The LegalTech 2012 Conference last week was a bit overwhelming for me as a first-time attendee.

As a knowledge management (KM) lawyer / law librarian, my continuing legal education opportunities tend to focus more on conferences related to KM or law libraries, such as the upcoming annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries / L'Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit held in Toronto in May.

However, I think it was worthwhile attending LegalTech, although I might not need to attend every year. The main difference for me was the large number of technology vendors exhibiting or presenting their technology.

There were several themes I saw from the conference, including e-discovery and predictive coding, enterprise search, the use of iPads in legal practice (including mobile device management), and working in the cloud. Of these themes, e-discovery seemed to dominate.

Because my technology interests are currently not focused on e-discovery, I found many of the seminar sessions to be less relevant for me. That said, the keynote sessions were interesting and I enjoyed the session called iLove for the iPad: Tips, Tricks & Apps. From that session, I realized I am likely under-utilizing GoodReader for iPad, which – in addition to reading PDF files – also allows you to manage and transfer your files. A number of other PDF apps were mentioned, including PDF PROvider for iPad (which allows you to create PDF files) and PDF Expert (which lets you easily use PDF forms and signatures). The speakers also recommended the Atomic Web Browser as an alternative to the native iPad web browser since you have an option to have this web browser "mimic" your web browser of choice. I also likely taking notes in iWriter, mentioned by the speakers, since it has keyboard "arrows" allowing you to more accurately move the cursor on the screen). The other app I will likely explore is SoundNote, which records the speaker's voice and synchs up the recording with notes you are writing on the iPad. There is of course also the two high-end apps for lawyers, being TrialPad for iPad (which allows trial lawyers to easily use their iPad to present visual evidence to the court) and TranscriptPad for iPad (which allows you to easily review, tag, and annotate examination for discovery transcripts).

Ultimately, however, I found that perhaps the most useful thing to do was to meet with vendors and find out about their technology.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the appeal in Clements (Litigation Guardian of) v. Clements, 2011 BCCA 581, reversing 2009 BCSC 112; leave to appeal granted 2011 CanLII 36004 (SCC) on February 17, 2012. The Supreme Court’s summary of the issues in the appeal suggests that that all the Court was asked to do is clarify the meaning of the Resurfice material contribution test for proof of the causation requirements in causes of action in negligence and, then, determine the correct result in Clements based on that test. See http://www.scc-csc.gc.ca/case-dossier/cms-sgd/sum-som-eng.aspx?cas=34100.

That is an accurate enough summary of what was in Ms. Clements (the appellant’s) leave to appeal factum. It is not an accurate summary of what is in her factum. The appellant (Ms. Clements) has explicitly asked the Court to decide if the causation issue ought to have been decided in her favour on the bases of the but-for test, in particular the “robust, pragmatic, common sense” approach mandated by Snell v. Farell [1990] 2 S.C.R. 311, 1990 CanLII 70. The parties’ factums are available on the Supreme Court’s web site. See http://www.scc-csc.gc.ca/case-dossier/cms-sgd/fac-mem-eng.aspx?cas=34100. That is not a problem because the Supreme Court’s mandate, having granted leave, is to make the decision that ought to have been made by the lower court from which the appeal comes; or order a new trial if that is the proper decision (if the decision appealed from was “against the weight of the evidence); or remand the appeal or any part of the appeal to the court appealed from for additional consideration in accordance with the direction of the Court: the Supreme Court of Canada Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. S-26, ss. 44-46.1.

The Supreme Court panel in Clements could have three judges who were appointed to the Court after Resurfice was decided. It will if the panel is the full 9 member court. It will have at least 1 new judge if the panel is composed of seven judges. Justices Cromwell, Moldaver and Karakatanis are the new appointments. Justices Bastarache, Binnie and Charron have retired. Only Justice Cromwell has expressed a judicial opinion on the meaning of Resurfice in reported reasons for judgment. Only Chief Justice McLachlin and Justice LeBel J. remain from the panel that decided Walker Estate v. York Finch Hospital, [2001] 1 S.C.R. 647, 2001 SCC 23. Only McLachlin C.J. remains from the panels that decided Snell and Athey v. Leonati, [1996] 3 S.C. R. 458, 1996 CanLII 183.

A colleague’s comment about the granting of leave in Clements was “here we go”. My immediate reaction was to add “again”. I hope I am wrong.

On the other hand, the Continuing Legal Education Society of British Columbia's (CLE BC) first "Causation in Tort" conference was held in Vancouver in June 2008, about 1 year after Resurfice. "Causation in Tort II" was held in Vancouver in June 2011. It will probably be late 2012 or early 2013 before the Clements reasons are released, assuming that Supreme Court concludes that the case requires something more than a brief oral judgment. Assuming the Supreme Court does attempt, again, to clarify the jurisprudence, it will probably take a year or so before the Clements reasons will have been considered often enough by the provincial and territorial courts that clear trends will be apparent. So mid 2014 will be just about time for "Causation in Tort III" in Vancouver, in May or June. (If you've spotted a trend, you're right.)

For those who care about such things, the materials from both "Causation in Tort" conferences are very good* and reasonably priced. They are available through the CLE BC web site store. (No, I don't get direct kickbacks but if enough people by the material that'll probably hint at some reason for the next conference.)

(*Full disclosure – I was involved in the preparation of some of the materials in both conferences. The "Causation in Tort II"  material includes sample factums for a mock appeal to the British Columbia Court of Appeal that was part of the "Causation in Tort II" programme. The factums cover a wide range of issues. The unfortunate plaintiff – an otherwise successful British Columbia lawyer – somehow managed to develop both AIDS and mesothelioma, then be killed in a rather complicated motor vehicle accident while on his way to an appointment with one of his doctors. The appeal dealt only with liability.)

