Susan McDonald, a Tennessee lawyer, publishes the Legal Research and Writing Blog. She says of herself:

The internet and outsourcing have enabled me to build a successful practice of providing legal research and writing services to other lawyers around the country. This unique practice is a win-win situation for me and for my clients. I can combine my broad experience in litigation and judicial clerkships with a genuine passion for legal research and writing. With that combination, I provide writing projects that help my lawyer-clients better represent their own clients, without the overhead of an additional full-time attorney.

My

Readers of Slaw will know about Dominic Jaar, thanks to a recent post by Slawyer Patrick Cormier full of praise for Jaar’s talk at a recent conference. Well now we can all benefit, because Jaar has a blog, Wine and Information Management, which seems to me to be a stellar combination.

A special welcome to yet another legal blogger from Québec. (See his recent Les juristes québécois ne blawgue pas.)

The RSS feed for WIM is http://dominicjaar.blogspot.com/atom.xml . . . [more]

Web 2.0 tools continue on their march to world domination. Latest to come to my attention (thanks, ResearchBuzz) is Gliffy, a diagramming program that operates within your browser. It can do what most commercial programs do (Giffy is free now but will likely charge in the near future), and it allows you to export your diagrams or share them on the web in various ways. Particularly useful is the ability to export in svg (scalable vector graphics) format, which permits the resizing of the image without loss of quality. . . . [more]

The Legal Writing Prof Blog had an announcement about a new, on-line legal-writing journal,(American), sponsored by the Salmon P. Chase College of Law and edited by Professors Jennifer Jolly-Ryan and Lawrence Rosenthal. The announcement includes a link to the list of articles posted so far.

The Legal Writing Journal provides a forum for posting both completed works and works in progress that relate to all issues in the legal writing field. The journal seeks articles that cover topics such as 1) effective ways to teach legal writing; (2) the status of individuals who teach legal writing; (3) effective legal writing . . . [more]

Stumbled upon: the BC Geographical Names Information System (BCGNIS). This isn’t law but it’s in some sense prior to law — after all, it’d be hard to have an innominate jurisdiction, or at least more than one:

…[G]eographical names are… an indispensable tool for navigation and location, forming reference points even in historic transportation and communication systems. Standard forms of geographical names, and their clear, unambiguous application to particular features are an essential element of modern maps and charts. Co-ordination of geographical naming by one authority is thus an essential element in maintaining an effective system in which physical

A topical question in the light of recent judgments by the US Supreme Court: Can any SLAWer advise on the best method for searching cases listed for hearing and judgments reserved in order to locate those on particular topics (i.e., using key terms). This is very straightforward on the Web sites of other ‘top’ courts – the House of Lords, the High Court of Australia, and even the Supreme Court of Canada, but I’m finding it not at all obvious for Mr Roberts’ Court. I daresay the answer is staring me in the face …. . . . [more]

Just off the Wires with today’s date – but wasn’t this the same announcement they made on May 8? And does this answer any of the questions we raised about enhanced search, yesterday?

New Quicklaw™ Legal Research Service Provides Powerful Features

New Search and Filtering Capabilities and Ability to Save Searches and Set Up Alerts Represent Major Enhancements to Canada’s Leading Online Legal Information Service

TORONTO, ONTARIO–(CCNMatthews – July 5, 2006) – LexisNexis Canada, a leading provider of information and services solutions, today announced it has launched the new version of the LexisNexis® Quicklaw™ online legal research service, . . . [more]

In an 1806 case about madness, Lord Erskine noted that the causes of understanding becoming defunct are little known, although “there is no doubt, the Moon has no influence”.

The case is indexed as “Lunatic, see Lord Chancellor”Courtesy of The Times. . . . [more]

Occasionally, a publishing representative will blurt out what we suspect – that customers for legal information are simply sheep to be shorn.

Double digit growth is what LexisNexis is aiming for, even in a highly competitive legal and tax information market that has taken to the net with a vengeance.

One of the ways in which the business has changed has been the disposal of much of its book publishing. “We sold off about a quarter of the books we were publishing, which probably only accounted for about 2% of our business. That enabled us to focus our resources on

It’s what’s behind the vast buildings of the new Googleplex being built beside the Oregon river.

It’s the battle between a special investment of $2 Billion that Microsoft is pouring into R&D for online search tools and $1.5 Billion that Google has allocated for its team to build a better engine.

The fruits of that have started to show in the increasingly useful deployment of geographically linked search results that appear in Google results with a compass logo.

But the Holy Grail of search technologies is to gain a sustained competitive advantage in relevance rankings. And this is . . . [more]

Today’s Trinidad Express carries news of the activities of CARALL, the Caribbean Association of Law Libraries at its annual meeting at the National Library in Port of Spain.

It’s good to know, because the Carall.org website has gone darkThough judging from the 2004 Report, they’ve been grappling with interesting issues. It used to have interesting comments on the challenges of law librarianship in the Caribbean and the emergence of a distinctly Caribbean jurisprudence.

Celebrating 22 years in existence, CARALL believes the advent of information technology has contributed to the creation of a regional legal library system that is today

Avec un collègue de l’Université de Sherbrooke, Mathieu Devinat, nous nous sommes fixés comme objectif de rechercher les articles de droit privé qui peuvent, qui doivent être qualifiés d’incontournables. Bien conscient que l’exercice est forcément subjectif, il s’agit seulement par le biais d’une page de blogue de tenter d’initier un dialogue sur ces articles qui mériteraient d’être davantage connus. Car au-delà de ce qui est une gageure, une activité d’été, le but se situe ici : l’important sera en effet de contacter et de persuader les éditeurs pour leur demander l’autorisation de les publier en ligne.

Bien que . . . [more]