The Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC), which for the purposes of clarification is not the regulator of Nunavut but of Ontario, has just released the Interim Report by the Articling Task Force.

The Task Force has previously been commented on Slaw by Adam Dodek and John O’Sullivan. The five options under review include:

1. Maintaining the status quo

2. Status quo with added quality assurance measures

3. Replace pre-license transition requirement with post-license requirement

4. Allowing students to do a practical legal training course (PLTC) during or after law school

5. Abolishing articling in favour of a PLTC . . . [more]

Ever wonder how Google responds to copyright violations? Or, how many URL removal requests it receives from copyright holders? Take a look at Google’s Transparency Report.

The numbers are pretty interesting; and the site is probably worth a bookmark for anyone involved in IP law. You can see, for example, that BPI made 5X more copyright enforcement requests than the RIAA last month. You can also identify which domains are being taken offline, or which file sharing services are receiving the most attention.

An interesting window inside Google…

. . . [more]

Recently I spoke at lawTechcamp at the University of Toronto about the future practice of law. The session generated a great deal of discussion with the audience, some of it quite heated – particularly when I raised the question, “Why should we hire students or junior associates?” The point of my question was to force lawyers to question everything we do – not take any process or practice as a given. The players in the legal industry who are able to forget the past and re-invent how legal services are delivered will be wildly successful.

One of the questions from . . . [more]

The New York state legislature is reviewing two proposed laws that would seemingly make it mandatory for operators of blogs, websites, etc., to take down anonymous comments upon request “unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name and home address are accurate”.

Also included is an obligation for any website “where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages” must develop infrastructure and contact mechanisms for a.) allowing takedown requests to be submitted and b.) for contacting anonymous posters and seeking their . . . [more]

The National Post recently presented the interesting case in which a New Jersey judge must decide whether someone can be “electronically present” in a car, even if they physically aren’t there, and, if so, whether the person can be held liable for events that take place, or that are caused by their electronic presence.

(Also by Jesse M. Lindmar)

With an average of 193.1 billion text messages sent every month in the United States, the importance and use of text messages in litigation is ever-increasing. As a consequence, the importance of text message preservation for e-discovery is also growing. Understanding how text messages can be preserved and the pitfalls to avoid is essential. While we recommend engaging the services of a digital forensics service provider who is familiar with the complexities of mobile phone forensics, there are certain situations in which the end-user can at least create a preserved, forensically sound copy that a . . . [more]

On May 22 the B.C. Supreme Court issued an interesting ruling in Vilardell v. Dunham, 2012 BCSC 748, an application that arose out of a family law proceeding. The plaintiff had sought to be relieved of hearing fees, or fees for the use of the courtroom. It is important to note the fees in question were as existed under a version of the Supreme Court Rules that was repealed and replaced in 2009; hearing fees continue to exist (at least to the point of yesterday’s ruling) but are reduced.

The Courthouse Libraries BC prepared an excellent and short . . . [more]

On May 11 a US District Court issued its long awaited decision in the lawsuit brought by three academic publishers against Georgia State University for its use of copyrighted materials in its “electronic reserves” system. A practice at many universities is to post scans of required classroom readings to secure “student only” websites or course management systems such as Blackboard. The GSU had developed a policy on the use of copyrighted materials that attempted to balance the rights of copyright holders and the University’s fair use rights. The GSU policy includes a “fair use checklist” that is based on the . . . [more]

The Canadian Bankers Association just released a mobile payments reference model as a voluntary guideline for development of mobile payments at point-of-sale in Canada. In practice this means that your phone will have a mobile wallet that replaces your debit and credit cards. Phones with NFC (near field communications) will be able to use this feature to pay by holding it near a payment terminal similar to how we can now use the paypass feature on our cards. The CBA press release has links to the full guideline, and a summary version.

From the press release:

The voluntary guidelines, technically . . . [more]

One of my closest friends is a senior litigation partner at one of the largest law firms in Australia. She has always worked part-time through an arrangement with her firm where she works more than full-time during hectic trial periods and then will take a few weeks or a month off during the various school holidays. I have always admired her tenacity in making this work despite some pushback from her partners when she first started this arrangement eighteen years ago.

Recently, she remarked to me that flexible work arrangements were now common at the large national and international firms . . . [more]

As the status of the various Criminal Code provisions concerning prostitution floats its inevitable way upward towards the Supreme Court, now that the Ontario Court of Appeal has struck down some of them, readers of Slaw might like to learn something about how the matter is handled in other countries. The ever helpful Legal and Legislative Affairs Division of the Library of Parliament’s Information and Research Service has released online a “Prostitution: A Review of Legislation in Selected Countries” (by Laura Barnett, Lyne Casavant, and Julia Nicol) [PDF].

The countries examined are Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Sweden, . . . [more]

Twitter is growing. There is no news in that statement. What is new is that they are now sending users a weekly email about what they are doing. They’ve also made a number of updates to their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Privacy changes include:

• A tailored suggestions feature, which is based on recent visits to websites that integrate Twitter buttons or widgets, an experiment they are beginning to roll out to some users in a number of countries.
• They now support the Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting, which stops the collection of information used for tailored

. . . [more]