According to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Section 15 (1)):

Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

Of course, and unfortunately, this is not always the case in practice. Many people continue to deny others equal treatment, intentionally and not. Law Times offers a recent example of alleged systemic discrimination; the case Law Society of Upper Canada v. Selwyn Milan McSween raises the question of whether racism hinders black lawyers’ participation in big law firms in Ontario. I am sure this problem is not exclusive to big law firms or Ontario.

Selwyn McSween is a black lawyer found guilty of professional misconduct for “completely abdicating his professional responsibility” to an allegedly unscrupulous law clerk, in the opinion to the Law Society of Upper Canada. However, dissenting appeal panellist Clayton Ruby stated:

We cannot close our eyes to the disproportionate number of black lawyers whom we find before us faced with very grave professional misconduct allegations. …

The legal profession has made no concerted effort to rid itself of the racism inherent in the practice. The effects of racial inequality are real, not imagined, and we do the public no favour by refusing to acknowledge them.

Ruby suggests that the reason black lawyers face increase disciplinary charges is that minority groups have fewer and less meaningful articling opportunities to gain experience compared to “non-racialized” lawyers, law students and others in the profession.

The Law Times article refers briefly to a 1999 report on Racial Equality in the Canadian Legal Profession by the Canadian Bar Association, and I was curious.

According to the report:

Systemic racism or institutional racism is not about individual malice. It is about the way seemingly neutral values and practices can inadvertently serve to promote discrimination. It is about how the legacy of historic discrimination can continue to thrive in our midst.

The report’s authors clearly recognized that, at that time, law graduates from minority groups had poorer opportunities than non-minorities. Such graduates did not get the much-needed training and experience that their white counterparts received to succeed in the practice of law. I wonder what steps the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Department of Justice, the law schools and other decision makers have taken, given the findings of the report. Did they follow the strategic steps and recommendations? I guess not really, if we accept Ruby’s statement.

It would be interesting to know how the law society and the other groups received the report, and a follow-up report on the steps taken would have been very helpful!

As a lawyer who is also black (though that is not all I am, and I do not define myself by the colour of my skin, which by the way is brown not black), I see that systemic racism in law firms is unfortunately still a reality and not merely a perception. However, it is not only in law firms, but in many other industries and professions. I would also say that it is worse for black men than for black women.

This said, not all black lawyers are lacking experience in the practice of law, nor can we say all black lawyers do not obtain meaningful articling opportunities. Many lawyers who also find themselves referred to as blacks have succeeded in the legal profession. I can further add that some progress has been made to include more lawyers who are black in the legal profession; however, not enough.

In my view, these advancements are based on tolerance, not on totally removing the prejudiced policies, practices, perceptions, stigma, stereotypes and ideas about people who are black that continue to thrive in society, law schools and law firms. No matter the colour of our skin, it is not something we can change. It will always be with us and will be the first thing an interviewer will see, no matter whether we are the most experienced, the most qualified or the best candidate.

Tolerance has not been a final solution, but a precursor of continued racism.

I can also say these advancements are to meet diversity goals to show the public how multicultural a firm is, or to meet employment equity requirements, not solely with the intention of truly removing barriers that stop racism. Please note, having to state in an application form that you consider yourself part of a visible minority does not help, or reassure me that I will be considered so that you can meet your diversity goals or employment equity requirements.

At the same time, lawyers who also find themselves to be black have a responsibility to obtain the experience they need to become lawyers, especially if they have to become sole practitioners because law firms won’t hire them. Articling, although required, is not the only way to gain experience. Black lawyers’ the main concern should be getting their degree, learning as well as they can, practicing law and being the best lawyers they can be.

Not getting a good articling experience because you are black is a real problem that needs to be dealt with but not a good reason to become guilty of professional misconduct.

To gain knowledge and experience before I graduated, I volunteered in associations and legal centres. After I graduated, on top of articling, I sat in court most days watching how lawyers pleaded their cases. I talked to other lawyers and judges. Judges were the most willing to guide me. I read on the developments of legislation and case law at least three hours every day, and still do. I went to conferences, seminars, courses and workshops on the topics of law I wanted to specialize in. It takes work, but you need to look beyond the colour of your skin, even if others insist that you do.

But I still have to wonder, why would systemic discrimination still exist in law firms? Within organizations who are there to protect the public and the practice of law? Doesn’t the legal institution exist to uphold and apply the law without any prejudices?

So what do members of the Canadian Legal Profession and decision-makers intend to do about this?

I have updated my Legal Research and Writing website with a new page on resources for teaching legal research and writing.

Included on the page are links to:

• online training video tutorials,

• legal research and writing journals, newsletters and selected articles,

• legal research and writing associations and blogs, and

• general teaching resources for teaching legal research and writing.

I suspect my page may not be complete, so if I have missed something, I welcome comments and suggestions for other resources.

The start of the winter term means a happy return to the University of Toronto Faculty of Information where I am again part of the team that teaches the perennially oversubscribed Legal Literature and Librarianship class. This year I am co-teaching with two of my colleagues Susan Barker and John Bolan and we will once again feature a guest lecture from Ted Tjaden who taught this course from 1998-2004. (Ted has blogged about his impressions of the class here , here and here).

It might strike some of my non-librarian colleagues odd or quaint that such a course continues to exist. Legal Literature and Librarianship is one of a handful of masters-level courses at Canadian library and information schools that teach future librarians about the literature and tools of legal research as well as the practice of law librarianship. While students in this class obviously do not learn about legal writing and analysis, they do learn a lot about research and the literature. By the end of the course their ability to find just about anything and quickly identify the best secondary sources on any topic, coupled with their ability to advise others on research strategy, impresses me every year.

