Georgia has instituted proceedings [PDF] against Russia at the International Court of Justice. The action claims violations by Russia of the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), alleging, among other things, that Russia:

has practiced, sponsored and supported racial discrimination through attacks against, and mass-expulsion of, ethnic Georgians, as well as other ethnic groups, in the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions of the Republic of Georgia.

Georgia is relying on article 22 of CERD to give the ICJ jurisdiction in this matter:

Any dispute between two or more States Parties with respect

In this, the first of hopefully many columns, I wanted to take a few moments to introduce myself. My name is Gavin Birer and I am the founder and president of the first Canadian offshore legal outsourcing company. I am called to the Bar in Ontario and admitted as an attorney in the Supreme Court of South Africa. My legal experience is as a corporate commercial lawyer, practicing in Bay Street law firms and in-house as a General Counsel.

This month’s column is going introduce you to the offshore legal outsourcing industry (also commonly known as “legal process outsourcing” or . . . [more]

We are all publishers now, but are bloggers journalists? Frankly, I don’t think so, and I don’t pretend to be a journalist (even though I have been writing a weekly newspaper column for several years) – although the issue has been subject to some debate.

Wikipedia defines a journalist as: “a person who practises journalism, the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues and people.” – although it defines journalism as “the profession of writing or communicating, formally employed by publications and broadcasters, for the benefit of a particular community of people.”

Bloggers are often treated as . . . [more]

The Department of Canadian Heritage has released my colleague Prof. Pina D’Agostino’s report, “Fair Dealing after CCH.” It is available in HTML online and in downloadable PDF. She warns against ad hoc attempts to fix this aspect of copright law alone, whether through some legislative implementation of the CCH factors or via a borrowing of foreign provisions. Industries can and should work to develop “best practices” concerning fair dealing, which can guide behaviour and, potentially, give industry “advice” to the court in future cases.

[via CultureLibre.ca] . . . [more]

Someone at the Ontario Ministry of Engergy and Infrastructure has been pumping bookmarks up to delicious.com (a service formerly known as del.icio.us) under the username of mei.govonca. They’re up to 314 as of yesterday. Nothing wrong with this, of course: I doubt that anyone is going to glean information that would otherwise be secret from scanning the list of bookmarks, nearly all of which are tagged “stakeholder” in addition to whatever other labels they may have. Still, it feels odd to find a government ministry making use of a service outside of the firewall like this.

It might be . . . [more]

Well Thomson Reuters reported this morning and as is consistent with its competitors’ results, this hasn’t been a happy quarter.

Thomson has had indigestion-expenses from the Reuters acquisition, but even so, the sort of profit margins that management have been expecting over the past decade from legal publishing haven’t been as easy this year. . . . [more]

[Image via Wikipedia] The United Nations is a huge source of legal information, much of which is available in searchable databases. (I’ve not found any single entry point into all of the U.N.’s legal and law-related material.) A number of these sources are marked by the “LEX” in the URLs or titles. To wit:

• ILOLEX
  ILO database on international labour standards. A list of the database contents is available.
• NATLEX
  Another ILO database, this one containing national labour, social security and related human rights legislation. The database offers 65,000 records covering over 190 countries and over 160 territories

I imagine not a few Canadian lawyers might be in China right now, and even if they are ‘on business’, they might be checking in with the office now and then. If this describes you, then take a look at his note from GigaOm, which surveys some of the security risks posed by the unique reality of a regulated internet. . . . [more]

As you’ll notice from his first post below, Slaw has added another contributor from outside Canada. This time we’ve picked up a UK correspondent in Nick Holmes.

Nick, as you might already know, is the founder of infolaw, and a well respected legal blogger, having published his very popular Binary Law since February, 2004.

We are very pleased to welcome Nick as an occasional contributor to Slaw, and hoping he’ll morph into one of our weekly regulars. (hint, hint…) As Connie Crosby pointed out to me when I first started blogging, guys like Nick Holmes and Scott Vine . . . [more]

I am an Olympics fan-girl, and have been absorbing as much television coverage as possible. What I find new this Olympics are all the references by reporters to blogs written by athletes. I was a bit surprised that the athletes would be into blogging, but in a CBC interview following his Olympic competition this weekend, Kyle Shewfelt said that he likes to write and he finds writing about his day of training to be a good way to unwind and “let it all out”.

And write he does! I had a look at his personal blog, simply called Kyle Shewfelt . . . [more]

One of the more interesting parts of Guy Joubert‘s recent interview with the Canadian Lawyer is his observation that there is only scant accurate and current statistical information on the Canadian legal profession. We encountered this in drafting a background chapter of the CBA Conflicts Report in which we discussed trends within the population of Canadian lawyers and access to justice. . . . [more]

I’m chuffed (is that a peculiarly British expression?) to have been invited onboard Slaw as a contributor and will aim to provide a UK slant to some of the the core issues Slaw addresses surrounding legal information in the digital age.

I have been fortunate to have been involved at first hand in the entire modern publishing revolution. When I first started out in law publishing, authors produced copy on manual typewriters, editors used pens and literal cut and paste to hack it into shape, typesetters set the copy in movable lead type or “slugs” and made it up . . . [more]