Last week the most severe outage in RIM’s history crippled BlackBerry users’ abilities to use e-mail, BBM, and the Internet in general for over three days.

The outage highlighted two deeply concerning issues with RIM. First, it is almost beyond comprehension how a single point of failure could bring RIM’s global network down for this period of time. In the face of fierce competition from Apple and Google, RIM had been able to depend on real-time and reliable e-mail delivery as one of its key competitive differentiators. Not any more.

Worse, the company’s response has come across as arrogant, aloof, . . . [more]

The Law Foundation of Ontario is helping to coordinate articling positions in the Public Interest community, in conjunction with Pro Bono Students Canada (PBSC). From the LFO’s information page:

The Law Foundation of Ontario (LFO) is pleased to announce that it is now accepting applications from prospective host organizations for its groundbreaking Public Interest Articling Fellowship Program for the 2013-14 articling period.

The Public Interest Articling Fellowship was conceived to meet both a significant need for legal assistance within the public interest community and to allow law students to gain valuable experience in public interest law. The program expands

In 2008 Parliament passed the Statutes Repeal Act, aimed at clearing out those portions of federal legislation that have passed, assented to, but not declared in force for, effectively, a decade. That Act was itself proclaimed in force in June of 2010.

Under its provisions, each year the Minister of Justice is to draw up a list of appropriate candidates and present it to the Senate and Commons within five days of the first sitting in the calendar year. Specifically, a target is any statutory provisions that

2….
(a) was assented to nine years or more before the December

If I offered you a free means of advertising your name, profession and contact information every time you sent an email, would you leap at the chance? Surprisingly, many lawyers don’t.

I’m referring to the email signature—an electronic version of your business card that you can attach automatically at the end of an email message. It’s a neat and tidy way of letting everyone know your name, your firm, your contact information and anything else you care to add—every time you send an email message. Many lawyers still send emails without an automatic email signature. At best, this is a . . . [more]

Persons Day this year falls on Tuesday, commemorating 82 years since women were made persons under the law following the Persons Case. LEAF, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, is holding its annual gala Persons Day breakfast in cities across Canada over a number of mornings (Ottawa’s was already held on Friday). There is still time to book your ticket. Last year 5,000 people across Canada attended the breakfast, with 800 in Toronto alone.

The Government of Canada’s Status of Women Canada website has additional information about the “Famous Five” and the Persons Case at http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/dates/gg/case-affaire-eng.html (English) and  . . . [more]

In the latest chapter of the online defamation case by UofO law professor, Joanne St. Lewis, the plaintiff proceeded recently with a motion to compel a response from undertakings and refusals. These motions are rather commonplace in civil litigation, except that the defendant, Denis Rancourt, sought to have a blogger accompany him to report on the proceedings.

The undertakings and refusals emerged from the cross examination of an affidavit, submitted to oppose a motion by the plaintiff to abridge the time for mediation and require the parties to use an experienced private mediator rather than a roster mediator.

Counsel . . . [more]

Google provides a dashboard where you may view and edit the information it collects about you, and set policies for its collection of info in future. Google also describes data it collects that is not editable here.

It’s an interesting interface as much for what it implies as for what it states. Since multiple services, such as Gmail and Picasa, collect personal information independently, any inaccuracies in the various profiles could potentially be identified and corrected. For instance, my gmail profile lists Afghanistan as my location, but I’ll bet that, between Picasa, my calendar info, and various other indicators, . . . [more]

The moon today is waning gibbous and 95% of full — whether or not you can see it through the rain or past the city lights where you are. I suspect that, if you’re at all like me, you don’t often look up and note old luna’s phase. Nor, I suspect again, are you likely able to say just by looking at the image on the right whether the moon’s on its way to or from full. That fact struck me the other day; not only have we in the city — and, I dare say, in nearly all of . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, 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.

“People don’t leave jobs they leave leaders.”

This comment came at the end of a training session with leadership coach Troy King and it stuck with me. In all the discussions I have sat in on, overheard and read in the legal press about the retention of associates never have I heard this idea put forward with such blunt clarity.

I take everything Troy says with consideration. As a Master Certified Coach, and Canadian Coach of the Year in 2010 he is pretty much a Yoda of the coaching profession. I decided to call Troy up to learn more about . . . [more]

I had written about the Just A Click Away project in January 2011. Just A Click Away is a Canada-wide initiative on public legal education and information (PLEI).

It organized a successful conference in Vancouver last February on how to use Internet and social media technologies to better educate the general public about the law.

Just A Click Away is continuing its efforts to bring the law closer to every Canadian and has just announced that it has received funding for Phase 2 of its work with a focus on “Supporting a Culture of Sharing”.

Phase 2 involves 4 organizations: . . . [more]

Site news for those who read Slaw only via RSS or email

1. Comment Watch:

In the last week there were 22 comments. You might be particularly interested in the informative comment by John Gregoryupdating his own post, “Electronic Transferable Records,” from March of this year.

You can subscribe to the comments on Slaw either as a separate matter (RSS, email) or as part of a subscription combining posts and comments (RSS, email).

2. SlawTips

This week’s tips on SlawTips are:

• Tuesday: Technology: The Google Doodles Archive
• Wednesday: