Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on technology, research and practice.

Technology

Using Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 After April 8, 2014 Will Expose You to Security Dangers
Dan Pinnington

Microsoft will no longer be supporting Windows XP SP3 (Service Pack 3) and Office 2003 (SP3) as of April 8, 2014. After this date there will be no new security updates,winxplogo non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options or online technical content updates from Microsoft. Your computer will still . . . [more]

Do you have a giant client that gives you more than 50% of your revenue? That can be good news and the bad news. The good news is you can concentrate on the needs of that client giving them exceptional work and client service. The bad news is they consume your time and you have nothing left to develop other clients. Which leaves you with the looming question… “What would happen to my business if they took their work someplace else?” That one can keep you up at night! I know from experience the sleepless nights and the havoc it . . . [more]

A release usually forms part and parcel of any settlement. Most of the time there is little or no dispute over the wording that goes into the release. However, a recent case is notable for giving a quick refresher (or crash course) in the law of releases.

To put it shortly, the case law is clear that where a settlement is reached, it is normally implied, absent some agreement to the contrary, that an executed final release will be given.

On the other hand, parties are not bound to execute a complex or unusual form of release. While the duty . . . [more]

In a recent post the prolific and insightful Lee Rosen suggested that a cloud provider’s market dominance shouldn’t be your sole criteria when assessing the company’s prospective longevity. Instead, Rosen suggests a lawyer should adopt the Regan-era mantra of “trust, but verify,” and assess — essentially, audit — a cloud computing provider’s financials to prove out the company’s financial health. Rosen uses his diligence on his practice’s cloud provider, Salesforce.com, as providing a high degree of financial visibility that helped him gain a level of comfort with placing his practice’s data in the company’s hands.

Rosen closes his post with . . . [more]

Cyber criminals and identity thieves want to steal your personal information to commit fraud. They may try to get a credit card in your name or to access funds in your bank account. On top of directly losing money, your credit status can be damaged and it can take a great deal of time and expense to restore your good name.

And this goes beyond being an issue of personal concern. LAWPRO has seen situations where law firm bank accounts were hacked and where law firm bank account information was used on counterfeit cheques.

There are many different ways to . . . [more]

The fall-out from the Snowden revelations and the evident powers of the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) continues in the UK this week. Lawyers and the Law are being portrayed in the press in a different light. See this article in the Guardian – “Parliament Has Forsaken our liberty. Law is the Last Resort.” . . . [more]

North American courts are not really sure what to do about web scraping, where someone uses automation to take information in bulk from a web site and puts it on his/her/its own site in competition with the original site. Sometimes (but not often) doing this is held to be trespass to chattels. More often it has been held to violate the terms of use of the victim site, even if those terms are ‘webwrap’, i.e. never explicitly consented to. (In fact, it is freakishly rare for webwrap conditions to be upheld except against scrapers).

The federal court in Illinois recently . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada's award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from forty-one recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog   2. Thoughtful Legal Management   3. Le Blogue du CRL   4. Michael Geist    5. First Reference

When is an author not the author?

The publication of the twenty fifth annual edition of Tremeear’s Criminal Code by David Watt and Michelle Fuerst raises an obvious question about the naming tradition in legal publishing. Why name a new edition of a book after someone long deceased, who had nothing to do with its creation.

Specifically, why name an annotated Criminal Code prepared by Justices Watt and Fuerst Tremeears Criminal Code?

The making of a “tradition”

Over the past century or two, a practice evolved whereby legal publishers launched new editions of established works under the name of . . . [more]

This week the Supreme Court of Canada released the decision in Cuthbertson v. Rasouli, involving a dispute between physicians and the family members of a patient who was on life support.

Summary of the Majority Decision

The dispute involved a patient who experienced severe brain damage from an infection following the removal of a benign tumour, resulting in what the physicians called a persistent vegetative state. The patient was kept alive through life support, and the physicians wanted to stop this care over and above the objections of the patient’s family members, who expressed the patient’s prior expressed intention . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week's summaries concern: Judicial reasons / Discovery of settlement documents / Expropriation & interest / drug-sniffing dogs:

Bien que l'étendue de l'équité procédurale à laquelle est tenue la Commission d'enquête sur l'octroi et la gestion des contrats publics dans l'industrie de la construction soit très élevée, cette dernière était fondée, dans les circonstances, à refuser aux requérants le droit de contre-interroger l'auteur d'un témoignage les impliquant dans des tractations potentiellement répréhensibles.