Earlier today, the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned the summary judgement decision in Baglow v. Smith, which dismissed the online defamation action in the context of political blogs. The case was previously summarized on Slaw before here, with costs decision mentioned here, and additional commentary here.

Today’s decision will allow the action to proceed to trial.

The key excerpts of the decision follows: . . . [more]

As I write this, deadlines for submission to various legal ranking directories are fast approaching. This one is a survey where you rank lawyers in your field. That one is an interview where you’re asked who (after you, of course) is the best in your field. Another asks to whom you would refer a client if you couldn’t act for that client. Their timetables, criteria, and requirements are all different. Lawyers find the submission process laborious, unproductive, and frustrating. However, they are even more frustrated when they see their competitors’ names ranked above their own names (or worse, not seeing . . . [more]

General Counsel have a great opportunity to change how legal services are delivered – if they choose to do so. While some have made strides to change things up so that they may assume a more strategic and value-added role within their companies (which in my view is the best role for GCs and their teams), many choose to remain reactive fire-fighters, policing an increasing number of outside law firms. In fact many advertisements for in-house counsel now stipulate that experience managing outside law firms is a vital quality for employment. Surely companies should be hiring in-house counsel to bring . . . [more]

Through a recent tweet from Omar Ha-Redeye (@OmarHaRedeye), we learned that private member's Bill C-304, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act (protecting freedom) passed third reading in the House of Commons without much media coverage, public attention or debate from the opposition parties.

An almost overwhelming amount of information is generated and stored in disparate places in our digital world. Email, documents, tweets, posts, status updates, reports, and other data flow through our computers, tablets and smartphones. Cataloging and retrieving this information is a challenge. Fortunately there are a variety of tools that make simultaneously searching through these data mines a little easier.

At Your Command

Operating system search tools, including MS Window 7 and Apple’s OS X Lion Spotlight, allow users to search files and emails locally and on external drives. They both can also be extended to search Web sources, . . . [more]

Last week I attended a course at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria. I was one of several librarians in a class consisting mostly of digital humanists learning about digital pedagogy. We created hypothetical or real learning assignments relevant to our own fields.

In one of our exercises, the class explored an excellent (beta) site of digital research tools, a site new to me: Project Bamboo’s DiRT, which evolved from an earlier DiRT wiki. The site is a categorized collection of research tools, some of which were familiar but most of which were new . . . [more]

[This is the text of a LAWPRO Alert sent to real estate lawyers in Ontario June 13, 2012.]

Do any of these names ring a bell: Kin Hang Cheung, Haru Hayate or Hideki Kazuhiro?

OR – is someone from overseas asking you to act on a real estate matter? Is a real estate agent you know sending you new business from an offshore client?

Be wary: Real estate lawyers like you (as well as real estate agents) are being targeted all over the continent by a new fraud scam.

To date we’ve heard from lawyers in Toronto (purchase of a . . . [more]

Unless it’s just a glitch in the DRM system, the online version of the Ontario Reports looks to be freely available. Historically, the ORs are a benefit earned by membership in the Law Society of Upper Canada. If so, it’s a pleasant development. (Although, the digital ORs have been the subject of criticism aimed at their failure to take advantage of the functionality that the web offers: they are essentially a photographic image of the print service.)

[hat tip: @davidpwhelan] . . . [more]

Like lots of issues confronting judges, sentencing is no easy matter, tied as it is to the facts of the instant case yet bound within loose limits set by similar-fact precedents. A new service, Rangefindr, aims to make it easier for lawyers and judges to estimate the impact of precedent in a given case.

Research lawyer Matthew Oleynik and his team have analysed and tagged thousands of sentencing cases, double checking their results with computer indexing, to create a database from which relevant precedents can be easily retrieved. The manner of using the service is illustrated in a video . . . [more]

June 6, 2012 was chosen by the Internet Society as the world IPv6 launch day. Major ISPs, web companies and home networking equipment manufacturers have now turned IPv6 on permanently.

IPv6 is a new internet addressing scheme that will replace IPv4, the current scheme. The main issue was that IPv4 only allows 4.2 billion addresses, which is not enough to meet world demand – especially given the number of smartphones, computers, servers, and the future of the internet of things. IPv6 allows for 340 undecillion addresses (3 followed by 38 zeros).

More information can be found in this cnet . . . [more]

In my last posting, I presented a two unusual management metrics, specifically challenging readers to look at the amount of management “time spent exploring new opportunities” and to examine how many “new revenue ideas were launched” by the firm in the past year. In this second column, I want to explore with you some of the other metrics that may make sense for you to consider examining:

Metric #3: Defining Distinctive Attributes That Clients Value

One of the most difficult questions that we all face, that is sometimes articulated but always on a prospect’s mind is: “Why should I . . . [more]

According to dictionary.com, communication is “the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs.” That sounds pretty simple, but wait, can a word with that many syllables and so many modes of connectivity really be that simple? In the library world we know that if communication were easy, straightforward and not prone to misinterpretation, a lot of our time would be saved. Library school was all about the “reference interview”, and if I’ve learned anything since then, it is that the art of understanding and deconstructing someone else’s question is one of the most difficult . . . [more]