Quickscribe 2.0: Legislation service training session coming up, register now

Quickscribe Services is offering a free lunch-and-learn training session on its excellent legislation tracking and research service, Quickscribe 2.0, which I've written about elsewhere. The session qualifies for one CPD credit  a will be held by webinar at noon on Wednesday 14 January 2015.

Quickscribe 2.0 offers access to all provincial, and some federal, legislation and regulations, without point-in-time capabilities, tracking of pending and in-force amendments and speedy consolidations. Public annotations are provided by leading practitioners; users can also make private annotations available only to themselves or only within a firm. The service features a cool tracking feature that will alert you to amendments and new annotations.

Although Quickscribe 1.0 was perhaps not as helpful as it could have been for family law practitioners, I have found Quickscribe 2.0 to be a handy research aid and surprisingly useful. You can take a slideshow-style tour of Quickscribe 2.0 or request a free trial.

Register for the training session on Eventbrite.

Cloud Computing and the Family Law Lawyer

The Law Society of British Columbia has adopted changes to the Law Society Rules to address cloud computing for lawyers who store, or are considering storing, practice data in the cloud; the changes are based on the recommendations contained in the final report (PDF) of the Cloud Computing Working Group. Cloud computing allows data like emails, contact lists, photographs and so forth to be stored in a remote server and synced between various devices like a smartphone and a laptop, so that when you change something on one device you change it on all of your devices. Cloud computing can also allow you to store more important files, like word processing documents and spreadsheets.

 The Working Group identified a number issues raising significant concern with cloud computing, including these:

• privacy and the security of stored data from third party intrusion;
• lawyers' compliance with protection of privacy legislation;
• lawyers' compliance with Law Society auditing standards for electronic files;
• security of stored data from loss in the event of service failure;
• the reliability of the service provider;
• security of stored data from seizure by service provider;
• the status of stored data after termination of service provider; and,
• providing notice to clients as to where their data is being stored.

Perhaps most importantly, the Law Society has also adopted a thirteen-page (thirteen!) checklist (PDF) for lawyers considering using cloud computing. Among other things, the checklist asks lawyers to consider whether there are any laws, including federal and provincial privacy legislation, that restrict placing client data in cloud servers located or accessed outside of Canada. This last little bit strikes me as being especially worthy of note given that the USA PATRIOT Act (the title of the act is an acronym) allows US government agencies to rummage through electronic communications and gather data from US and non-US citizens without the necessity of probable cause or judicial oversight.

Now, I would expect that most family law lawyers don't rely very much on cloud computing, or at least not knowingly. (Here's a tip: if you can access a file on your office computer from home without logging into your office network, you are probably storing that file in the cloud.) However, DivorceMate has recently rolled out a version of its very popular support calculation program that relies on cloud technology to allow users to run numbers on the fly, in court or in an interview, and relies on Microsoft's cloud technology... which means that the data is stored on Microsoft's servers in the US, backed up by Microsoft in the US, and is therefore available to government agencies in the US should they care to look at it.

This raises some pretty serious concerns about client confidentiality. I spoke to the DivorceMate people this summer about the cloud issue and they said that they were aware of the problem. Although they don't have a  work-around for the storage problem yet, they did note that you can access their software in the cloud and simply elect not to save your calculations, so that the data doesn't wind up being stored Microsoft's servers. They may have another solution by this point.

Quickscribe 2.0 Launched!: Important New Tool for Family Law Counsel

Quickscribe Services has just launched the long-awaited Quickscribe 2.0, which offers a boatload of useful new features and is a genuine and substantive improvement on 1.0.

The original version of Quickscribe was known for its legislation tracking service, which offered speedy updates to the provincial legislation and the more frequently accessed federal legislation, historical point-in-time tracking, and information about the status of bills, new regulations and new orders in council. Quickscribe was also much easier to use than the BC Laws and Legislative Assembly websites, and subscribers were able to program a variety of automatic alerts customized to the needs of their particular practice.

The new version continues these services and also offers:

• some pretty slick PDF capabilities, letting you print or save to file all or some of a document;
• an expert annotation service provided by leading practitioners;
• an improved tracking and alert system, which will alert users to new annotations in addition to legislative amendments; and,
• a collaborative annotation function that lets users build a database of annotations shared with a firm.

Quickscribe 1.0 likely would not have been particularly useful for family law practitioners, particularly when the Family Relations Act was the law of the land; we had two key statutes and one critical regulation to keep on top of, and rarely found ourselves needing point-in-time references to the Land (Spouse Protection) Act or the Fraudulent Conveyance Act. I had access to the system for a whole year, and maybe used it once. I'm sure 1.0 was an indispensable tool for general civil litigators, just not so much for members of the family law bar.

I've had the chance to browse around 2.0, however, and it seems to me that the new version will make a very useful addition to the family law lawyer's tool box. First, Quickscribe is likely the only way you're going to get your hands on a complete electronic copy of the Family Law Act without having to jump between parts. Second, the case law is developing at such a rapid pace, that you need a way of faster way keeping up with developments than waiting for the next practice manual or white book; users' ability to make public annotations could give us an extraordinarily useful resource. Third, a number amendments have already been made to the act, and more are in the pipeline, that we need to keep on top of — it's reasonable to assume that still more amendments will be made in the months and years ahead as further wrinkles in the new act are discovered.

A slideshow-style tour of Quickscribe 2.0 is available, as well as a free but time-limited trial subscription. Quickscribe is a web-based application, which means that it works on both Macs and PCs, and you won't need to download or install any software.