With it becoming ever easier for any novice legal researcher to muddle through and find something relevant, we continue to need people who can identify the best sources and know how and when to use them. In fact, given how easy it is to find just something there is less incentive to learn the tools and sources well enough to find everything when required. Getting new librarians on the road to becoming this kind of expert is exactly why classes like Legal Literature and Librarianship continue to exist.

Like Darryl Mountain in today's Slaw.ca column, I have been thinking about law school lately. Or rather, I have been reminded about past thoughts on this topic. Whether law school should be changed or not is a current hot topic in the U.S. In addition to the New York Times article that Darryl points to, The National Law Journal has also just published the article What is Law School For, Anyway? by Karen Sloan about law schools not keeping up with what is needed in the profession.

One thing I believe the U.S. law school system has gotten right, however, has been allowing for parttime studies leading up to a law degree. It has allowed law degrees to be more available to students of a wider range of backgrounds, and allowed some to obtain the law degree to support work and previous education for other purposes besides practising or teaching the law.

It has long irked me that Canadian law schools are full-time study only (somebody please correct me if I am wrong). In the U.S., because law school is available on a parttime basis, roughly half of law librarians have both a law and a librarian degree (this is a guesstimate on my part, based on past discussions). In Canada the number is much smaller. I would be surprised if we could find more than 20 people across the country with both degrees.

Typically those with dual degrees have completed the law degree first, and then looked for alternatives to practice, thereafter seeking out library school. There are a few who have taken the dual degree in a program for that purpose. I am aware of dual degree programs at Dalhousie University and the University of Toronto; again, I would be interested if there are other dual degree programs in Canada. Even more rare, the odd librarian has gone back to school for law. But typically those people go into practice.

For a Canadian law librarian who would like to pursue legal studies, it means stopping work for 3 years, not only paying for law school but also potentially giving up an income for those years. It is not something that most would be willing to do. As a result, we have few with dual degrees.

Demand for law librarians in Canada, however, rises over time. Many law schools across the country, for example, require the dual degree for their library reference and management staff. Those with dual degrees are also desirable in some law firms for research lawyer and knowledge management positions. Supply is not up to the demand, so as a result those from outside Canada are found to fill the positions. This in itself is not a problem for individual positions, but what happens when we get to the point where most senior positions at our Canadian law school libraries are not staffed by Canadians? How does that affect service, instruction for law students, and the general philosophy of law school libraries?

Yes, you are correct if you pick this up as a personal rant. I have long felt that, had law school been available on a parttime basis in Canada as it is for my colleagues in the U.S., I would have gradually worked toward and completed a law degree to supplement my three other university degrees. I completed my library degree on a parttime basis while working fulltime in a law firm library. Starting a law degree 18 years ago would have been of great interest to me. I think about how different my career would have been. But there is no way I could have afforded to put my work life aside to complete a law degree fulltime.

If there is demand for the dual degrees, why is no one in the Canadian system doing anything to facilitate this? Why do law school libraries not hire those with library degrees who are willing to pursue a law degree while working? Is there another option?

Teaching and learning are pretty constant activities for legal professionals. Some of the learning — most, perhaps — takes place when you're alone, and the teaching when you're with one other person; and at the other end of the scale, a lot is now managed by professional societies, responsible for providing CPD to large groups. But there are also times when a course of instruction is needed for a group that falls somewhere in between the very small and the very large. It's with that middle-sized, ad hoc occasion that Coursekit might be helpful.

Post-secondary education makes fairly consistent use of online courseware nowadays, the two main products being Blackboard and Moodle, both quite sophisticated, not to say complex. Now Coursekit provides a third choice: it's open access software that's beautifully straightforward (and quite visually attractive), offering anyone who wishes to build a course the ability to do the essential online elements with ease — and have the data hosted on the Coursekit site, again for free. You'll find modules for online student discussion, sharing resources, calendaring, grading. and so forth.

As you might imagine with a courseware site, there's ample explanation of the software, the obligatory FAQ, and the opportunity to play with a demo version.

Even if you don't need to mount courses or formal lessons, you may find that this product can lend itself to becoming a decent, free collaborative tool for that project or problem-solving task.

Given my moot history in law school it's no surprise that I've been approached repeatedly by a number of different international moots now that I'm a lawyer. But I've never seen anything like this before.

A non-profit environmental law organization, West Coast Environmental Law (WCEL), is hosting the first-ever moot court held entirely on Twitter. Participants from different Canadian law schools will make their submissions in 140 characters or less. The intent of the exercise is to bring environmental law issues to a broader audience.

Yes, I've always dreamed about being a tweeting judge, and it seems that dream might come true.

The case will be a simulated fact pattern mirroring the West Moberly First Nations, obviously focusing on environmental law. Winners will receive a cash prize, their name on a plaque, and of course an incredible amount of exposure on Twitter.

You can follow WCEL on Twitter here, and the hash tag for the event, scheduled for February 2012, is #twtmoot. This will certainly be worth watching this exercise in pedagogue, social media, activism and engagement .

I'll have more information related to sponsorship and participation on my personal site here.

Last month the Federation of Law Societies of Canada released a long-awaited Report on Conflicts of Interest prepared by its Standing Committee on the Model Code. This was the third attempt by the Federation with previous reports prepared by a Special Advisory Committee on Conflicts of Interest in June 2010 and in February 2011. The Federation settled the conflicts issue except for the thorny conundrum of current client conflicts. A copy of the almost-finished Model Code is available here. If this report is adopted by the Federation's National Council it will mark the completion of the Model Code (which was substantially completed in March 2011). More on specific issue of conflicts of interest to follow below.

The Federation's Model Code has been adopted by the Law Society of Alberta (effective November 1, 2011), the Law Society of Manitoba (January 1, 2011) and the Nova Scotia Barristers Society (effective January 1, 2012). Other provinces are expected to follow in 2012. Each province may retain local variances but the vast majority of the provisions will become uniform across Canada. In an age of national and international mobility, this makes eminent sense for lawyers, law firms, regulators and clients.

