This was how David Sterns, one of the panel members at an OBA civil litigation session last week, described the Ontario Court of Appeal’s 5 December judgment interpreting the new summary judgment rule. (See Simon Chester’s post last week for a good description of the amendment and the decision.)

Despite all the energy and resources being devoted in our modern system of civil justice to mediation, alternative dispute resolution and most recently judicial dispute resolution, in its 111 page judgment in Combined Air and four other cases, the Court of Appeal reinforces the primordial elements of the trial in our . . . [more]

The 2011 Apple in Law Offices Survey saw over 750 respondents provide insight on how Apple devices, ranging from the iPhone to the MacBook, are impacting the way they practice law.

iPad

Unsurprisingly, the iPad saw a huge jump in usage. In the 2010 survey, 26% of respondents used an iPad in their law office; in the 2011 survey, that figure jumped to 56%. The remaining 44% of lawyers without an iPad apparently don’t plan on going without one for long: 71% of respondents were considering purchasing iPads for their law office in the next year:

Mobile

On the mobile . . . [more]

‘Tis the season for law firms (and no doubt others) to send out season’s greetings by email, most often accompanied by the usual wordy and sometimes bilingual notices that the content of the email may be confidential, privileged and subject to diverse prohibitions that we are more or less politely admonished to comply with.

Here’s a typical, though polite, version (French omitted):

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The contents of this electronic mail message are confidential and strictly reserved for the sole use of its intended recipients. This message may contain information protected by the solicitor-client privilege. If you receive this message in

. . . [more]

[This is the text (updated for SLAW) of a Fraud Alert that LAWPRO sent to Ontario Lawyers December 15, 2011.]

LAWPRO continues to see high numbers of bad cheque frauds targeting lawyers across Canada and the U.S., as well as several other countries around the world. On a monthly basis, 250-300 lawyers advise us that have been targeted by bad cheque frauds. We are seeing the same types of scams over and over again, and on a weekly basis we are seeing two or three new fraudster client names. And these frauds are becoming more sophisticated. Very experienced lawyers have . . . [more]

Creating an annual roundup of legal web technology predictions was never on my personal “to do” list. Rather, it was an accidental offering started here at Slaw a few years ago. Now, much like repeated broadcasts of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” it’s somehow become a holiday tradition.

Some of these predictions pick up on current trends, and extend my own perspective of how that trend might play out in the legal market. Others ideas are clearly more “blue sky,” my honest attempts at swinging for the fences (or more accurately, my emulations of the Mighty Casey). Either way, this is . . . [more]

Words have meaning. The context, tone, and interplay give rise to nuances that is the basis for statutory and case law interpretation. But sometimes the iteration of words have meaning too. The frequency and repetitiveness of certain words can at times given insight into a culture or society.

At Jurix: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems in Vienna, Austria earlier this week, Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Julie Seaman, Adam Candeub & Eugene Agichtei proposed the idea of Legal N-Grams in conjunction with a beta pre-release of Legal Language Explorer, a new web . . . [more]

CanLII has presented us with an early Christmas present. They are offering up their new hyperlinking tool. As the linking page (found under Tools) states:

This tool automatically adds hyperlinks in your document to legislative and case law citations corresponding to materials posted on the CanLII website. This functionality is powered by Lexum’s LexHub, the same technology that is used to add hyperlinks within CanLII’s decisions.

I know, this is just a new version of their Reflex API that Simon wrote about in 2008. I covered the previous source of the API, the CanLex site in 2009. CanLex . . . [more]

What does the Byzantine musical symbol kai apothes look like? Unicode knows. Because we human beings do love to “scribble, scribble, scribble” that computer industry standard boasts “more than 109,000 characters covering 93 scripts,” according to the Wikipedia entry. Fear not, however: I’m not about to regale you with tens of thousands of squiggles. No, I’m going to let you do it yourself.

Actually, I’m pointing you to Shapecatcher, a modest little website that invites you to draw any shape you like and promises to find you the unicode character nearest in outline. So, for example, I gave . . . [more]

On December 15, 2011, Quebec's Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jean-Marc Fournier announced the filing of a draft regulation aimed at making the Gazette officielle du Québec available free of charge on the Internet.

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

. . . [more]

Access to justice issues in the Canadian civil justice system are often framed around affordability, geography, and the quality of service provision. Affordability is most often linked to the high costs of privately provided legal services and the underfunding of legal aid. Geography has recently been shown to be relevant in major studies in Alberta and Ontario, one by the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, the other by the Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project. Both emphasized that lawyers and paralegals are overwhelming concentrated in large urban centres. The quality of public service provision has been an issue in the case . . . [more]

The public library is a wonderful spot for information, entertainment, socializing, technology, education and more. Have you ever wondered about the actual value of your library to you? Perhaps impossible to translate into dollars and cents, however I recommend you try the library use value calculator to see how much it predicts you would be paying out -of-pocket for your library services. It would be interesting to see a similar calculator for law libraries. . . . [more]