Copywriter, technical writer, translator (FR>EN, ES>EN, IT>EN), journalist

Periodical Writing Samples

Hi-tech tips for small firms

This is the second of a two-part series. To read part one, click here. You might think small law firms have small budgets, but they don’t all act like it. Thank technology, which is getting better and cheaper all the time, for letting savvy lawyers build big-firm

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Technology makes work possible for office-less lawyers

Doug Simpson practises law and runs Legal Systematics, his online form and document assembly business, from all sorts of places. He works from home offices in the Toronto suburb of Burlington as well as Victoria Harbour, on the shores of Georgian Bay. He meets clients at their

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Mind those annoying patent trolls

They’re known as NPEs, or non-practising entities. Their reason for being is to make money from the patents that an operating company uses in its products. If a letter arrives from one, here’s why it should not be tossed in the trash. There’s a certain type of

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A cleaner, simpler feel in the new look Office

Microsoft packaged new goodies in the latest version of its Office suite of productivity software, but this time you might notice the package more than the goodies. The programs — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook et al — are all still there, but they look a lot less

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Fine print in the clouds

What to look for in a provider’s service-level agreements Lawyers who want to use the cloud to meet their computing needs find themselves whipsawed. Cloud service providers promise up-to-date systems, great features and manageable IT costs. But questions stemming from professional responsibilities, such as privacy and confidentiality,

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Protection begins with assessment of access

Law firms handle plenty of sensitive information, both their own and that of their clients. A client’s competitor and opponents in a lawsuit are just two parties who may want to steal that information. “Security matters because it is not a theoretical risk,” says Martin Felsky, a

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Weird Science

From self-bending metals to stones that repair themselves, ecopreneurs and scientists are developing a range of advanced building materials.

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MaRS Centre – Phase 2

Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District supports innovators as they commercialize intellectual property. Phase 2 of MaRS will complete the vision when it welcomes tenants in September 2013. “Intellectual property is evaluated for its readiness to become the underlying logic of a business,” says Dale Martin, senior advisor to

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Sign of the times

Easily add signatures with Adobe’s new software Picture it: you receive an email about forms or contracts you need to sign back at the office. You read this email on a touchscreen-enabled device – your smartphone, perhaps, or your tablet. And you wonder why you can’t just

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DIY e-discovery still possible, but with limits

A question of collection tools, in-house expertise, volume of work The legal industry has adopted the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, a structural workflow that professionals can follow (www.edrm.net). Before the EDRM, discovery was a do-it-yourself process. Those were confusing days. “Different vendors and law firms took different

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