If you are not able to attend the 2013 Futures Conference, they are offering a live webcast of the keynote and TED presentations. Please click here for the link to the live webcast.

2013 Futures Conference agenda:

Friday, October 4
9:10 – 10:00 am CDT — Keynote Presentation by Stephen Mayson
10:00 – 10:15 am CDT — TED #1, What is the Market for Legal Services in the Future (from the buyer’s point of view), Ann Lee Gibson, Ann Lee Gibson Consulting
2:00 – 2:15 pm CDT — TED #2, Innovation in the Law Firm, Jordan Furlong, Partner, Edge . . . [more]

Whenever there is an auto insurance claim, insurers must determine fault. If you are found to be at fault for a claim, the insurer will consider you an increased risk and use this information to increase your premiums. If you are not at fault, the claim will not directly result in an increase of your premiums. This probably makes sense to most people, but you may be surprised to learn that things are a bit different when it comes to home insurance claims.

Assume you make a claim to repair a roof damaged by a hail storm, or your expensive . . . [more]

I cannot resist employing useless things. One reason, I guess, is that I’ve been taught and brought up since the year dot to be useful. Naturally, this leads to a hankering after the useless, that which is instrumental to no purpose and the disappearance of which would not materially change the world. Music is one such. (Note, I said materially.) As is poetry and, indeed, most art. There is no point to any of it — and that is the lovely point, of course.

But poetry, painting, music . . . these are the heavies, when it comes to uselessness. . . . [more]

Here are a couple of new features in relation to searching.

1. I’ve taken to using DuckDuckGo as my basic search engine because, if they are to be believed, they don’t track my searches as some other search engines do and, consequently, don’t feed me back ads they imagine I’ll like. (I just wish the name were less silly.) I think you’ll find a bunch of things to like about it, among which is the potential to search within certain other sites through the use of a “bang” marker: !

   It’s not exactly same thing as using the site:xxxx.zzz search

. . . [more]

The Law Library at the University of Windsor is pleased to announce two new Google Custom searches.

The first is a meta search of policing journals, magazines, reviews, reports and news feeds.
The second is a meta search of police review board decisions from across Canada.

Both are available here, along with the full list of the sites being searched:
http://www1.uwindsor.ca/law/library/research-on-policing-in-canada

This is a new addition to our offerings. Two years ago, we had also announced the creation of a meta search
for military law journals: http://www1.uwindsor.ca/law/library/canadian-military-law-articles . . . [more]

Once again a Canadian law firm is in merger discussions. The Blog of Legal Times said earlier this week that Dentons is in discussions with US-based McKenna Long & Aldridge to create a firm of 3,100 lawyers – assuming no one leaves.

John Grimley makes a good point on this potential merger – what’s really in it for McKenna?

George Beaton said on Twitter, “Pray, why is bigger better for clients?”

My thought is, “My God, what is with this obsession with size?”

The marketplace for large international firms is pretty small – enough for only a very few players. . . . [more]

The baby panda cam at Washington’s National Zoo is not the only digital casualty of the shutdown of U.S. federal government services that started this week [awwww man, not the cam with the adorable baby panda!].

The websites of Library of Congress and the Law Library of Congress, the world’s largest law library, are also down, although THOMAS, the legislative information site is still functioning.

Even NASA’s website is knocked out of commission.

The Washington Post, the Ars Technica site, and the government transparency NGO the Sunlight Foundation have details. . . . [more]

The CBA Futures Initiative took to the Twitterverse Tuesday night to talk about legal education.

What was supposed to be a half-hour discussion about objectives and obstacles turned into more than two hours of enthusiastic participation from across the country. Mitch Kowalski summed up the responses about 75 minutes in: “So we’ve seen tuition, diversity, maturity, practicality, length of study are issues. Solutions?”

Karen Dyck summed up the legal profession’s response to these issues so far with an emoticon wink: “Don’t change a thing.”

A lot of the early discussion focused on high and rising tuition costs, in response to . . . [more]

BrightPlanet has created a new online product called “BlueJay,” which it is advertising as a "Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner." The tool allows users to monitor virtually every single public tweet published by Twitter users in real time for indicators of crime or wrongdoing. Users can set up virtual perimeters or geo-fences to track tweets specific to those areas. BrightPlanet’s main business is “open source intelligence”: searching the “deep web”—those parts of the World Wide Web that are public but which regular search engines cannot reach.

Over the years I have seen dozens of contracts with dreadful arbitration clauses.

They are generally found near the end of the agreement, with the other so-called “boilerplate”. One often wonders whether the lawyers even read them before the contract was signed. Almost certainly, the business people didn’t. One consequence of this neglect is that, if and when the clause must be dusted off and used in a dispute, it may not work as intended. And unworkable arbitration clauses tend to give the process as a whole a bad name.

There are 7 essential elements of an effective arbitration clause. . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

LAW FIRM LIBRARIANSHIP: ISSUES, PRACTICE, AND DIRECTIONS
John Azzolini
Oxford : Chandos Publishing, 2013

Excerpted: pp. 9 and 10-14 from Chapter 2: Tasks, Skills, and Attributes

[Footnotes have been converted to endnotes here.]

Abstract: Law firm librarianship can be distinguished from its public and academic counterparts by examining several of the emblematic features . . . [more]

Aka Phantom Cellphone Vibration – when you think you feel your phone vibrating when it is not. Yes, this is a real thing that has been the subject of academic studies.

From a study at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, United States entitled Phantom vibrations among undergraduates: Prevalence and associated psychological characteristics:

Phantom vibration syndrome,’ or perceived vibrations from a device that is not really vibrating, is a recent psychological phenomenon that has attracted the attention of the media and medical community. Most (89%) of the 290 undergraduates in our sample had experienced phantom vibrations, and they experienced them . . . [more]