First, I congratulate Treasurer Thomas Conway for opening up Convocation to the public via the internet – this has been a long time coming and has permanently shredded the mystique that has surrounded Convocation for far too long. Hopefully this opening up will inspire a new, fresher slate of benchers to be elected in 2015.

But there is still work to be done.

It was said at the last Convocation, and in various other forums, that democracy is messy but it’s better than the alternative. Cue the dramatic music.

That kind of cold war rhetoric is quaint and interesting, even . . . [more]

The Queen’s Bench for Saskatchewan just granted an injunction restraining a former employee from competing against his former employer, soliciting the employer’s clients, and using any of the employer’s confidential information he garnered while working with the employer.

If you are a publisher and your e-book strategy is called EPUB or any of the likes, you are still stuck in the print era.

E-book formats and reader devices came with the promise to transform the way we consume books. However, those formats did not reinvent the book but they rather reinvented paper. They do not necessarily offer the possibility for a use case that is radically different from the use cases that we know from the world of print. True, it is cool and practical to take many more books than we can actually read while on vacation. . . . [more]

Last week the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) met in Geneva to further Member States’ negotiations on several matters.

WIPO published its SCCR 25 conclusions this week, and they are summarized in its SCCR 25 Update. The outcome of the negotiations is progress on three points: work toward a legal instrument to benefit visually impaired or print-disabled persons—the most concrete outcome, it appears (and attaining Canada’s endorsement); exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives and for educational institutions; and the protection of broadcasting organizations.

From the SCCR 25 Update:

Negotiations advanced to the

. . . [more]

The World Justice Project, an international not-for-profit organization, publishes an annual index that ranks countries on a number of scales. The 2012 Rule of Law Index came out today. Canada fares far less well than you might imagine and certainly worse than you'd hope, as the snapshot below of our score on the major scales shows

Don’t get us wrong, we dislike Rob Ford as much as the next guy. Maybe more. And we were delighted with Justice Hackland’s decision on Monday ordering the Mayor be removed from office for violating Toronto’s Municipal Conflict of Interest Act.

We’re ecstatic about him being booted, but we’re also disappointed with how people continue to flippantly ridicule the Mayor about his weight. His physical appearance is irrelevant, and the more his weight gets brought into this, the further we get from legitimately critiquing his horrible record as a member of City Council, not to mention the further we get . . . [more]

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the telecommunications arm of the United Nations, is hosting a World Conference on International Telecommunications starting Dec 3. The agenda includes gaining a role for the ITU on Internet governance. This is in part fueled by repressive government regimes wanting more control over the internet and its users. It has drawn huge opposition from human rights and free speech advocates. Also from companies such as Google. Vint Cerf – now with Google but considered the father of the internet – has come out very strongly against it.

This is a very bad idea. One . . . [more]

Here are the three most-consulted English-language cases on CanLII for the week of November 20 – 27.

♨ 1. R. v. Tremblay 2012 BCPC 410

[1] Mr. Tremblay has entered guilty pleas to two charges: (i) wounding an animal, contrary to section 445(1)(a) of the Criminal Code; (ii) mischief in relation to property, the value of which did not exceed $5000, contrary to section 430(4) of the Criminal Code. It is my duty to impose a fit sentence for each offence.

♨ 2. Honda Canada Inc. v. Keays 2008 SCC 39

[1] On March 29, 2000, after 14 years of

. . . [more]

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to participate in presenting at a Webinar entitled The Firm Leader-COO Team: A Sensitive Balancing Act in Shared Responsibility. One of the questions that was asked by the registrants was this one:

What are the danger signs and which factors greatly impede the development of an effective Firm Leader-COO working relationship?

Here was my response.

One needs to keep in mind that the Firm Leader-COO team, in a sense, is two people who have been forced to work together – rather than having chosen the arrangement voluntarily. That is not intended to be . . . [more]

I was a bit surprised at s statistic that was reported by Jack Newton here at Slaw last week. Though a top 5 desktop app, Evernote showed a usage rate of only 16% in Clio’s annual survey.

There has been plenty of discussion about Evernote here at Slaw, and David Whelan recently discussed Evernote Updates for iOS. An easy link for Evernote clipping was even added to Slaw a couple of years ago.

I used Evernote (the iPad app) last weekend as a ‘meeting binder’ for the background information that I would have otherwise carried to the fall . . . [more]

♫ But I know I had it comin’,
I know I can’t be free,
..
And I ain’t seen the sunshine,
Since, I don’t know when,
I’m stuck in Folsom Prison,
And time keeps draggin’ on…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Johnny Cash.

 

Delays in the courts is not news…unless, that is, where the Judges have decided that they will issue fines against lawyers for failing to keep the cases on schedule. In this case it is the judges in Cowlitz County Superior Court in Washington State, USA who will be issuing the fines.

There the Superior Court . . . [more]

In a country as large as the United States and one boasting as many law schools as it has, the attraction of ranking is almost irresistible. How else to make sense of the profusion? A sensitive and nuanced differentiation and description would tax critics’ creative powers to bankruptcy. Not only, then, are law schools ranked, but law journals also. And here, too, it’s the simple numbers that get used because . . . they’re there, the most important measure being the frequency with which articles from the journal are cited by others (though whether the “others” must be published in . . . [more]