A CNET article entitled Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans’ text messages says that “State and local law enforcement groups want wireless providers to store detailed information about your SMS messages for at least two years — in case they’re needed for future criminal investigations.”

This issue keeps coming up – the Canadian lawful access attempts are another example.

Attempts to force the preservation of this type of communication are tremendously invasive and wrong on many levels. To me, it is no different than asking phone companies to record and save phone conversations or the post office to . . . [more]

It’s December so Christmas, Hannukah and other holidays are right around the corner. For law professors, law students, judges and court staff this is a relief. And the same is certainly true for most lawyers. However, for lawyers that have cases on reserve at the Supreme Court of Canada, the last two weeks of December can be a nerve-wrecking time.

In the last few years, the Supremes have saved some of their biggest cases as a pre-Christmas holiday gifts for all of us SCC-watchers. In 2009, they gave us Grant v Torstar, 2009 SCC 61. The next year, . . . [more]

Let me start by saying I don’t condone shoplifting. Seen as a mere nuisance by some, the ‘five-finger-discount’ is a petty crime that exacts a heavy toll year after year on retailers – be they big box chain stores or mom and pop corner varieties. The cost is initially born by the store-owner but ultimately passed along to lawful consumers by way of increased prices to account for the overhead costs of security and the loss of inventory.

Many shoplifters are doubtless serial offenders with a pathological disrespect for the lawful property rights of others. However, in my experience having . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For the week of November 28 to December 4th:

1. Magder v. Ford 2012 ONSC 5615
   

   [1] This is an application brought by a municipal voter, Paul Magder, under s. 9 of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. M.50 [MCIA] against the respondent, Robert Ford, the current Mayor of Toronto. At a meeting of Toronto City Council on February 7, 2012, the respondent spoke to

From January 31 to February 1, 2013 the Hotel MacDonald in Edmonton will be filled with lawyers and judges attending the Alberta Law Conference. This annual continuing legal education offering is always an excellent learning and networking opportunity. The theme of the 2013 Conference is “Working with Judges and the Courts”. The conference will explore the ways that judges and counsel interact and will also explore techniques for improving such interactions.

I have the honour of hosting the Social Media/Privacy panel at the conference. Naturally, the panel is weighted with some familiar names. Doug Jasinski and Dan Michaluk will . . . [more]

The official report of the October 2012 meeting of the Working Group on Electronic Commerce of UNCITRAL is now online as the first document at this site. (16 pages including formalities)

You will recall that the project is looking for international rules to govern the creation and use of electronic transferable records (ETR), that is, documents that entitle their holder to the delivery of goods or money. The meeting decided that there was enough interest in the topic among businesses and member states to pursue the topic further.

At the outset, the group determined that the elements of negotiability . . . [more]

The United Nations working group for online dispute resolution (ODR) of cross-border electronic commerce transactions (UNCITRAL Working Group III) met in Vienna early in November to continue its work on procedural rules for ODR. This effort has been underway since 2010 and should be nearing completion, but the approach taken by the working group has drawn some criticism from those concerned that its focus is too narrow and its proposed rules will be ineffective.

Professor Vikki Rogers, Director of the Pace Institute of International Commercial Law, one of the facilitators of the 2010 colloquium that put ODR on the UNCITRAL . . . [more]

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
Tagging People Who Do Not Use Facebook in Photos Posted on Facebook
Dan Pinnington

You can actually tag anyone in a photo, even if they don’t have a Facebook account. If you type in the name of someone who is not one of your Facebook friends when tagging a photo, you have the option of listing their email address. . . .

Research
Start at the Beginning
Shaunna Mireau . . . [more]

Justice D.M. Brown has awarded costs against a lawyer who sought (and obtained) an adjournment as a result of falling ill the day before an application.

It sounds crazy, until you discover that the real reason that costs were awarded was as a result of the lawyer’s office failing to properly inform the court about the adjournment.

On the day before the application, at 9:52 a.m., an email was sent by Mr. Cosgriffe’s office to opposing counsel advising them that Mr. Cosgriffe had fallen ill and the need to adjourn the hearing.

At 12:20 p.m. opposing counsel responded and indicated . . . [more]

As medicine advances and we live longer lives, late-life marriage is more common today than it was when the law governing both marriage and wills first evolved. Where the lawyer learns that an older client has entered into a recent, late-life marriage, a degree of caution is recommended and issues of capacity and undue influence should be considered.

In the new Wills & Estates issue of the LAWPRO Webzine, Nora Rock (corporate and policy writer at LAWPRO) interviewed Kimberly Whaley of Whaley Estate Litigation and asked for her practical recommendations for lawyers working with wills clients who have married late . . . [more]

How many knowledge management and IT professionals have heard this refrain? Why can’t we just use Google (or something like Google) to find documents inside our organization? Why do we need to spend time and money organizing documents and adding indexing or classification or a taxonomy?

The problem lies with a significant difference between web pages on the Internet and internal documents: Google uses links from other websites as recommendations as to what is good content. It uses links plus a number of other things together in its secret algorithm–which gets changed periodically–to help its system figure out which web . . . [more]

The month of December has arrived, and so have the 7th annual Canadian Law Blog Awards — a.k.a. the Clawbies! Our public nomination period runs throughout the month; and with the list over at lawblogs.ca closing in on 400 blogs, the choices are better than ever.

Please head over to the Clawbies.ca site for the complete details, but here’s a quick summary of how the awards work:

• Everyone is invited to nominate three of their favourite Canadian law blogs by tweeting (#clawbies2012), emailing, or blogging their choices. And we’re saying it clearly this year: don’t nominate your own blog.