You might have read about LawMeets: It was profiled this week in an ABA Journal news item as the subject of a $500,000 US National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant to its developer, entrepreneur and corporate and securities law Professor Karl Okamoto of Drexel University.

Professor Okamoto is also Director of the Business and Entrepreneurship Law Program at Drexel and founder of ApprenNet, which operates the LawMeets venture. The new LawMeets is an online experiential learning initiative, the virtual evolution of Prof. Okamoto’s live National Transactional LawMeet program, which – live or online – might . . . [more]

♬ Now you need to publish every movement And every single thought to cross your mind
I’m told the Twitterverse is full of rubbish But most of us are actually quite refined
We validate each other’s insecurities And brag about the gadgets that we’ve bought
We laugh out loud at every hint of jolliness And try to self-promote without being caught
You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…♬

Lyrics and music by Ben Walker.

On Monday Aug 13, the Canadian Judges Forum together with the Canadian Bar Association at the Canadian Legal Conference in Vancouver BC, held a . . . [more]

First, an important proviso. Numbers don’t actually matter.

And yet we all obsess over metrics, especially law firms trying to determine some form of ROI for entering the social media space. Largely by default and in part by design, the leading site emerging for tracking social media influence is Klout. Other sites include PeerIndex and Kred.

CEO and Klout Founder Joe Fernandez  told Forbes,

Klout is basically your social credit score. Consumers should care because it affects the way employers, companies and everyone looks at your ability to spread information as a critical part of the

Now when you search Google Patents you’ll be querying a database that includes European patents. Even more useful perhaps is Google’s just-introduced attempt to find “prior art”. Here’s a description of the process from the Google Inside Search blog:

The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web. You’ll start to see the blue “Find prior art” button on individual patent pages starting today.

A prior art search produces Google’s pick of the . . . [more]

A number of blogs in the United Kingdom are reporting that guidelines regarding blogging by members of the judiciary in England and Wales have come down from the Judicial Office. See here for a blog article found on The Guardian‘s website that recaps the situation and provides an interesting commentary.

According to these guidelines, which have not been made available to the public, when blogging, magistrates and judges must not identify themselves as members of the judiciary and must avoid making comments that could damage the public’s confidence in the judiciary.

This last part is not particularly surprising. Judges . . . [more]

I would like to thank my colleagues at Harrison Pensa for being Firm Guest Bloggers on Slaw this week. Their articles focus on emerging issues both in substantive law, and the practice of law itself.

I’d like to share some thoughts on the emerging field of social media law, which includes both of those aspects.

Social media has created many challenges for business, including disparate issues such as violations of copyright, trade-marks, confidential information, and privacy, as well as pushing the boundaries on things such as defamation and employer control over employee actions.

Businesses, including law firms, are racing to . . . [more]

If the maxim Ignorantia juris neminem excusat (“ignorance of the law excuses no one”) means something in a society governed by the Rule of law, legislative materials ought to be made available in a manner that makes the most out of current information technologies. Before the invention of the printing press, such technologies included a stone stele put in a public place in ancient Babylonia or parchment documents issued in several handwritten copies to English medieval barons. Up until 15 years ago, the most efficient technology to disseminate Acts, regulations and related proclamations to wide audiences has been printed sessional . . . [more]

I have been working with some very talented folks planning the CIAJ Annual Conference. The conference will take place October 10-12 at the Fairmont Palliser Hotel in Calgary.

The program (English PDF) for the conference “The Courts and Beyond: The Architecture of Justice in Transition” is very exciting and features a keynote on building justice with architect Jack Diamond, dinner with award winning journalist Paula Simon, and an opening reception at the beautiful, Calgary Courts Centre. The program features fantastic speakers from the bench, the bar, and the academy, including Slaw Columnist Nicolas Vermeys.

I am looking forward to . . . [more]

As readers of Slaw will know, we approached Maritime Law Book a little over a year ago with the idea of a collaboration in which MLB would select certain of its case summaries for Slaw to make freely available online. Slaw converts the summary to HTML and places a precis of it online, along with a link to the full summary in PDF on Slaw’s site and a link to the free version on the MLB site of the unedited case report. (The more than 300 such summaries are available here; the criteria by which MLB selects them can . . . [more]

For a variety of reasons, lawsuits tend to drag on for a very long period of time. It is the plaintiff’s obligation to move the lawsuit forward. When acting for a defendant in a case that has dragged on (through no fault of the defendant), I am often asked whether we can ask the Court to have the lawsuit dismissed for delay. I tell my clients that they can bring a motion to dismiss the action for delay (provided one of the enumerated procedural defaults have occurred), but that winning such motions are extremely difficult. The governing principle taken by . . . [more]

The federal government has announced proposed regulations that will allow banks to opt out of a national customer ombudsman service in favour of private ADR services that they will choose and pay for.

This seems like a bad idea.

If banks can simply shop around for another ADR service provider whenever they are unhappy with the decisions of the current provider, how can consumers and small businesses have any confidence in the integrity and impartiality of decisions?

The Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments (OBSI) currently has more than 600 participating firms including banks, credit unions, trust and loan companies, . . . [more]

Between 1993 and 2003, Canada’s overall divorce rate fell by more than 11%. The most recent statistics available, compiled in 2005 by Statistics Canada, indicated that the divorce rate was hovering around 40%.

However, the same study found that divorce rates for persons over 50 years of age had increased markedly. Similarly, a recent study conducted by Bowling Green State University confirmed that American divorce rates among couples over 50 had doubled within the last 20 years.

The conclusion is clear: Boomer marriages are falling apart at a growing rate, bucking an overall trend towards fewer divorces among members of . . . [more]