Addison Cameron-Huff, Blockchain Lawyer

FlatLaw.ca was written up yesterday on the blog of Canadian Lawyer Magazine/Law Times.

The mention on their site caused about 50 extra people to visit the site (although it was published late Friday afternoon).

I've created a presentation about terms of use and best practices for ensuring enforceability.

It works best in Chrome & Firefox: “Terms of Use: Best Practices for Enforceability”

Online license agreements usually have warranties that are WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS. This is an anachronism from the typewriter era that should be avoided according to the 9th Circuit, a leading author on contracts drafting and the deputy GC of Wikipedia.

The reason why people use all caps is a section of the UCC, an American law that codifies sales law (similar to the Sale of Goods Acts in Canada). You can read more about it here.

Here's an easy guide for getting SSH keys set up for SSH/rsync connections to your web server: myridia.com

In order to create AlbertaMonitor.ca I had to figure out how to convert PDFs to HTML using PHP.

The trick is to use a Java program called pdfbox and run it from the shell using PHP:

Here are a few questions to ask when hiring a technology lawyer:

1. Does the lawyer have a website? I wouldn't hire one who doesn't. A decent website is quite affordable in 2013 (check Craigslist!).

A week and a half ago I attended the 17th annual IT.CAN conference. The conference was more educational than I expected (i.e. less networking). Although the IT/tech bar is a fairly small group of people the conference was still accessible and open to new people like myself.

I wish I had attended IT.CAN as a student because it would have opened my eyes to the areas of practice within tech. I strongly recommend it to anyone considering the field (and there's a very cheap student rate).

I was quoted in a Globe and Mail article written by David Israelson.

The article is about Suncor's social media strategy. Here's what I had to say:

My legal marketplace, flatlaw.ca was written up today on Betakit. You can read the article here.

It's difficult to estimate what a case is worth. There are many variables and it's impossible to provide an exact figure but it's helpful to consider ballpark numbers (especially for settlement offers). The calculator below gives an idea of what a small claims court case could cost and what a plaintiff could get out of it (expected value).

Warning: this calculator makes a lot of assumptions and is a simplified model that overstates the odds of success (for a few reasons, such as judges not awarding the full amount claimed, non-payment by defendants [a $0 "win"], etc.). It does not include HST.

As of a few months ago, all Ontario court proceedings are being recorded but the files are hidden from the public through court procedures.

Theoretically Ontario courts follow the "open court" principle (see e.g. Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. v. Ontario). The public is supposed to be able to see justice be done.

Square launched Square Cash today. It looks like a competitor to Interac e-transfer (at least in Canada) except it's free.

From what I know of the American market, this is a bigger innovation there than it'll be here where emailing money is fairly common (at least with young people). For the moment it's US only anyway.

Answer: an arm and a leg at a time.

Better answer: hourly, fixed fee and on contingency.

I've nearly finished developing AlbertaMonitor. It's a service that sends clients emails when their keywords are mentioned in Hansard, new bills or regulations (the Alberta version of OntarioMonitor.ca).

Now the waiting part. Scrapers can break for a variety of reasons so I'll need to wait a while before I can start getting people to try out the service. The Alberta Legislature will re-open at the end of October and I'll have a chance to test out the scraping/parsing services.

Android is better than iOS if you have multiple email accounts set up in Gmail.

I switched to an HTC One about two weeks ago from iPhone (I'd been using iOS for about five years). There are a lot of differences but one thing stands out as being worth switching for.

A bill has been introduced to the Ontario legislature that will allow the personal, non-commercial importation of alcohol drinks from other provinces: Bill 98.

From the Explanatory Note: “The Bill amends the Liquor Control Act to add a provision that permits individuals who are 19 years of age or older to import or cause to be imported wine into Ontario from another province if the wine is for their personal consumption and not for resale or other commercial use.”

The Google AdWords rates for lawyer-related ads range from about 35 cents for a divorce lawyer in Edmonton to $63 for "car accident lawyers".

There are very few monthly searches for "injury lawyers" or "injury lawyers toronto" but every time someone clicks one of those ads it's about $60.

There's a large abandoned town in British Columbia: Kitsault. It was built in 1979 as a mining town for molybednum but the price collapsed shortly after construction and the town was abandoned.

Story and photos on MessyNessyChic.com.

The Don Valley River runs through the heart of Toronto. It's about a five minute drive from where I grew up yet I've never walked the trail next to it. It's nice in parts but generally pretty shabby.

It probably wouldn't take much work to make this a nice trail. If the City extended the Riverdale Farm design down through the trail and cleaned up the garbage it could be a beautiful walk. Throw a few container stores like at Dundas and Bathurst along the walk and it could be a bunch of new jobs for Regent Park/St. Jamestown.

I used to read the Toronto Star online several times a day. The trivia night I go to most Wednesdays used it as the source for questions for the first round every week. Then The Star introduced a paywall. I stopped reading it. The person who runs trivia night stopped using it and switched to the National Post.

It's incredibly hard to monetize casual internet content (e.g. news, blogs, etc.). Charging for access causes a huge drop in readership (depending on the form of paywall: 60%-90% for the Times UK, 40% for the Globe, etc.) and isn't an approach most small websites can take because their brand has no value (yet).