I now continue sharing some of the lessons I learned from walking the historic pilgrimage route in France and Spain, the Camino Frances, over six weeks in May and June. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. Fear or a negative attitude can prevent us from getting to where we want to be or getting what we want. We saw this time and again on our walk. Allow me to share two such stories that stand out in my mind:

One day toward the beginning of our trip we had a very long, tiring journey. We arrived into a . . . [more]

Sending highly confidential or personal information via unencrypted email is like sending a postcard. There are many places that postcard goes before it reaches its recipient – and can be read by anyone along the way. Regular email is sent via plain text, and if you watch Google’s “Story of Send” you can see how many touch points a Gmail message has from the time you hit “send” to the time it gets to your recipient. Email can be intercepted by sniffers or read while saved on remote servers. And that is just the beginning.

Your “deleted” messages are likely . . . [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. Clicklaw Blog   2. Avoid a Claim   3. University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog   4. Official Clio Blog    5. Canadian Securities Law

As we’ve often heard the future of practice can be found in technology, but it can also be found in the past. A review of some of the legal stories this week provide some ideas of how things can be transformed.

At a recent conference in New Jersey, a bunch of American judges heard about the future of court houses without the court house. Trials will be virtual, they heard, and hearings will be done with videos. Court appearances for most minor matters will be more like online banking than 12 Angry Men. At a car accident, a camera . . . [more]

On the second Sunday in each month we bring you a summary from Supreme Advocacy LLP of recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers a weekly electronic newsletter, SupremeAdvocacyLett@r, to which you may subscribe.

Summary of all appeals and leaves to appeal granted (so you know what the S.C.C. will soon be dealing with). For leaves, both the date the S.C.C. granted leave and the date of the C.A. judgment below are added in, in case you want to track and check out the C.A. judgment. (July 12 to August 8, 2013 inclusive).

APPEALS . . . [more]

All that has been written and said in relation to the “access to justice” problem — that is, the fact that the majority of the population cannot obtain legal services at reasonable cost – fails to contain the necessary solution. That is because the law societies and other such institutions and experts that write the reports and speak to the problem do not understand a fundamental fact. That fact, stated as an issue, is: shouldn’t the present method of delivering legal services be abolished in favour of some other method?

The present method of legal services delivery is the “handcraftsman’s” . . . [more]

The Cyber-safety Act, SNS 2013, c 2 came into effect in Nova Scotia this week. This act followed a high profile case of cyber-bullying that occurred in the province that was the final straw, so to speak, that led to a high profile report and the legislature to act with the creation of this act.

The act has some interesting points that should be intriguing playing out in case law. It establishes Cyber-bullying as tort where the victim can sue the perpetrator and more interestingly, is that if a minor commits cyber-bullying this act allows the victims to sue . . . [more]

Canadians have invented a lot of high-profile things — the Canadarm, the method for extracting insulin, IMAX projection — but what catches my attention are the small things that disappear into everyday life as though they’d always been there. These Canadian inventions are rarely sung (well, if something can be “unsung,” surely it might also be “sung”).

First among these is the humble egg carton. Yes, a Canadian invented the thing in which you buy and, likely, store your eggs. Joseph L. Coyle from  Smithers, B.C., a newspaperman of all things, came up with a working prototype in . . . [more]

If you are currently considering a new website, you may want to build it for the mobile generation, and you will want to include responsive design. All websites – including law firm sites – are seeing an increase in mobile traffic. Mobile users require unique usability and it is anticipated that in the near future, mobile devices will account for nearly half of your website’s visitors.

Responsive design is a technology aimed at crafting sites that provide an optimal viewing experience – easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling – across a wide range of . . . [more]

In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress in Washington, turned 3 this week.

Since August 2010, a team of bloggers has been busily blogging about anything legal:

“Some posts are interesting things we see in the news that have a legal angle, some are interviews with staff, many are about the Law Library, and others are photos from here and law libraries around the world. Some are a bit more off beat than others.”

The Law Library of Congress is the world’s largest law library, with a collection of over 2.65 million volumes  . . . [more]

There has been a great deal of buzz over Jeff Bezos’s recent purchase of The Washington Post for a fraction of what Facebook paid for Instagram, and also a fraction of what Yahoo paid for Tumblr. How can it be that a venerable old newspaper, guardian of the right of the public to know, with hundreds of employees and thousands of square feet of bricks and mortar be worth far less than smaller companies that simply deal with code?

If lawyers ever needed another reason to believe that the world has changed. This is it.

In my view, it . . . [more]

New rules have been adopted regarding procedures for the processing of certain applications for a Certificat de sélection du Québec submitted by permanent workers, investors, business people and self-employed workers. These changes were published in the Gazette Officielle du Quebec on Wednesday, July 17, 2013. These new rules are in effect from August 1, 2013 to March 31, 2014.