news and knowledge from around the globe compiled by Global EDD Group
Microsoft has announced the beta release of SharePoint 2010 to the world.
The beta for SharePoint 2010 was first released a couple of days ago to TechNet and MSDN subscribers. Everyone else had to be patient. That wait is over. The SharePoint 2010 beta is available to everyone at the new SharePoint 2010 website: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Pages/Default.aspx
In The Hague, Netherlands, the United States attended a meeting of the International Criminal Court's management board for the first time Wednesday in a sign it has stopped shunning the world's only permanent war crimes tribunal.
The United States has not ratified the court's founding treaty, the Rome Statue, partly because of fears the court could become a forum for politically motivated prosecutions of U.S. troops.
continued In a First, U.S. Envoy Attends International Court Meeting.
The first session at the Thomson Reuters e-Disclosure Conference in London last week was called The Continuing Challenges of Preservation, Collection and Exchange. George Socha’s panel included a solicitor, a software provider and a judge – Matthew Davis of Lovells, Stephen Whetstone of Stratify and HHJ Simon Brown QC.
Judge Brown said that the court is interested in the material, and only the material, needed for a decision. The point at issue in Earles v Barclays Bank Plc [2009] EWHC 2500 (Mercantile) (08 October 2009), on which he recently gave judgment, was not a difficult one. The judge is the end user of the disclosure process and needs contemporaneous documents. He had been given many documents which were not relevant to the issues which he had to decide, but not the ones which actually mattered. Witness statements drawn up by lawyers are often not worth the paper they are written on relative to the contemporaneous documents, in this case the records of telephone conversations.
Given the state of modern technology, it should not be difficult to find such documents. There was no question of malicious concealment in this case, but if documents were missing then someone was to blame. Although there was no duty to keep documents prior to the threat of litigation, there was a serious risk of an adverse inference if it proved not possible to produce them. A proper search must be put in hand right at the outset.
The issue was not limited to banks or other commercial entities. The Baby P case (where drafts of critical documents were not produced until a new lawyer joined the Council and made a proper search) showed that public bodies similarly need to produce the documents to prove their case.
Continued at The Continuing Challenges of Preservation, Collection and Exchange « Chris Dale Lawyer Support.
As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law country. That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions. Over time, these legal opinions build, refine and clarify the laws that govern our land. For average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. We think that's a problem: Laws that you don't know about, you can't follow — or make effective arguments to change.
Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.
We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the “How Cited” link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).
As we worked to build this feature, we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations. And they often do it in language that is surprisingly straightforward, even for those of us outside the legal profession. In many cases, judges have gone quite a bit out of their way to make complex legal issues easy to follow. For example, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court justices present a fascinating and easy-to-follow debate on the legality of internment of natural born citizens based on their ancestry. And in United States v. Ramirez-Lopez, Justice Kozinski, in his dissent, illustrates the key issue of the case using an imagined good-news/bad-news dialogue between the defendant and his attorney.
We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Daniel Poulin (LexUM), Tim Stanley (Justia), Joe Ury (BAILII), Tim Wu (AltLaw) and many others. It is an honor to follow in their footsteps. We would also like to acknowledge the judges who have built this cathedral of justice brick by brick and have tried to make it accessible to the rest of us. We hope Google Scholar will help all of us stand on the shoulders of these giants.
In what is certain to be a noisy development, Google has quietly added state and federal case law and patent searching to its Google Scholar search service. Also included is the How Cited citator service.
The Google Scholar welcome screen presents three new radio buttons allowing you to search either Articles, Articles and Patents or Legal Opinions and Journals. Bizarrely for Google, you have to choose and can’t search all at once. Go to Google Scholar Advanced Search (and scroll to the bottom) to further limit case law searching.
via Et Seq..
Businesses that were scared of saving money by using Skype because lawsuits might take away its essential VoIP technology may not have to worry anymore.
Ownership of the company will shift from eBay to include others, but the company will finally own rights to essential code, meaning it won't fall victim to having that code stripped away by a judge and stranding customers.
That lifts the main barrier to business use of the VoIP service that has expanded over the years from a peer-to-peer phone application to include services specially crafted for corporate use. “I would be a lot more interested in Skype than I was a week ago,” says Irwin Lazar, an analyst with Nemertes Research.
Just last month, in the midst of litigation that has since been settled, he was advising businesses to stay away, but now it's safe to try to reap the cost savings Skype can afford, he says.
via Skype for Business sounds the all-clear on legal pitfalls – Network World.
Japanese imaging giant Canon Inc is set to takeover Europe's largest printer manufacturer, Océ for approximately €730 million ($1.1 billion) in an all-cash deal, aiming to create the world's largest printing entity, benefiting from an excellent complementary fit in product lineup, R&D and business lines.
According to the conditional agreement reached yesterday between both the companies, Canon offered to buy all the outstanding shares of Océ at €8.60 a share, which represents a 70-per cent premium over the closing price on 13 November and 137 per cent above the average price over the past one year. The offer values 100 per cent of the issued and outstanding shares of Océ at around €730 million.
Holders of Océ's cumulative preference shares Ducatus NV, ASR Nederland NV and ING AM Insurance Companies BV, with approximately 19 per cent of the total share capital, and another large share holder Bestinver Gestion SA owning about 9.5 per cent have agreed to tender their shares to Cannon.