The controversy over conflicts of interest dates to the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R. v. Neil, 2002 SCC 70 where Justice Binnie established "a bright line rule" providing "that a lawyer may not represent one client whose interests are directly adverse to the immediate interests of another current client — even if the two mandates are unrelated — unless both clients consent after receiving full disclosure (and preferably independent legal advice), and the lawyer reasonably believes that he or she is able to represent each client without adversely affecting the other." (para. 29). This sentence has caused great consternation in the legal profession and led the CBA to create a Task Force on Conflicts of Interest which produced a 284 page report in 2008 which includes an excellent Toolkit for lawyers and law firms on how to deal with avoiding conflicts.

The members of the CBA Task Force parted company with Justice Binnie over the necessity and the advisability of "the bright line rule" and recommended against its adoption in the CBA Code. The CBA Code was amended and took a different, more lenient approach to conflicts of interest between current clients. The Federation did not accept the CBA approach and hence the three reports by it on the issue. If you are interested in more details of what I describe as a decade long "battle over conflicts of interest in Canada" you can read my upcoming article here.

Looming right around the corner is that magical time of year, we all get more busy, tensions rise and people run around in oddly coloured clothing…. of course I'm talking about Law School Exam Time. Personally, I do not think that CERN needs to go on trying to break the speed of light because this semester seems to have already done so, which brings us to exam time. Back in September I posted, what I hoped were, a few nuggets about being in law school. What follows are a few more with regards to preparing for and executing exam writing. I did not address this post to the 2Ls and 3Ls because I figure that they have already figured out what works for them and what does not but this advice is not just for 1Ls

I'm keeping many of the same headings from the September post because most of that advice relates to the exam writing advice:

Obviously, you can't do much about this if you haven't gone all semester, but hopefully you did, and took decent notes. If you missed a couple find a classmate who hopefully takes good notes and ply them with baked goods in the hopes that they will share. Use your class notes to help with preparing your own CANS (below).

Again, hopefully you have done this. If not you have about a week to get caught up. If you are very far behind, skimming is a fine art that you have hopefully already nurtured as a skill set through the first 3 months of law school. Remember, first and last sentence of a paragraph. You probably don't have a lot of time to do this right now, but the Science of Word Recognition is quite interesting.

I'm going to try and not revisit what I wrote before, so all I will say is make sure that whatever CANs you use are liberally sprinkled with content that has been generated by you.

The hysteria mentioned previously reaches its zenith right about…….now. Do not succumb to it, which I acknowledge is sometimes harder than it sounds. If you need to avoid the law school whilst studying then find another good study spot. Don't let whatever the talk is, get to you, and don't engage in or even try to listen to the
conversations that take place immediately preceding or post exam.

To quote, "…is the decrease in the marginal (per-unit) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant." In exam writing terms this means to get the amount of rest you need in order to be alert and have a properly functioning mind while writing. If you need 8 hours of sleep to feel refreshed, the value you might gain from studying until 3am is offset by the sluggishness brought on by only getting 5 hours of sleep. Or quite simply, at a certain point it no longer pays to keep on studying, get some sleep and focus on what you know, the return you get on studying until 3am is going to be greatly diminished.

The enemy of studying; but to be honest, your mind needs to have short breaks every so often. Around here there is usually a dominant procrastination theme for an exam period, recent ones have included: Mafia Wars, Assassins or placing themed post-it notes on a world map. I'm always interested to see what the exam period will bring.

Good Luck to all who are writing, I'll see you on the other side!

A recent working paper by Mark K. Osbeck of the University of Michigan Law School, proposes a framework for understanding, and teaching, good legal writing.

Available via SSRN, What is "Good Legal Writing" and Why Does it Matter?, the paper provides an overview of the major reports and other documents that have called for increased attention in US law schools to practical "lawyering" skills, starting with the MacCrate Report of 1992. It then provides a conceptual framework for defining good legal writing, and a detailed discussion of its various elements:

[The paper] argues that legal readers judge a document to be well-written if the writing helps them make the decisions they need to make in the course of their professional duties. The article then provides an analysis of the fundamental qualities that enable legal writing to do this, concluding that there are three such qualities: clarity, conciseness, and the ability to appropriately engage the reader. The article explains why each of these qualities is essential to good legal writing, and it examines the tools good writers use to make their writing clear, concise, and engaging. Lastly, the article examines what it is that distinguishes the very best writing in the field, arguing that great legal writing is not just writing that is especially clear, concise, and engaging, but is instead writing characterized by a separate quality, elegance, that is aesthetic in nature. (abstract, p.2)

I like the emphasis on meeting the purposes of the readers of the document, because, though it may be a somewhat narrow, even idealized, view of the purposes of legal writing, it is at least a starting place that recognizes the connection between legal writing and legal reading. The development of expert legal writing and legal reading skills go hand in hand, as the writer summarizes:

[Writers] become proficient at writing primarily by reading the works of good writers and by practicing their own writing. Focusing students on the fundamental goals of legal writing (i.e., clarity, conciseness, and engagement) while at the same time exposing them to examples of excellent writing allows students to analyze for themselves the tools masters of the craft employ to achieve these fundamental goals.(p. 66)

I was alerted to this article by subscribing to SSRN's Law & Rhetoric eJournal, available to subscribers.

On Wednesday the Canadian Association of Law Libraries will be presenting a webinar with Michel Gamache, Director of Documentation Services, Heenan Blaikie in Montreal. Michel will be explaining how to get started with Yahoo Pipes for working with RSS feeds to customize information for practice groups. Even if you do not work in a law firm, this webinar will help you get started taking your use of RSS feeds to the next level. I myself dabble in the use of Pipes and am looking forward to learning more.

