I spent last week at LegalTech in New York. It was a huge, thought provoking, intimidating, useful, connected, and intriguing experience. I was sent to the conference to investigate software in some specific market segments for my firm, and it was very useful for making connections with vendors and surveying the landscape of available products. There were very few librarians in the crowd.

The LegalTech experience could lead someone to believe that the most important technology function in our industry is eDiscovery. Predictive coding was another theme that bubbled to the surface multiple times along with cloud computing solutions.

Contrast . . . [more]

Early this year, the Department of Justice released, seemingly for the first time, a report titled “Costs of Crime in Canada, 2008” by Ting Zhang [PDF version]. Given the impending omnibus bill on crime and the likely large increase in the costs to the provinces from their associated responsibility for corrections, this report might be of some interest.

It consists, essentially, of a series of “appendices” that set out cost tables for, respectively, the criminal justice system, the victims of crime, third parties, and finally intangible costs (pain and suffering, value of loss of life) associated . . . [more]

For many members of the general public seeking to understand the law, Wikipedia is the first and perhaps only stop. Others may go further and eventually come across equally accessible but considerably more reliable sources – online or otherwise. In any event, there is often a gulf between where the general public goes to understand the law and where the understanding is available.

Based on observations of a little experiment in contextual-linking, small efforts can go a long way toward bridging that gulf.

Contextual-linking is different from promotional or advisory linking such as is found on the “links” page of . . . [more]

Julian Assange’s extradition appeal was heard at the UK’s highest court on 1 and 2 February. Assange is trying to avoid being sent to Sweden to face allegations relating to sexual encounters there in 2010. The key issue is whether a public prosecutor is a valid judicial authority.

Two things about this appeal illustrate the flexibility of what is wrongly thought to be a crusty, fossilized world. Both barristers in this extremely high profile case are women. And the proceedings were broadcast live from the court room. Here is an extract from the hearing.

And Simon Chester’s post today reports . . . [more]

Not all fraudsters are strangers. Even partners, associates, law clerks or other employees may turn to fraud because of financial pressures from a divorce, failed business venture, or other personal crisis. Its usually the last person you’d expect, and often one of your most long-standing and trusted employees.

Here are the red flags:

• Someone never takes vacation or sick leave, works overly long hours, or refuses to delegate work.
• A firm member undergoes a sudden change in lifestyle or change in temperament.
• The firm receives mail for a corporation for which no client file is opened or billed, or minute

Library Boy told us last year about some tentative steps that courts were making to embrace – or to sniff around tentatively – the whole subject of social media. Today’s announcement from the UK Supreme Court that it will start official tweets of judgments – this in anticipation of the Assange extradition decision – represents the first wholesale adoption by a final court of appeal.

It overshadows Chief Justice McLachlin’s announcement within a speech at Carleton University on the Media and the Courts, that the Canadian judiciary should start to think seriously about social media.

See the Globe, the . . . [more]

Two weeks ago federal prosecutors in the US shut down MegaUpload, one of the most popular file-sharing sites on the Internet. The site was a widely-used “digital locker” that stored files for millions of users world-wide. Some of those users, however, used the side for illegitimate purposes, turning the site into a hub of what the US prosecutors characterized as “massive worldwide online piracy.”

While there’s no question large quantities of illegal, pirated material was successfully removed with the MegaUpload takedown, thousands of innocent users have lost access to their files as a result of the takedown. The legality . . . [more]

The Strategic Planning Society recently posted on their Linkedin site the seemingly straight-forward question: “What is a good definition for vision?”

Now please keep in mind that this question is being posed within the fraternity of those who have fostered and perpetrated the belief that every organization should have a vision and that the organization’s leader should be a “visionary” – the originator of such a vision. A flurry of responses came from a community who hold titles like Strategic Planning Manager, Senior Resource Planning Manager, Head of Planning and Control, Senior Manager Strategy Solutions, Strategy Execution Advisor, Managing Partner, . . . [more]

Back at the end of the last millennium, the Centre de recherché en droit public (CRDP), along with colleagues from the Centre de recherches informatique et droit (CRID) and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) obtained a research grant from the European Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumers to develop what would become the ECODIR (Electronic Consumer Dispute Resolution) ODR platform.

Launched in Brussels in October 2001, the ECODIR platform was well received by the various stakeholders: consumer associations, professional associations, industrial groups, the public sector, the European Commission, etc. The technical aspects of the . . . [more]

What is the responsibility of a public body to notify a third-party when a request for information is made? The Supreme Court of Canada considered this question in Merck Frosst Canada Ltd. v. Canada (Health), on appeal from the Federal Court, and released this week. Although the appellant’s appeal was dismissed by the court, they did highlight some areas of improvement for the drug application process.

A competitor of the appellant pharmaceutical company, Merck Frosst, requested information under the Access to Information Act about submissions Merck had made to Health Canada. The submissions were required under the Food and . . . [more]

The Paris court of appeals has decided that a suggested search query generated by the Google Suggest function defamed the company whose name was first entered into the search box. This feature works by displaying the most popular searches performed by other Google searchers associated with the text typed into the search box. So Google doesn’t decide what is displayed; its machines just count and show.

Turns out that one of the most popular associations with the name of the plaintiff company was ‘escroc’, which in French means crook or swindler.

Is this a kind of ‘crowd-sourced’ defamation? What can . . . [more]