♫ You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Ben Walker.

Kendyl Sebesta reported on Oct 31, 2011 in The Law Times that Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger has banned the use of Twitter and such tools inside his court in a high profile murder case.

His ruling permitted the use of electronic devices inside the courtroom, but only for the purposes of the taking of notes.

“Electronic devices that have the capability to transmit or receive wireless signals may not be set to ‘silent’ or ‘airport mode’ settings, but must be completely

Since Slawyers like to know about cool things, I thought I would share some testing I have done in the last couple of days to build an App. I have been trying out Snappii.

Snappii offers the service of building an app using one of their templates, or from scratch using variou widgets they offer. They have a previewer app which lets you see your app to test it. It works on a username and password registration to their site. The tool is remarkably easy, so I created an (unpublished – more on that later) app to post a . . . [more]

[ français / English ]

Le locuteur de plusieurs langues peut généralement comprendre la complexité du travail de traduction. Il sait qu’un bon traducteur ne va jamais traduire mot à mot une phrase d’une langue à l’autre. Il faut plutôt refaire la phrase selon la structure grammaticale de la langue de traduction, les sens différents d’un mot dans cette langue ou les expressions idiomatiques propres. Sans oublier que parfois, la phrase originale contient des référents culturels qui n’auraient pas de sens dans l’autre langue.

Lorsqu’on fait de la vulgarisation et de l’information juridique, c’est encore plus complexe. Souvent, afin de . . . [more]

Aaron Swartz is that rare individual who is prepared to risk imprisonment in order to promote the cause of open access. And we’re not talking about liberating “tunes” or movies or, indeed, anything of much “entertainment value”; Swartz goes for the serious, you might say earnest, stuff. At the moment the young man stands accused of various crimes associated with his downloading of 4.8 million articles from JSTOR. (Many, but by no means all, readers of Slaw will know that JSTOR stands for “Journal Storage” and is a not-for-profit, but paywall-protected, online archive for academic journals.)

There are good . . . [more]

Professor Mari Sako, a fellow of the Novak Druce Centre for Professional Service Firms at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School published a very interesting paper titled General Counsel With Power? From May 2010 to January 2011, Sako interviewed 52 GCs in the US and UK with the aim of analyzing what is happening in the in­house legal departments of major corporations and financial institutions. Interviews explored various areas including the changing relationships with law firms; the extent to which work has become disaggregated; and how multi-sourcing (i.e. the use of multiple sources of legal service delivery, including outsourcing . . . [more]

Flags are being raised by numerous privacy experts about expected federal “lawful access” legislation. This legislation–expected to be reintroduced–was last seen in the 40th Parliament, 3rd session, which ended March 26, 2011 and includes:

• Bill C-50 – Improving Access to Investigative Tools for Serious Crimes Act
• Bill C-51 – Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act
• Bill C-52 – Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act

Excerpted from a commentary by Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario Ann Cavoukian published in today’s National Post:

At issue is the anticipated re-introduction of a trio of federal bills that will provide

Followers of the AvoidAClaim blog will know that fraud attempts against lawyers show no sign of slowing down. Almost daily we see new names and new email addresses being used. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done to track down the actual perpetrators who are often overseas and using free email services.

However, the free email services will shut down addresses being used for illegitimate activities. Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail all have pages where you can submit an email address used in a fraud attempt. Yes, the fraudsters can quickly generate a new one, but shutting . . . [more]

Even in 2011, I receive a surprisingly large number of documents that require me to print them, sign them, and fax them back to the sender. Ironically, most of these documents are sent to me as PDF attachments to e-mails.

We’ve banned physical fax machines at Clio, and instead use RingCentral for sending an receiving faxes. My workflow below helps me avoid having to print and scan documents that require completion and signing:

1. Download the PDF document
2. Open in Adobe Acrobat Professional
3. Use the “typewriter” tool to complete form fields
4. Open a separate PDF file where I’ve signed my name

Just in time for Hallowe’en, we get the scary news from the UN that the population of the Earth will be reaching 7 billion today (give or take 50 million). According to today’s National Post:

Mounting concern over humanity’s environmental impact and fears that we may not be able to feed ourselves 100 years from now cast a cautionary tone over the buildup to Monday’s milestone.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon told students at a New York school last week: “Seven billion people who need enough food. Enough energy. Good opportunities in life for jobs and education. Rights and freedoms.

From my earliest days as a professional I have taught about how best to carry out legal research. Over the years I have instructed high school students, undergraduates, prisoners, graduate students, paralegals, librarians and many, many law students. Something not quite rational drove my interest. Many times I have paraphrased the lines spoken by John Belushi in the classic movie The Blues Brothers, telling people that I was on a mission from God to teach legal research. I have written books, made cassette tapes, video tapes and DVDs about legal research. If this almost obsessive interest had not been . . . [more]

This week the Ontario Suprerior Court of Justice ruled in the costs award in the online defamation case of Baglow v. Smith.

The plaintiff, who lost on summary judgment, sought only minimal costs based on public interest because he claimed the case dealt with a novel point of law and fact situation. He based this on the commentary in the decision on “removing the sting” in blogging, which as I’ve noted here before was a unique approach to dealing with online defamation.

Annis J. rejected this argument and stated that his decision was primarily based on two points:

1. the

Imagine going into Walmart, Superstore or Loblaws to buy Halloween candy and being offered the chance to make a will or get summary legal advice on some issue. This might sound spooky or even scary to many Canadian lawyers but could become a reality in England and Wales with the launch of Alternative Business Structures (ABS) under the UK Legal Services Act. The New York Times has a great article today on non-lawyer ownership of legal services. Australia has permitted non-lawyer ownership of law firms for several years and the US is seriously considering it with the American Bar . . . [more]