It has been a long while since we mentioned the Innovaction Awards. The 2011 winners were recently announced, and a Canadian group are among the winners:

Berwin Leighton Paisner, LLP (BLP) was selected for their Lawyers On Demand (LOD) initiative which began in 2007 after BLP observed two important issues affecting the UK legal market: (1) legal services clients want to stretch their budgets further and (2) many lawyers are looking for greater flexibility and autonomy in their work. BLP created LOD to address these issues. LOD challenged the traditional models of legal service delivery and brought talented freelance

If you’re interested in the online sound bites coming out of the 2011 ILTA conference, here are a couple of worthy sources:

• There seem to be two Twitter hashtags running, so try both #ILTA11 and #ILTA2011;
• The official conference Twitter account is @ILTAConf;
• Mobile apps available for iPhone, BB, Android and mobile-web;
• TR’s Legal Current is doing a good job with the post-session roundups;

And perhaps the best of all… As sessions are completed, the presentations and handouts are available for download at: http://conference.iltanet.org/downloads . . . [more]

It goes without saying that balancing family while working for a “big-law” firm can be a challenge. I am reminded of that on a weekly basis. Other jobs are just as demanding (if not more). It has become de rigueur for employers (especially law firms) to tout their approach to promise a positive work-life balance. However, there are few ways to confirm that an employer’s advertising confirms with their employees’ reality.

In response to this issue, the Quebec government has launched a unique program: a corporate certification regarding work-family balance. The certification is for all businesses, regardless of their size. . . . [more]

There is an August 22, 2011 decision from the U.S. District Court, Eastern District, in the Matter of Historical Cell-Site Information, 10-MC-897 (NGG), NYLJ 1202511989637 that Slaw readers may find interesting. The U.S. Attorney’s office wanted 113 days of cell phone records from Verizon Wireless. The court said:

While the government’s monitoring of our thoughts may be the archetypical Orwellian intrusion, the government’s surveillance of our movements over a considerable time period through new technologies, such as the collection of cell-site-location records, without the protections of the Fourth Amendment, puts our country far closer to Oceania than our Constitution

The most recent Canadian Bar Association annual meeting just wrapped up in Halifax, and while I missed this one, I attended many previous editions (more recently called Canadian Legal Conferences) while with the CBA. 

At each CLC, I came to notice, Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin’s keynote address could always be counted on to include a call for the legal profession to do more pro bono work. I suppose the fact that this is an annual request from the chief justice indicates that it’s not generating the results she might like to see. 

But it does illustrate the fact that . . . [more]

The following is a quote from the book, From Third World to First, by Lee Quan Yew, prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. The quote refers to his appointment of ministers.

The attrition rate was high because, despite all the psychological tests, we could never accurately assess character, temperament and motivation.

Here at Maritime Law Book we have had the same experience in the hiring of employees.

Marks at school or university, taken alone, are not determinative of an applicant’s likely success in a position such as a legal editor. Character traits are an important indicator or . . . [more]

Google’s venture capital arm, Google Ventures, is intent on disrupting the legal market.

First, it invested in LawPivot, a Quora-style Q&A platform for providing legal advice to businesses. LawPivot has now opened its platform to the public, allowing lawyers to answer businesses questions in a venue visible to the public.

This new twist on LawPivot’s business model will build up a valuable and publicly-accessible knowledgebase of legal advice for businesses to leverage. LawPivot will also provide lawyers a high-visibility platform to demonstrate their expertise to prospective clients.

Google Ventures has also recently invested in Rocket Lawyer, . . . [more]

TitlePLUS’s Ray Leclair has provided prospective condo buyers with a checklist of things they should know about before deciding to purchase. This list was made available to the public in several real estate publications.

1. Status Certificate: This document should be a condition in any agreement to purchase. It includes important information such as monthly expenses, pending legal actions and other matters, including how much the condo has in reserve funds, which could affect future fees. It also includes the documents governing the condominium: the declaration, by-laws and rules & regulations. These documents govern many aspects of condo life. You

Time and circumstance have been good to me. I began studying China in 1968. Why I did so was a mystery to all concerned. No one in my family had dreams further than the boundaries of Canton, Ohio. As my father, a working man who thought that I was throwing my life away by studying the Chinese language, put it, “You never even met a Chinese person before you went off to college. We don’t even have a Chinese restaurant in this town!” My decision was not based on practical reasoning; I just discovered as a freshman in college that . . . [more]

Background

I initially mentioned the lawsuit against Law Buzz last year when it was first launched. The case settled earlier this summer, with the plaintiff opting to move forward with her business. But a spin-off lawsuit was launched by Tycho Manson, one of the defendants in the original action, against anonymous posters commenting about him on the original case.

Pepall J. of the Ontario Superior Court heard a motion earlier this month in Manson v. Doe, dealing with a various forms of relief by the plaintiff, Manson:

1. an order seeking validation of service by e-mail
2. an injunction requiring

Corruption in government and business can occur everywhere; no country is totally immune. (See, for example, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.) But in some countries and in some industries the demands for bribes and kickbacks or the promise of favours for favourable decisions are a serious reality. Governments that wish to halt or hinder corruption have passed anti-bribery and corruption legislation, proscribing not only corrupt acts that take place within their jurisdiction but also acts that take place ex juris if committed by their nationals or businesses incorporated within their jurisdiction. Britain’s Bribery Act 2010, which came into . . . [more]