As Connie mentioned, the annual Consumer Electronics Show is now underway in Las Vegas. The tech press is full of commentary on the latest and greatest things at the show. One trend is that everything is becoming more intelligent and more connected, ranging from TV’s to appliances.

That results in many great features and new capabilities. At the same time, a Washington Post article entitled Privacy rights activists worry about potential abuse of high-tech devices featured at CES event points out that we can’t forget about the privacy issues that comes along with this technology.

The article starts off . . . [more]

We are just preparing the 2012 Online Legal Services Conference. It seems that in the last year or two the legal, business and technology planets have aligned to produce a surge in interesting web-based projects hitting our legal shores. Far from overnight inspirations, many seem to have been nurtured for years. Often the result of pain experienced by lawyers, or their clients.

When such projects ferment for so long, their depth can be surprising. They start out providing solutions to real problems the legal entrepreneur has experienced, but are enriched by feedback from numerous sounding boards.

Another observation is . . . [more]

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled today in Awad v. Ziriax et al, blocking a proposed constitutional amendment that would forbid domestic courts from considering or using international law. The more controversial aspect of the amendment is that it would also ban courts from using or considering Shari’ah law.

The Appeals court upheld the decision of The Western District Court of Oklahoma on November 29, 2010 to grant a preliminary injunction blocking the amendment, and stated,

Appellants argue there is no discrimination because the amendment bans all religious laws from Oklahoma courts and Sharia law

About three weeks, my colleague and fellow blogger Genevieve Lay wrote a post about the brewing storm in Montreal regarding the Canadiens’ appointment of the unilingual Anglophone Randy Cunneyworth as head coach. Perhaps because it was posted shortly before Christmas, Genevieve’s post did not garner any comments. However, the debate has intensified, both in the “blogosphere” and in Montreal.

In short, many Québecois feel that the Canadiens should appoint only a bilingual or Francophone coach. Local Québec papers got in the act, calling for the Canadiens’ General Manager’s head for his insentive decision. In response to the furor, the Canadiens . . . [more]

Here are the three most-consulted English-language cases on CanLII for the week of January 1 – January 9.

♨ 1. Bouzari v. Iran 2004 CanLII 871 (ON CA)

[1] From June 1993 to January 1994 Houshang Bouzari was abducted, imprisoned and brutally tortured by agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Shortly after his release, he escaped from Iran and eventually came to Canada as a landed immigrant in 1998. He now seeks to sue Iran for the damages he suffered.

♨ 2. Saskatchewan (Social Services) v MS 2011 SKQB 481

[1] T.J.E.S. . . . was apprehended by officials

Does your law library have a strategic plan? Is the plan available, aligned, and has it been shared? Is process measured against the plan? Is your plan in a document, embedded in your budget report, unwritten?

I have some work to do this January to assemble the strategy of my firm library into a working document that can be referenced by my team and by other members of the firm. While we have a strategy and we are executing it, it is less available than it should be.

Confidence in our library team is high, we had excellent response to . . . [more]

Last summer I wrote an article that was scheduled to be published in the Law Library Journal. The article, like Gaul, was divided into three parts. Each of the three was edgy. The first was a reflection on the end of scholarly bibliography as a mainstream intellectual activity. The second was an overheated rebuttal of a piece on the nature of Law Librarianship that the eminent Professor G. Edward White had written in the Green Bag a few years back. The third part consisted of me pontificating on the future of academic law librarianship in the United States. In that . . . [more]

In late December the Law Society of England & Wales issued a practice note setting out a number of guidelines for solicitors concerning social media.

The note, clearly aimed at tyros in the social media scene (which will likely include most lawyers, whether there or here, I’d guess), begins by asserting that social media offer the professional benefits of marketing, interaction with clients, networking, and public education, and present risks such as “the blurring of the boundaries” between professional and personal lives. As well, social media activity is seen as possibly testing the principles of integrity, independence, and maintaining public . . . [more]

Uncertainty… is a lawyer’s discomfort. When I sit down with clients and ask them to “project how many cases this business development initiative could produce,” they squirm in their seats. Then they say… “It depends on… I don’t know if… It’s hard to say.” It happens every time!

As lawyers, you are trained to find the certainty and the precedence. You want to know the answer before you ask the question. That is what makes you good lawyers. But, it is also what makes you lousy business development planners and strategists!

Strategizing requires that you: make educated guesses, take leaps . . . [more]

For some reason Yeat’s poem The Second Coming bubbled up in my mind when I read an article based on an interview with the incoming chairman of the UK bar, Michael Todd in the Law section of the London Times recently. These lines of the poem in particular –

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”

I don’t suppose Yeats was foreshadowing the turf war between barristers and solicitors much, or that he was particularly worried about it. But promoters . . . [more]

Over the last four days there has been a massive spike in bad cheque frauds targeting lawyers in across Canada (BC, Ontario and Quebec), the U.S. (NC, NY) and several other countries around the world (including Australia, Fiji, Italy, Scotland, Sweden, Turkey and the U.K.).

Almost 300 lawyers notified us that they received an initial contact message on one of these frauds. As LAWPRO would receive reports on a fraction of the attempted frauds, it would appear that thousands of lawyers have been targeted over the last four days. Several thousand lawyers have visited the AvoidAClaim blog for more information . . . [more]

The EU privacy directive (1995 version – I gather that it is being revised, though I don’t know on what timetable) provides that member countries may not release personal information outside the EU unless the recipients are bound by equivalent safeguards for privacy.

While the US has a ‘safe harbor’ agreement with the EU about criteria for judging when the protections are equivalent, Canada does not. On the other hand, we have a generally applicable privacy law (PIPEDA) and some provincial equivalents, plus personal health information laws in most provinces. Are they enough to permit the personal information to come . . . [more]