The webinar takes place this Wednesday, November 16, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. ET. Cost is $45.40 for members and $67.80 for non-members (tax included). For more information and to register, visit the CALL/ACBD website: http://www.callacbd.ca/en/content/webinars.

Here is the full description:

Yahoo Pipes: Slicing and Dicing RSS Feeds for Legal Practice Groups
SPEAKER: Michel Gamache

Yahoo! Pipes has been around since 2007, yet it doesn't seem to have caught the eye of many librarians. However, this is a valuable and simple tool that can be used in the context of web monitoring and information delivery.

This webinar will help you understand what Yahoo! Pipes is all about. You will learn how to create, aggregate, filter and customize feeds. You will also learn how to create widgets so that the contents you manipulate can be made available on intranets.

Michel Gamache has been Director of Documentation Services at Heenan Blaikie since 1999. Previously, he was Library Manager at another law firm in Montreal.

Michel holds a MLIS degree and a Certificate in Industrial Relations both from Université de Montréal, as well as a Bachelor degree in Business Management from Université du Québec à Montréal.

I have been remiss at mentioning the free online conference Library 2.0 that started today at 9:30 am ET and continues around the clock through to the end of tomorrow. This page has a schedule of sessions listed according to your time zone. For a quick look at the schedule, check out the Eastern Standard Time schedule – sessions typically run for a 1/2 hour.

There is still time to sign up! Register for the Library 2.0 site. All sessions will be run using the Blackboard Collaborate platform. Session rooms have a bandwidth-related limit of 700 attendees. Word via Twitter is that there are approximately 6,000 registrants. There are a number of concurrent sessions, and of course most people will not be watching the full 24 hours. There are over 150 sessions in all. All will be recorded.

The hash tag #lib2011 is being used on sites such as Twitter.

I hope you will at least stop by for one or two sessions!

We have been quick to use the word “crisis” to describe the state of articling in Ontario. Maybe too quick. Certainly the rather abrupt rise in the rate of “unplaced lawyer candidates” – students unable to find articling positions – from 5.8% in 2008 to 12.1% in 2011 is an eye-popper and potentially a game changer. But a crisis, as the Globe and Mail reports today? Maybe.

Those that work in the legal trenches have known for years that another crisis exists – the access to justice crisis – now well documented by the Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project in its 2010 report Listening to Ontarians.

The Law Society of Upper Canada’s creation of an Articling Task Force presents an opportunity to shine attention and hopefully address ‘the other crisis’ of access to justice. At least this is the thought of a group of us at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, Common Law Section. The Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa is hosting a series of lectures and workshops on the Legal Profession and Access to Justice. The series is a joint initiative of the Social Justice Caucus and the Professionalism Initiative, funded in part through the support of the Law Foundation of Ontario.

Last week’s session was provocatively titled “May the (Task) Force Be With Us” and featured a pre-Halloween Star Wars theme. The subtitle more directly described the substance of this workshop: “Access to Justice and Articling: Information, Issues and Ideas for the LSUC Articling Task Force”. A podcast of the session is available here. Moderated by uOttawa Prof. Suzanne Bouclin, this workshop brought together faculty, student services and students to brainstorm about solutions to “the real crisis” – access to justice, in the context of the current Task Force on Articling.

Professor David Wiseman set the table with a quick “articling stats for dummies” (my term not his) update based on the information contained in the Law Society’s May 2011 Report. He compared this data with information on Ontarian’s unmet civil legal needs from the Report of the Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project. Wiseman’s simple but powerful point was that there simply are not enough articling positions with lawyers who service the legal needs of low and middle-income Ontarians: sole practitioners, small firms and legal clinics. U of Ottawa Professional Development Counsellor Chelsea Paradis reinforced this point by explaining where uOttawa graduates obtain articles, mostly in the private sector. In this uOttawa is likely representative of other Ontario law schools. Paradis sounded a cause for concern that equality seeking groups are overrepresented among those law students who can’t find articles. This should be a serious cause for concern in the profession.

Mikaila Greene, a third year J.D. student, spoke passionately about her own experience as a law student deeply committed to social justice who has struggled to find employment in the field and meanwhile has incurred substantial debt through her schooling. She talked about the difficulty of finding a job in social justice and shared her elation in obtaining a dream job only to be confronted with the personal crisis of whether to follow her dream (plus paying for her own Bar Ads and health benefits) or pay off her debt. Her colleague, second year JD student, Ziad Yehia, expressed frustration with the lack of debt relief available to uOttawa students, especially compared to programs at American schools and at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. Yehia situated this problem in relation to the broader need to make articling with small firms and sole practitioners more economically feasible for both law grads and would-be principals.

Experienced law teacher and administrator Chantal Morton made the case for the importance of practical legal training. However, she encouraged the Task Force to consider possibilities beyond our general approach to articling. Morton pointed to Australia’s Leo Cussen Institute as a potential model. Leo Cussen offers students who do not article a practical training course that gives them the opportunity to interview “clients”, open and manage mock trust accounts, prepare documents for trial and work with a registrar, and gain experience through rotations in various practice areas (litigation and corporate). This all occurs with ongoing feedback from trusted and trained faculty/practitioners over months of daily training. More of Chantal’s thoughts can be found here. For his part, Wiseman proposed a civil law ‘mega-clinic’ with articling students as supervised frontline legal information and service providers, possibly integrated into a part-time third year of law school.

