It’s an obvious feature of practice that a lawyer’s professional interest will generally gravitate towards the big, the powerful, and the rich — there’s a business side to lawyering, after all, (though I’m not yet prepared to agree with those who say, reductively, that practice is a business), and, as a long-gone uncle used to opine, “It’s gotta be fed and it don’t eat hay.” That said, it’s good, I think, even for those in big towers and Jimmy Choo shoes, to reflect on small wrongs and rightings from time to time, the matters at the bottom of the justice . . . [more]

When you next visit the website, you’ll see a few changes on Slaw. We’ve spruced up the site a little, mostly around the top banner, and we’ve made the recent new features on Slaw a bit more prominent by giving them menu icons at the very top. TalkLaw/ParLoi, MLB-Slaw Case Summaries, and SlawTips have already been introduced here — indeed, SlawTips is already venerable by web standards and has a healthy following of its own. But Noted on Slaw is brand new.

When Delicious got sold, it broke the right-column feature called Slaw Linkblog, where a number of . . . [more]

There are three ways to approach a skillset such as project management:

1. Have a specific rule to apply for every imaginable situation.
2. Analyze every situation anew, based on what you know.
3. Have a set of core principles that you apply as you recognize situations.

Let me offer an analogy. Let’s say I want to program a computer to play tic-tac-toe. I could do so using each of the three approaches above.

1, By rule: Tic-tac-toe is a simple game. There are only nine possible moves to start the game. For each opening move, there are but 8 possible responses, and . . . [more]

Ten months ago, the two Simons sat at the back of the Supreme Court of Canada and watched the argument in Crookes v. Newton, one of a number of Internet defamation cases coming from British Columbia. The decision was handed down this morning as 2011 SCC 47, (October 19, 2011). Among the intervenors were Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Samuelson-Glushko, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, NetCoalition, British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Newspaper Association, Ad IDEM/Canadian Media Lawyers Association, Magazines Canada, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Writers’ Union of Canada, Professional Writers Association of Canada, PEN Canada and Canadian . . . [more]

Bill C-11, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, received second reading in the House of Commons on 18 October 2011. Discussions focussed on balance, openness to listening to interest groups, and specific provisions and scenarios covered and not covered by the bill. If you want a quick catch-up on copyright reform in Canada, take a look at Hansard. . . . [more]

ITBusiness.ca had a story yesterday about a Humber College professor named Tom Green who uses @tomgreen as his twitter name. Fans of comedian Tom Green have been campaigning him to give his twitter name to Tom Green the comedian, who uses @tomgreenlive. 

While it is an amusing story, and professor Tom Green has every right to keep his twitter handle, there is a lesson here.

Even if you are not a social media fan, and you don’t have an immediate desire to tweet or update your facebook status, it is a good idea to at least register your name . . . [more]

Dear Prospective Law School Student:

So you want to go to law school?

In making your decision, I encourage you to closely examine your reasons for wanting to embark on this path and make sure you have considered the pros and cons of doing so. Law school is now quite expensive and involves 4 years of your life (3 years of law school plus typically 1 year of articling). As such, you should not make the decision lightly.

Many of the 10 tips that follow may give the impression that I am against you entering law school. That is . . . [more]

Given the increasing level of globalization in the world today there continues to be considerable interest in trade with emerging markets like China.

Dan Harris of the China Law Blog provides a recommended list of English reading on commercial law in China:

1. The Legal System of the People’s Republic of China in a Nutshell

2.  Chinese Commercial Law: A Practical Guide.

3. China Law Deskbook, A Legal Guide for Foreign-invested Enterprises.

4. Understanding Labor and Employment Law in China

5. Patent Litigation in China

5. Environmental Law in China: Mitigating Risk And Ensuring Compliance

6. Anti-Monopoly Law . . . [more]

Canadian Law is an iPhone app, put together by Lunaform Software, a German based company. The cost is $4.99. The app’s purpose is a little more modest that its name suggests – it provides offline access to over 700 Federal statutes. This includes the full text of all statutes (but not the regulations) in English only. Once the app has been downloaded one does not need to be connected to the Internet to view and work with the statutes.

I reviewed the app on an iPad 2, but I expect that it works the same on an iPhone. As . . . [more]

It begs to be asked, increasingly, who is the customer for professional information publishers. No longer can they think simply about students, teachers, practitioners and librarians. Not when there are KM specialists, procurement managers, IT geeks, consultants and financial managers media buyers and, doubtless, countless others who have a role to play in what is chosen to support the information needs of a firm, corporation or institution.

Nevertheless, decisions need to be made as to what to invent and develop in order to create product and service offerings and, though some will disagree, the focus group, questionnaire and consultancy approaches . . . [more]

Here in la belle province, the announced appointment of an apparently unlingual Supreme Court justice has met with some consternation and criticism. The Barreau de Québec has officially (by letter – linked here) asked the Prime Minister to reconsider his choice.

The Director of the Québec Bar, Mtre Claude Provencher, made the following comments to a French-language blog (my rough translation):

“Bilingualism must be a required competence. It’s a question of equality before justice for all Canadians, regardless of their mother tongue.”

“We request that the government and the parliamentary committed charged with examining these recommendations not name

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries has a brand new website.

There are some really great features of the new site including job postings, easy links to committee publications including items like the Vendor Liaison Committee’s Cost Containment Strategies and the Code of Good Practices for Loose-leaf Publication the Knowledge Management Special Interest Group’s suggested resources and the Courthouse &Law Society Library SIG’s Standards document.

The best parts of the new CALL/ACBD site are reserved for members, and membership is open to those who support the objectives of the association.

The Association is soliciting feedback on . . . [more]