and is now up and running.

I find the re-design an improvement: there’s a more open feel from a greater use of white and lighter colours. The old site had a tendency to feel a bit claustrophobic at times.

If you’d like to see how the site had changed over time, pay a visit to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, where there are S.C.C. pages from 1998 to the present. Sadly, the . . . [more]

The federal, provincial and territorial justice ministers had a meeting for several days this week and in their final press release said, among other things:

Mandatory reporting of child pornography
Ministers agreed that Canada’s response to child pornography could be enhanced by federal legislation requiring any agency whose services could be used to facilitate the commission of online child pornography offences to report suspected material.

Will “any agency” include telecoms? ISPs? Search engines? What others?

Will the response to this problem be ehanced by mandatory reporting? …Are the various “agencies” contemplated here now reluctant to assist, so that legislation is . . . [more]

Former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson once said in a letter to his first wife, Ellen Axson, two years before they got married,

The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other. It was once the same road; and Congress is [s]till full of lawyers.

One-hundred and twenty-five years later, and across an international border, this quote still holds true. A quick search of current members of the House demonstrates that 45 of the 308 MPs have their occupation listed as “lawyer.”

Earlier . . . [more]

The Public Policy Forum has released a report, “(Not as) Male, (Not as) Educated, (Not as) Experienced & (Still) White,” [PDF] by Jonathan Dignan, analysing the makup of our 39th Parliament and comparing it to comparable data for the current U.S. House of Representatives and the British Parliament. Among the many interesting nuggets are the facts that (only?) just under 16% of MPs are lawyers; 86.5% have attended university but only 32% have university degrees; and the cost of campaigns in Canada is much less than those in the U.S. and much more than those in the U.K: . . . [more]

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has nominated Nova Scotia Court of Appeal judge Thomas Cromwell to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada.

If appointed, he will fill the seat left vacant when Michel Bastarache retired earlier this year.

Justice Cromwell has worked at the Court before. He was the executive legal officer to former Supreme Court chief justice Antonio Lamer.

And I have heard that he loves law libraries. . . . [more]

Got the time? Who’s got time anymore. Time was… My best time ever.

Oh, and billable time.

Slaves to the clock and the watch (and now the cell phone), we need to know the time. So this week’s fillip is a Slaw Six, offering up half a dozen somewhat amusing ways to know when your time is coming… now… up… and gone.

1. The broad strokes first: you’ve got to know what day it is before that fact that it’s twenty to nine can have any real impact. To help you out in that regard let’s make use of the “

It’s probably just serendipity, but there seems to be quite a lot of recent writing on the future of journalism in a Web 2.0 world. Christie Blatchford’s August 21 Globe article was the first in a series of “whence journalism”-ish reading I’ve stumbled upon lately.

Sarah Kellogg writes in the September issue of DC Bar that the mainstream media is reducing its coverage of court proceedings, seemingly surrendering the field to non-professionals. The article, Legal Journalism at a Crossroads is thought-provoking, and I encourage you to have a look. I don’t agree with her that blawgers are less qualified to . . . [more]

An article about Avner Levin’s new study about young people and technology ran in itWorldCanada yesterday.

The article, and presumably Levin’s research, considers ways that today’s employers can keep employees happy by resisting the urge to ban instant messaging within the office. I understand the need to ensure that employees don’t feel that walking through the office doors equates to a step back in time; however, I remain unsure about the final object here. Are we simply trying to keep the employees happy as they IM with friends and utilize social networking tools at work, or is there a greater, . . . [more]

The final version of the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines is available in PDF and HTML format on the Department of Justice website. It is a report prepared by Professors Carol Rogerson, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and Rollie Thompson of Dalhousie Law School, in conjunction with the Advisory Working Group on Family Law. Although it doesn’t represent the policy of the DOJ, it was prepared with Ministry backing and clearly has Ministry support, the idea being to provide a set of informal (i.e. not legislated) guidelines that courts across the country will find it useful to adopt.

The . . . [more]

…at least according to a list put together by Best Colleges Online. The list is divided under the heads of Architecture, Technology and Innovation, and Digital Collections.

Not a single Canadian pick, alas. And though the bulk are U.S. libraries, of course, there’s a solid rank of choices from abroad under the architecture section, for some reason. And speaking of the architecture section, I have to say that whoever put the list together wasn’t thinking: many of the links lead to the main library sites, where (somewhat surprisingly) there are no photos of the building or the facilities. ((For much . . . [more]

In one of those ostensibly annoying but secretly pleasing pyramid thingies that spread throughout the web, I’ve been tagged by Jordan Furlong, editor, blogger and sometime Slawyer, to post (under the title “5 Blogs & 5 Blawgers”) about five non-law blogs I like and then ponzi up five blawgers and tag them. Here we go:

1. things magazine
   “…an online journal about objects and meanings” from England, and for me a constant source of amazement. For one thing, there might be as many as 50 links in a post, sometimes clustered around an idea, but often simply sparking off