Last week’s forum was only the first of several at the University of Ottawa to debate the twin ‘crises’ of articling and access to justice. Law Society Regional Bencher and Task Force Member Adriana Doyle was in attendance and offered strong encouragement on the need for collaboration between the academy and the bar on these issues. It was great to hear that the Task Force has already started to consider many of the ideas raised in this forum and will begin consultations in the new year with its report due to the Law Society of Upper Canada in June 2012. The Task Force presented an interim report on its activities to Convocation on October 27, 2011.

It is heartening to see that the interim report noted that “The problem of unplaced candidates cannot be dismissed as 'the market weeding out weak candidates.'” I am also glad to see that the Task Force recognized the inconsistency in the profession’s commitment to articling in principle but not in practice: “Although the profession appears to hold a very strong philosophical attachment to articling, this has not translated to date into additional lawyers or firms being willing or able to offer articling placements.” It is this inconsistency which led me to propose the creation of an Ontario Legal Corps of articling students funded by a levy on all lawyers in Ontario.

It is disappointing that neither the interim report nor the terms of reference of the Task Force make mention of the Law Society’s statutory duty under the Law Society Act “to facilitate access to justice for the people of Ontario” (s. 4.2(2)).

At the end of the day, it will be a hollow victory if we “solve” the articling crisis but fail to make any strides on the access to justice front. The Law Society and the legal profession – in Ontario and in Canada – will be judged not by its ability to provide jobs for aspiring lawyers but by its ability to provide legal services for Canadians who need them.

Today's Globe and Mail features an articling discussing what is being called a "crisis" in articling positions,

Some blame law firms, accusing them of reducing their hiring in the face of economic uncertainty. But according to Law Society statistics, there has also been a steady increase in the number of law graduates, as law schools have increased their enrolments. The number of law students successfully landing articling jobs has increased each year since 2007, but it has not kept pace with demand.

The article features interviews with Meagan Williams, a colleague of mine from UWO Law (and occasional law blogger), Tom Conway, head of the Law Society task force on articling, Dean Lorne Sossin of Osgoode Hall, Deborah Glatter of Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, and Chris Axworthy, the new Dean of the Thompson Rivers law school.

You can see my previous piece on articling here.

We need to create an Ontario Legal Corps composed of lawyers and articling students to address the access to justice crisis in this province and we need to do it now. An Ontario Legal Corps will also go a long way to addressing the current deficit in available articling positions.

The articling crisis in Ontario is a supply-side program. It deals with the issue of the scarcity of supply of articling positions. As many judges and now the Governor General have reminded us, we have an Access to Justice crisis which is a demand side problem. The demand for legal services far outstrips the available supply as the Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project revealed.

Why not come up with solutions that attempt to match the two problems?

Clayton Ruby recently mooted the creative suggestion of paying a legal aid “articling student bonus” for legal aid work done by articling students. This is a great idea except that the prospect of any significant infusion of legal aid dollars coming from either level of government in the near future is remote. We need to keep working on governments but that is a long term strategy. In the short term, government is simply not the answer.

If we are to address the twin crises of articling and access to justice we must do so on our own. And it is in our collective interest as a profession to do so because as the Governor General warned us in August, if we fail to meet our obligations under the social contract “Society will change the social contract, and redefine professionalism for us. Regulation and change will be forced upon us—quite possibly in forms which diminish or remove our self-regulatory privilege.”

An Ontario Legal Corps – modeled along President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps - would provide legal services by lawyers and articling students to underserviced communities across Ontario. The idea of articling students providing legal services may be new to Ontario but it has recently been accepted by the Law Society of British Columbia.

It seems that lawyers in Ontario support articling in their rhetoric but not in their actions. In 2008, the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Licensing and Accreditation Task Force reported that that lawyers overwhelmingly wanted to retain articling. It also reported that there were only 1171 approved articling principals out of approximately 31,000 lawyers in private practice, government and corporate practice and other employment available to serve as articling principals. That is less than a 4% participation rate. The rest of the profession – including myself – is freeloading on the work of that 4% who are shouldering the burden of training the next generation of lawyers. If we believe in the need for practical training for new lawyers, we should all share in this responsibility.

Thus, out of necessity, the funding for an Ontario Legal Corps would come mostly from us, from lawyers. Under this proposal, each lawyer in Ontario would pay a $200 Access to Justice levy. With 40,000 lawyers, this will create 200 fully-funded Access to Justice Articling positions paying annual salaries of $40,000. In short, my idea is 200 articling positions for $200 per lawyer in Ontario. Or simply “200 for 200”. I think this is a fair price to pay to promote access to justice, train the next generation of lawyers and protect self-regulation.

The University of Ottawa proposed a similar idea in its submissions to the LSUC’s 2008 Licensing and Accreditation Taskforce as one of its nine suggestions that it made to that Task Force. It proposed instituting a “lawyer levy” that the LSUC would impose on the 30,000 lawyers who do not employ articling students in any given year contributed $100 each year, the LSUC could provide two hundred articling subsidies in the amount of $15,000 in any given year. Subsidies could be focused on both geographical and cultural areas that are currently underrepresented by lawyers. That suggestion was not given serious consideration at the time. It should be now.

But that 2008 proposal did not go far enough. The access to justice crisis worsens and we are back looking at articling only three years later because we need bold solutions. An Ontario Legal Corps is worth considering.

Dear Prospective Law School Student:

So you want to go to law school?

In making your decision, I encourage you to closely examine your reasons for wanting to embark on this path and make sure you have considered the pros and cons of doing so. Law school is now quite expensive and involves 4 years of your life (3 years of law school plus typically 1 year of articling). As such, you should not make the decision lightly.

Many of the 10 tips that follow may give the impression that I am against you entering law school. That is not the case. However, I think you should be aware of some of the negative aspects of pursuing this option so that you are not surprised or disappointed later on in your career.

1) Examine your reasons:

Why do you want to go to law school? You need to examine your reasons and read as much as possible about law school and the legal profession.