Further to the takeover news, Océ shares skyrocketed 70 per cent to close at €8.62 yesterday on Amsterdam Stock Exchange, while Canon shares were down 1.5 per cent at ¥3,370 in Tokyo.
Venlo, Netherlands-based Océ is one of the world's leading providers of document management and printing solutions by offering office printing and copying systems, high speed digital printers, wide format printing systems for technical documentation and color display graphics as well as related services and supplies. The company has strong presence in Europe and North America and employs about 22,000 people. Its 2008 revenue amounted to $4.3 billion.
via domain-b.com : Canon to acquire Dutch printer maker Océ for $1.1 billion.
Today, we've launched three new features as well as a new look and feel for Google Translate — a service that helps people access information throughout the world by enabling them to automatically translate text and and web pages into their own language. Google Translate offers 51 languages, representing over 98% of Internet users today.
Along with our shiny new layout, these new features should make it faster and easier for you to translate text between our 2550 language pairs:
Translate instantly: Say goodbye to the old “Translate” button. Google Translate now translates your text right as you type.
Read and write any language: Want to say “Today is a good day” in Chinese, but can't read Han characters? Click “Show romanization” to read the text written phonetically in English. Right now, this works for all non-Roman languages except for Hebrew, Arabic and Persian.
We also have a new input transliteration feature for Arabic, Persian or Hindi. If you want to translate from one of these languages, but can't type the script on your keyboard, our input transliteration feature will allow you to type words as they sound and convert them to native script.
The costs of civil discovery in the computer age appear to be prompting divergent responses by the federal and New York state courts. These differences, which are still evolving, could have significant implications for litigants and lawmakers.
Litigants with a choice of forum should consider these differences in selecting which court system best suits their objectives. And lawmakers should monitor these differences to assess what rules best reconcile the often competing goals of ready access to the civil justice system, full development of the facts relevant to the case, and the efficient, cost-effective resolution of the parties' dispute.
The costs of electronic discovery are well-known and have received ample coverage throughout this decade, in this publication and others.
The source of these costs is society's increasing reliance on the electronic creation, transmission and retention of information, especially in the corporate context. Because information is so easily created, kept and copied, the volume that is available and potentially relevant to a dispute had ballooned geometrically.
While these costs can be somewhat controlled by the creative use of technology and counsel's use of sound management principles in managing a document review, there are limits. The application of classic liberal discovery principles can still require the production of hundreds of thousands or even millions of “documents,” where in the past the same case would have involved discovery into a small fraction of that number.
Retaining and collecting this information is by itself extraordinarily expensive, even when the most efficient methods are employed. And on top of those costs, attorneys still must review the collected material for responsiveness and privilege, which can be prohibitively expensive for even a middle-sized case that is well managed. These costs can be so large that they have recently been blamed for tamping down the usual increase in litigation that accompanies an economic recession.
These increased costs have fundamentally changed the cost-benefit calculus that had informed many of the rules of procedure applicable in civil cases. Lawmakers accordingly have responded by seeking to recalibrate the rules to reflect the new reality.
In the federal system, there have been changes in the rules of discovery and evidence that apply once a case is past the threshold pleading stage, as well as recent changes by the U.S. Supreme Court in the standards that apply even to the commencement of a potentially burdensome action. And in the New York state system, there has been increasing attention to the application of existing discovery rules in the electronic context.
These changes are creating, or at least highlighting, important differences in how the two court systems address the problems of electronic discovery.
Continued at Legal Technology – Two Roads Diverge in E-Discovery Costs.
Switzerland will unveil the criteria behind the disclosure of 4,450 UBS accounts handed over to U.S. tax officials at a press conference tomorrow, Bloomberg reports.
As part of a late summer settlement between UBS and the U.S. government, the Swiss banking giant agreed to hand over the names on those UBS accounts. (UBS paid $780 million in February to settle criminal charges that the bank helped wealthy American clients avoid paying U.S. taxes.)
Swiss officials are expected to reveal the model used by IRS and Justice Department lawyers to suss out overseas tax evaders. The Am Law Daily reported in August that the Justice Department might never release an appendix to its UBS accord detailing the criteria used to select the 4,450 accounts, because it doesn't want to tip its hand on disclosure requirements and possibly incentivize individuals not to come forward under an amnesty program.
The amnesty deadline for U.S. citizens to file income tax returns disclosing assets stashed away in offshore tax havens passed on October 15. Swiss authorities withheld details of how UBS accounts were selected so as not to interfere with the IRS's voluntary disclosure program, which saw about 7,500 Americans submit filings.
Now the country's Justice Ministry–making more headlines recently for its role in the Roman Polanski case–will announce more intimate details of its arrangement with U.S. regulators. According to Bloomberg, the criteria will likely be based on a point system that automatically triggered the disclosure of certain accounts.
Like speeders getting pulled over by state troopers on a highway, certain accounts would accrue points based on certain characteristics. Have a million Swiss francs in your local savings bank in lakeside Lucerne? That's a point. Financial arrangements structured as foreign trusts and foundations also are fertile ground for red flags, Bloomberg reports.
The IRS has recently opened new offices in Beijing, Panama City, and Sydney as part of its effort to crackdown on overseas tax havens for U.S. citizens. Bloomberg recently reported that Hong Kong has become a target for federal prosecutors keen on determining how the roles financial professionals possibly linked to tax evasion have evolved after the former British colony was returned to China in 1997.
Read more: Swiss to Reveal Tax Man Tactics.
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