Before Siri and Alexa etc, there was Peggy. Back in the 1990’s, she told users of a pioneering practice management system (PMS) when they had an appointment. I found her most useful when I was distracted on the phone, or otherwise missed a visual reminder on the screen. She just did one task, but did it very well. In an English accent, she simply announced “Sorry to interrupt, but you have an appointment soon”

A more recent woman in my life is Amy Ingram from x.ai. She introduced herself to me about a year ago when I tried to make . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from seventy recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. The Stream  2. David Whelan 3. SOQUIJ  4. ABlawg  5. Ontario Condo Law Blog

The Stream
Thanks to the 3% — Now for the Winning Numbers!

Our survey of British Columbia’s lawyers, discussed in more detail in this post, was a success. We met our survey target of 360 . . . [more]

Matt Mullenweg is yet another tech billionaire college dropout. He may be less famous than Mark Zuckerberg, but the blogging platform he founded, WordPress, powers 25% of the web, including Slaw.

In a recent podcast, Mullenweg explained that most of the hot topics in technology that the tech press bombards us with at any given time are too early in their hype cycle, and that a better source of inspiration for tech projects is to look at what technologies were considered hot 5 years ago.

So I went back to 2011 and found a post entitled “2011: The . . . [more]

2016 has seen a continued focus on digital strategy in the Canadian legal market. Legal industry professionals have been late adopters of digital processes. However, the continued disruption in the Canadian legal market has placed pressure on law firms to find new ways to increase brand awareness and to meet client expectations. So what do law firms need to implement digital policies that improve their bottom line and the client experience? Information and a thorough understanding of client needs.

For the second year in a row, fSquared Marketing has gathered data on the Canadian legal market, to help law firms . . . [more]

For more than 30 years Richard Susskind has been a thought leader on the future of the legal profession.

This is despite the Law Society of England and Wales saying he did not understand confidentiality and was bringing the legal profession into disrepute by suggesting that email would become the predominant way lawyers and their clients would communicate in his 1996 book, The Future of Law.

Susskind’s most recent book, The Future of the Professions: How technology will transform the work of human experts, is a must read for anyone who wants to gain insights into where . . . [more]

Social Media Camp is the national conference on social media that attracts international speakers and attendees. At this year’s event, virtually all presenters agreed that images and video are taking over the internet. What do they mean by this? Consider the following:

• YouTube is now the second largest search engine – just behind Google – and may soon surpass it. (Don’t feel badly for Google as they own YouTube).
• Google is now building four-story data centre buildings to house the servers required to support increased data space needed on the cloud for things like images and video. These guys plan

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

FISCALITÉ : L’information contenue dans les demandes de mandat de perquisition était suffisante pour justifier l’autorisation de perquisitions chez Uber Canada et permettre ainsi la poursuite de l’enquête afin de déterminer si des infractions fiscales avaient été commises.

Intitulé : Uber Canada inc. c. Agence du revenu du Québec, 2016 . . . [more]

Like the local bank, your practice holds valuable information and money. Your computer systems may contain client information, trade secrets, and intellectual property. Your trust accounts have large sums of money. A cyber breach or trust account theft will harm your clients and potentially cripple your practice. Security guards, specialized safes, and sophisticated procedures protect the local bank. What safeguards have you put in place for your practice?

Perceived to be less sophisticated than banks and big companies, lawyers make easy targets for tech-savvy criminals. The payoff, which can include emptying trust accounts and taking advantage of confidential information, is . . . [more]

Apple had an event this week where they announced new products. But it lacked the excitement and wow factor that we have come to expect. Has Apple lost its mojo, or is something else going on here?

New product announcements from Apple and Google seem less impressive than they used to be. They seem more evolutionary than revolutionary.

There could be a number of reasons for that.

Product innovation is happening at a faster pace than ever before. Are we getting so used to that pace that we have higher expectations for innovation than before?

Is the smartphone / . . . [more]

The Internet taunts jurors. Promising them answers. Beckoning them to Google the parties, the law, the lawyers. And after-all, how bad could one search be? If only those lawyers weren’t so boring. If only the evidence was presented clearly. If only the judge’s instructions weren’t steeped in legalese, then we could decide it without the Internet. Whatever the justification may be, whether curiosity got the best of them or it was something else, jurors are Googling. And they are compromising the appearance of justice and maybe justice itself by going beyond the evidence in the courtroom.

Last year, the Ontario . . . [more]

The end of one year and the beginning of another is the usual time for commentators to review what happened during the year and discern the trends. What follows is my synthesis of the recent year-end roundups and what they seem to me to say.

Here are the most pertinent articles:

• 2015 LTN Year in Review from Legaltechnews
• Year in Review: Our Top Legal Tech Stories of 2015 from Nextpoint
• Things That Didn’t Happen In 2015 from Above the Law
• The 10 Most Important Legal Technology Developments of 2015 from Robert Ambrogi on LawSites

Among the trends identified are the . . . [more]

We should be grateful for other peoples’ data breaches – they help us to improve our own security. In our breach-a-day world, we seem to have more data breaches than ever. They come fast and furious – rare is the day when we don’t hear of one or more breaches on the evening news or through online media. Attack vectors change constantly – those of us in information security have a deep sense of humility in the face of constant changes in threats as well as technology, policies and training to defend against those threats.

Herewith, a few of the . . . [more]