If you are going to law school because you are not otherwise certain of what other educational or career path to take, this is not a good reason.

Likewise, if you are going to law school because you think you will make money, this is also not a good reason.

And even if your motives are noble and you want to work in a public law sphere helping underprivileged people, realize there are possible forces at play that may result in you not achieving this dream. In "Letter to a Law Student Interested in Social Justice" (2007) 1 DePaul Journal for Social Justice 7 at 9, for example, law professor William Quigley of Loyola University notes that, despite the best intentions of students to go to law school engage in social justice issues, there are a number of factors that result in students instead pursuing corporate careers:

Many come to law school because they want in some way to help the elderly, children, people with disabilities, undernourished people around the world, victims of genocide, or victims of racism, economic injustice, religious persecution or gender discrimination.

Unfortunately, the experience of law school and the legal profession often dilute the commitment to social justice lawyering.

The repeated emphasis in law school on the subtleties of substantive law and many layers of procedure, usually discussed in the context of examples from business and traditional litigation, can grind down the idealism with which students first arrived. In fact, research shows that two-thirds of the students who enter law school with intentions of seeking a government or public interest job do not end up employed in that work.

To this, I would also add the potential distorting influence of expensive law school tuition causing some law students to pursue seemingly more lucrative corporate careers in order to pay off their student debt (and I say "seemingly" more lucrative corporate career because law is not necessarily a high-paying career since only a select few earn the "big bucks" – see section 3 below for more on lawyer salaries).

In many situations, I think it is ideal if you are able to combine your undergraduate experience or other life passions with a law-related job on graduation from law school. For example, if your background is in science or engineering, it might make sense to pursue a legal career in patent law, if that is something that seems interesting. Alternatively, if your background is in criminology or government relations, perhaps a career in a legal aid clinic or working for the government might make sense. For me, it took me awhile to realize that what I enjoyed most about the law was the research and technology side of things, which led to me further graduate degrees in law and information studies, resulting in my work as a law librarian and knowledge manager.

The point here is to examine your motives for wanting to go to law school and speak to as many people as possible who work in the field to get a better sense of whether your motives are realizable.

2) See what lawyers do:

Don't go to law school based on some misapprehension of what you think lawyers do based on what you have seen on TV or in the movies.

Instead, if you have the chance, job-shadow lawyers in different work environments to see what they do on a daily basis. Visit a courthouse and sit in on trials. If possible, offer to volunteer as a legal aid clinic or international NGO. Likewise, although perhaps frowned upon by law school administrators, most law professors will not notice you are not a registered student if you sit in on a law school class to see what law school teaching is like.

In addition, once in law school, it is useful to try to work in the summer months after 1st and 2nd year law in one or more law-related organizations to get a sense of what lawyers do, The practice of law is generally quite different than law school and seeing what the practice of law is like while still in law school might help you decide what sort of legal career you will pursue on graduation.

And although the vast majority of lawyers are hard-working, admirable people who help others, realize that you would be joining a profession where lawyer jokes run rampant and the cover of Maclean's magazine proclaims that lawyers are rats.

3) Don't do it for the money:

It is a myth the lawyers are rich. While it may be that some lawyers earn a lot of money, the vast majority of lawyers do not. And although it is not fair to compare lawyers to doctors (for a variety of reasons), realize that lawyers in private practice on their own have no guarantee that they will be paid (unlike doctors who bill the government for their services and are generally paid automatically by the government).

Read the Canadian Lawyer magazine annual salary survey for more information on lawyer salaries (realizing the limitations of such surveys).

In the United States, there have been some interesting developments relating to the return on investment in legal education, the difficulty that US law grads having in landing jobs, and allegations that some law schools are misrepresenting their job placement statistics.

4) Law School Admission Test (LSAT) prep:

Entrance into Canadian or American law schools is generally based on applicants who have: (i) strong undergraduate grades (sometimes augmented by otherwise interesting prior life experience or "personal statements"), and (ii) strong LSAT scores.

I leave it up to individuals to decide whether to take formal LSAT prep courses or to do self-study. From my hazy recollection, I remember it being all about the ability to read and synthesis passages of text to answer questions about the text and to otherwise solve Dell Logic Problem type questions.

The LSAT is not without controversy since some argue that it is not necessarily a reliable indicator of whether the test-taker would do well at law school or as a practicing lawyer. In fact, there have been recent suggestions that the ABA may in fact drop the LSAT as an entrance requirement into North American law schools.

5) Financing:

The cost of Canadian law school education has risen dramatically in the last few years, with the University of Toronto Faculty of Law charging in the range of $25,000 per year tuition. When you multiple this by 3 years and add in living costs, the overall cost is significant.

Many if not most law school applicants will therefore either require student loans or financing from family or friends.

When considering applying to law school, make sure you can afford the financial commitment and that you have a reasonable plan to pay off any debt you incur.

6) Which law school?

In Canada, there are currently 22 law schools, plus the addition of new law schools in Kamloops, BC, at Thompson Rivers University and in Northern Ontario at Lakehead University.

In my opinion, you should not get hung up on the reputation of a particular law school since all of the Canadian law schools offer excellent programs and opportunities. For some, the Maclean's magazine ranking of top Canadian law schools is controversial due to the criteria used to judge schools.

Some law schools may have strengths in particular areas of law, and if you are interested in a particular type of law, investigate which law school would be best for that area of law. Tuition fees may unfortunately be a factor for some, given the recent sharp increase in law school tuition in Canada.

Some law schools are taking the initiative to adapt their curriculum to changing needs, such as recent innovations by Osgoode Hall Law School at York University to improve the scope and quality of legal education.

