It may not be a giant step for mankind, but it’s at least a baby step toward the technological modernization of Ontario’s archaic court system.

On April 16, 2014, Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General  announced the launch of OntarioCourtDates.ca, an online service that lists daily dockets for all Ontario Court of Justice and Superior Court of Justice courtrooms throughout the province.

Searching the website by municipality and case name, you can access listings of the next day’s pending cases, court room numbers and scheduled hearing times.

The AG’s press release notes:

• The online daily court lists will

♫ if you could hear my heartbleed
you’d hear me scream set me free
if you could feel my heart bleed..♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by the Peppermint Creeps.

The Heartbleed vulnerability has garnered a lot of press lately.  It has (understandably) set many on edge and left wondering if they are vulnerable and if so, what should they be doing about it?  Our colleague, friend  (and past columnist) Laura Calloway, attorney, past ABA TECHSHOW Chair and Director of Service Programs and Practice Management  Assistance Program at the Alabama State Bar wrote this piece on Heartbleed and we …

Amidst all the hype about this week’s t, I made the jump on the weekend to Windows 8.1 from the first of our remaining, four XP computers.

Overall, it was a pretty seamless and surprisingly anti-climatic event, particularly given my long avoidance of this change, buttressed as it has been by the many mixed reviews of the Windows 8 interface I’ve encountered online.

We have a number of Windows 7 computers in our office, all of which have performed admirably. It certainly would have been my initial preference to replace my remaining home and office XP computers with Windows 7, …

♫   There’s a bridge
I don’t know how to cross yet
I need your hand
To hold along the way..♫

Music and lyrics by: Tozer, Faye/lauper, Cyndi/pilsford, Jan/irn, Jasper, recorded by Steps.

Since I am just recently back from ABA Techshow in Chicago which was held last week, I thought this blog post could be an amalgam of the sessions that touched on going paperless that I saw as well as the management issues that were raised in these sessions.

To start, there are “Three Key Steps to Paperless Success.” These are:

1. Everything gets scanned
2. You need protocols

Thanks largely the excellent work being done at Avoid a Claim blog by LawPro, Ontario lawyers’ professional liability insurer, we now receive ongoing updates about cybercrime, and in particular, criminal efforts to target law firms and steal from lawyers’ bank accounts.

A post last week by Tim Lemieux provided a splendid, nuts and bolts roadmap on the steps fraudsters took to steal several hundred thousands of dollars from a law firm trust account. It all began with a phishing email that duped a firm’s unwitting bookkeeper into providing its bank account numbers by telephone directly to the bad guys.…

♫ Wake up and live, y’all!
(Wake up and live) Wake up and live now!
You see, one – one cocoa full a basket,
Whey they use you live big today: tomorrow you buried in-a casket…♫

Lyrics and music by Bob Marley, Anthony Davis, recorded by Bob Marley and The Wailers.

This post is being written up in Whistler BC while on a spring-break ski trip.  Garry sent me an email that he will be off to Jamaica this week to lie under a palm tree.  Whether it be snow or sand that calls to you, the important …

Are you thinking of building (or updating) your law firm’s website?

As my firm begins an overhaul of our ten-year old site, I’ve certainly learned it can be a bit of a daunting task.

Website-building for lawyers has become considerably more complicated over the last decade. The public has become much more sophisticated in its expectations of professional websites and the extension of law firms’ online presence, beyond websites to blogs and social media, creates challenges for firms seeking to maintain a consistent message and identity online.

There is no “one size fits all” solution or template that will meet …

♫  Doin it right, doin it right
Doin it right, doin it right
The blues bands cookin and the drummers burnin down
Doin it right on the wrong side of town!!!  ♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by the Powder Blues.

Law firms like to think that they do things rather well.  Exceptionally well, as a matter of fact. Particularly the biggest ones.

Only problem is, not everyone agrees with that perception.  Take Casey Flaherty for example.  Casey just happens to be the General Counsel at Kia Motors America.  In his words (and this is an exact quote) “Lawyers see …

After months of nagtext messages from my cell carrier, all promoting  my available hardware upgrades, I finally made the move several weeks ago and switched to a sparkling new iPhone 5s.

I wasn’t much interested in the new (for me) Siri functions, to be honest. I had long ago lived through my friend’ eager demonstrations of Siri’s amusing ability to handle their obscene test questions with digital grace. There was little novelty left.

Little did I realize that the technologies associated with Siri would ultimately be a pathway for my rediscovery of the long-lost art of dictation.

Back …

♫  Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye my love
I can’t hide, can’t hide, can’t hide what has come…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Avril Lavigne.

April 8, 2014 is a significant date for users of Microsoft XP and Office 2003. On that date, support ends for both of these venerable and well-loved products.

Microsoft wants its 100 Million XP and Office 2003 users to upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 and Office 2010 or Office 365.

MS has relented on MSE (Security Essentials updates) and will continue these until July 14, 2015 but that does not mean that you should stay …