In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, I put around two thousand lawyers through a hands-on computer course on how they could use a PC themselves. For a few years, one lawyer returned annually. Turns out that his motivation was to re-assure himself that his colleagues were still luddites when it came to IT, and that he had nothing to fear with respect to their catching up to him.

I suspect that he had a good 3 decades start on most. However, one would have to say that now tech is finally being accepted as playing an important role in . . . [more]

I’m sure I’ve confessed here before to being what others might call a “prescriptivist” where English usage is concerned. (I’m actually all for freedom of choice; it’s just that I would prefer it to be an informed choice.) But I have a healthy respect for the power of practice to normalize things, including the way we speak. Like Canute, the eleventh century king of Denmark, England, Norway, Sweden, etc., I might as well try to hold back the tide as to buck the way things get said.

And King Canute, or Cnut, is a good way to broach what I’m . . . [more]

The April 2013 issue of Connected is available online.

The bulletin covers the impact of new social media such as Twitter and Facebook on court proceedings, the ethical implications of judges and court staff using new media, and court policy issues relating to these technologies. Most of the stories are about the United States.

In this issue:

• Oregon juror jailed for texting during trial
• AOCs [administrative offices of the courts] and high courts using social media: an update
• Courts on Yelp
• Michigan launches latest video in Court Stories series

The bulletin is published by the Virginia-based National Center for State . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association is running through its CBA Legal Futures Initiative which ostensibly looks at allowing outside investment into law firms, the so-called, Alternative Business Structure (ABS). This initiative should be of interest to all lawyers, but most particularly to younger lawyers, as it may determine the course of their careers – perhaps for the worst.

Younger lawyers should take note of the behaviour of the CBA and various law societies in the late 1990’s and the early 2000’s around Multi-Disciplinary Practices (because of backward-thinking individuals in the CBA and in provincial law societies, MDPs have been regulated into . . . [more]

Since 2009, and most recently last December at the United Nations Sixty-seventh General Assembly Plenary, various countries—particularly Iran and North Korea—have raised various challenges to Canada's human rights record. However, on April 30, 2013, it was reported that members of the United Nations Human Rights Council have formally challenged Canada's human rights record, with 83 countries making recommendations for enhanced rights protections. This challenge refutes Canada's status as a human rights leader and indicates that Canada must take immediate action on socio-economic disparities.

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.

THE FUTURE OF NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONS IN A GLOBAL WORLD
Tom Ginsburg
in The Law of the Future and the Future of Law, S. Muller, S. Zouridis, M. Frishman & L. Kistemaker eds., Oslo: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2011

Excerpt: pages 148 – 151

The Future

Where will constitutions go in the next . . . [more]

I used to race our sailboat, a 35-footer (11 meters) that required a crew of about nine to be competitive. When I helmed, or steered the boat, I would sometimes drag down our performance with three common mistakes:

1. Not good enough as a sailor
2. Tried to do too much
3. Didn’t get my head out of the boat

Project managers often fall prey to the same three mistakes in the context of project management.

Insufficient Skill

I wasn’t a terribly good racing sailor. Indeed, none of our regular crew, equally busy-with-real-world-jobs colleagues, were that good. Over time, we learned to deal . . . [more]

Last week I had the good fortune to have attended the Canadian Bar Association’s Envisioning Equal Justice Summit: Building Justice for Everyone in Vancouver. Many participants live-tweeted sessions and otherwise engaged in #equaljustice discussions. The summit culminated in a compilation, by the participants, of ideas and concrete strategies for legal and justice system reform. These will be presented in a report to the full conference of the CBA with a plan for implementation. I’ll write about highlights in subsequent posts over the coming weeks. Others have written, here and elsewhere, for example, about the stimulating event as well.

The . . . [more]

Happy May Day all! A day for celebrating the labour movement, gathering community, and strengthening the search for greater workers’ rights everywhere.

On May Day, we celebrate and support vulnerable and embattled workers as if they are outside our profession. But we’d like to return yet again to the issue of retaining women in the legal profession, and ask why, as a profession, we are so bad at turning that critical gaze inwards. An April 2013 study commissioned by the Law Society of Upper Canada and authored by Fiona M. Kay, Stacey Alarie, and Jones Adjei of Queen’s University tells . . . [more]

I just heard Duncan Stewart speak about the Deloitte 2013 TMT predictions at an event held by the London Economic Development Corporation. A couple of things have been mentioned on Slaw before. Here are some more things to ponder.

As we start to rely on more data in the cloud, carrier promises for uptime guarantees will be as important as the volume of data on our plans.

The hype over voice and gesture control for PCs and TVs is overblown. A remote control has an error rate of about 2 per 10,000 uses. Voice and gesture error rates . . . [more]

CanLII is testing a new search interface! Check out beta.CanLII.org. The CanLII Blog reports:

CanLII is proud to present a new search interface designed to unify the functionalities of its search engine under a single form that is at once easier and more powerful to use. This beta site allows our users to get comfortable with this new tool, its functionalities and its organization. As this interface evolves over the coming months, we invite you to send us your comments and suggestions.

Like the single search box on the basic Google page? You will probably like the beta . . . [more]

When we come to a new fork in an old road we continue to follow the route with which we are familiar, even though wholly different, even better avenues might open up before us.

– George Manuel

Yesterday, the Canadian Bar Association invited us to join a conversation about the future of law. The CBA’s Legal Futures Initiative launched last summer and has been in a research and information gathering phase since that time, with the results trickling out now, and to be fully released next month.

In response to their invitation, a few conversations got started on Twitter yesterday . . . [more]