Well, the 2012 Summer Olympic Games will soon begin in London, England.

I am sure many of you are thinking: 100m sprint, marathon, water polo, rhythmic gymnastics, pentathlon maybe.

Is it just me? I hear Olympics, and my mind starts imagining protests over athletes being excluded, the odd bribe here and there, a little bit of trade-mark infringement, a few doping scandals, maybe demonstrators being kettled and baton charged, which all leads to: lawsuits!

There are lots of resources out there to understand the legal aspects of this summer’s London sportapalooza (and of sports in general):

• The most recent issue

. . . [more]

In a previous Slaw post, we indicated that Quebec’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jean-Marc Fournier announced the filing of a draft regulation aimed at making the Gazette officielle du Québec available free of charge on the Internet. Well now it’s official.

This regulation is now in force and allows free access to parts 1 and 2 of the Gazette officielle du Québec published on Publications du Québec website.

The regulation also modifies the price of the paper based annual subscription as well as fees for notices, advertisements and documents published in Parts 1 and 2 of . . . [more]

It’s a fundamental marketing decision for many law firms: How much content should we publish outside our website? For many years, the answer always seemed to be: none. Firms tried to serve and address every audience and every interest in one location. The predictable result was an incredibly cluttered website, both in its message and in its presentation.

The law firm website was never intended to be a single-subject, single-audience, publishing powerhouse. Fortunately, many firms have realized this and have wised up. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the rapid transfer of “commentary” from firm websites, pushing that content . . . [more]

Both Manitoba and Ontario recently added gender identity and gender expression to their human rights legislation as prohibited grounds of discrimination.

On June 29, 2012, legislation for Pooled Registered Pension Plans (PRPPs) has been given Royal Assent. PRPPs will be an excellent addition to the retirement savings options for small business owners and their employees. This legislation implements the federal framework for a new pension option for the millions of Canadians currently without access to a workplace pension plan.

Cloud-based Practice Management Systems (PMS) roll on as an increasingly alluring option for law firms. Packages such as CLIO and Rocket Matter have attracted serious investment this year, while adding features standard in their more mature desktop rivals, such as document merge. Other PMS available in the marketplace are also surprisingly powerful. ActionStep, for example, started life as a workflow engine, but has grown into a full-feature PMS.

For those in smaller firms who are reluctant to let “strangers” manage their server, I remind them that I would certainly prefer to occasionally lose access to my data, than to . . . [more]

Following the inspiring lead of Connie Crosby and Shaunna Mireau, I’m sharing a summer project list. I have quite a long summer project list, and it has had to face regular trimming. Summer rarely seems to offer the generous spare time foreseen during the hectic days of the late spring term.

My summer project list contains standard mundane tasks like reorganizing files – physical and electronic – as well as institutional projects difficult to achieve during the academic term, and taking a bird’s-eye view of library collections and services. I won’t bore anyone with those.

Some of the invigorating . . . [more]

Helen Woganowski is mad as hell and she’s not going to bake it anymore.

This poster went up recently on hoardings near me:

At first I thought Helen might have been done for nicking a bag of cookies and was making a sort of Twinkie-cum-necessity defence. But no. Turns out the allegation is that she’s the aggrieved because, in her opinion, Mississauga-based Allan Candy has used her recipe for its Desert Bites. I gathered this from the blog, Justice for Helen, set up to make her plaint.

Trouble is — well, troubles are —

• she doesn’t explain how she

. . . [more]

Over the last few years there has been much controversy over the negotiation of the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. Problems included that it was being negotiated in secret with little information being disclosed, lobby groups were granted unequal access, and the substance of the agreement proposed heavy handed enforcement.

It was signed last October, but apparently needs to be ratified by a certain number of signatories before it comes into effect. And even after that, the substantive provisions of international treaties such as this are not binding on individuals in any country until that country adopts laws that . . . [more]

As some people will have heard, CERN researchers have announced that they have seen evidence of particle which they believe to be a boson and which may be a Higgs Boson, aka the “God” particle. In related news, a contingent of Fleet St. reporters (some of whom might have once worked for Rupert Murdoch) have been dispatched to the Quad to interview the entity who is always about. . . . [more]

As short as 6 weeks ago in a SLAW post on my most frequently used iPad apps I bemoaned the fact that there was not a robust word processor for the iPad.

Either I overlooked what must have been a recent update to Pages for iPad at that time or in fact there was an actual update in the last 6 weeks, since it is now relatively easy to add footnotes (and headers and footers, among other things) while word processing in Pages.

The online help from Apple here discusses how to do this (it is simply a matter of . . . [more]

On June 25th, 2012, the Federal Court of Appeal denied the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants (CSIC) appeal of the decision by the Minister of Immigration to appoint the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council (ICCRC) as the Regulator of Immigration Consultants.