Also note the trend among many Canadian law schools to now award their graduates a J.D. or Juris Doctor degree (the name of the law school degree offered by U.S. law schools) instead of the traditional LL.B. degree that "real" Canadian lawyers get (a Canadian LL.B. degree is functionally equivalent to the U.S. J.D. degree – it simply means that the person has graduated from a 3-year law school program, post-undergraduate; by way of contrast, in the U.K., Australia and commonwealth-related African countries, an LL.B. usually means the person has graduated from a 4-year undergraduate program). Blame this on the University of Toronto, who – based on what I think was misguided infatuation of all things American at the time – seemed to feel that it had to become American in order to compete (and otherwise perhaps justify its tuition increases). As was hinted at earlier on SLAW, many of us with the Canadian LL.B. degree are relatively content and I don't think there was any confusion in the North American legal industry over the Canadian LL.B. degree.

7) 1st year:

In section 10 below I list out a number of "law school survival books" which include sections on specifically surviving first-year law.

In most law schools, first year law typically includes mandatory, year-long courses on core, substantive areas of law, including criminal law, tort law, property law, constitutional law and contract law.

Although first-year law for some can be a terrifying experience due to the large volume of hard-to-read 19th century old English cases one must read, it can also be an exciting time with lots of intellectual and social policy discussions among classmates and professors. Most law schools have also now veered away from 100% final exams for first-year law school courses to instead allow some "paper" assignments, which helps to take off some of the pressure of 100% final exams.

Some first-year students are not necessarily told about the "game" that many law professors play (see The Paper Chase for an entertaining view of first-year law at Harvard; I include this movie as one of my Top 10 movies on my Law-Related Movies website). This game can entail the professor providing students with a "casebook" of old English cases, many of which are contradictory or come to different conclusions on similar facts, and then peppering students with Socratic-like questions to probe why a judge may have decided the way he or she did.

One way of seeing the forest from the trees in all of this is to occassionally check legal treatises on the subject of your class to get a broader overview on a particular point. Alternatively, for many of the famous cases discussed in first-year law, there will often be case comments written in law journals that help explain the cases.

8) Upper years:

By way of contrast to first-year law, the second- and third-year of law school is comprised mainly of elective courses, many of which can be smaller, seminar-type courses, with opportunities to present on course-related topics or write papers. Many law schools will also require students in upper years to complete a "moot trial" and to also write a "major" paper in at least one of their courses.

My advice to students is to pick elective courses based on one of two criteria: (i) because the topic seems interesting, or (ii) because the professor is a good lecturer.

Students who have the benefit of doing a law-related summer job after first- or second-year law will often be able to more easily identify courses of interest when they return to school based on what they have discovered during their summer job. For example, every summer student who I have recommended take an advanced legal research course in upper years has, to a person, later thanked me for the recommendation since such courses can be life-savers during articling, a topic discussed in the next seciton.

9) Articling:

Articling is the term used in Canada to describe the apprenticeship process through which law school graduates must pass in order to be licensed to practice law.

Articling is typically heavily regulated by each provincial Law Society.

Although is it possible to graduate law school after three years and live a fruitful life without having articled and been called to the Bar, my advice is for graduates to article, even if they are uncertain whether they want to practice law. Having spent 3 challenging years in law school, it is worth it to article and be called to the Bar.

On graduation from law school, for those students wanting to practice law in Canada, you will need to article or "apprentice" in the province in which you want to practice law (there is no national or federal bar admission process). The articling process is typically 1-year long and includes a combination of work experience and writing and passing the bar examinations for the particular province. The work experience component usually involves work at a law firm or other approved law-related institution (including government departments, in-house corporate legal departments, and legal clinics). At some point during this year of work the articling student takes bar examination courses and writes the bar examinations at the end of the training. Successful completion of the work component and passing of the examinations then entitles the student to be "called to the Bar."

In the old days, it was harder to "transfer" to a different province to practice law, a process that often required either re-articling in the new jurisdiction or at least passing the bar examinations in the new jurisdiction. However, the Federation of the Law Societies of Canada has introduced a number of national regulatory initiatives to breakdown barriers between practicing law in different provinces.

A recent challenge, due in part to there being so many law school graduates combined with a limited number of articling positions (at least at the big "Bay Street" law firms), it is becoming harder for law school graduates to find articling positions. The Law Society of Upper Canada has in fact established a task force to study the issue.

10) Additional reading:

I encourage all prospective law students in Canada to read the following books, which provide more detailed information and other advice:

• Stephen M Waddams, Introduction to the Study of Law, 7th ed (Toronto: Carswell, 2010)

• Allan Hutchison, The Law School Book: Succeeding at Law School, 3d ed (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2009)

• Ramsey Ali et al, The ABC's of Law School: A Practical Guide to Success without Sacrifice (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2002)

Otherwise, if interested, click here for a listing of books on Amazon on the topic of legal education (realizing that most of these books are from an American point of view).

Let me know your thoughts or if you have any questions.

The Law Foundation of Ontario is helping to coordinate articling positions in the Public Interest community, in conjunction with Pro Bono Students Canada (PBSC). From the LFO's information page:

The Law Foundation of Ontario (LFO) is pleased to announce that it is now accepting applications from prospective host organizations for its groundbreaking Public Interest Articling Fellowship Program for the 2013-14 articling period.

The Public Interest Articling Fellowship was conceived to meet both a significant need for legal assistance within the public interest community and to allow law students to gain valuable experience in public interest law. The program expands opportunities for articling in public interest organizations in Ontario by targeting groups that do not have access to funds to pay for an articling position. Pro Bono Students Canada (PBSC), with its extensive experience in working with public interest organizations and law students across the province, will continue to administer the program.

The LFO is inviting applications from prospective host organizations for up to six 2013-14 Articling Fellowships. The Fellowship covers the articling student's salary, along with the LSUC Licensing Process Fee and Licensing Application Fee. A stipend may also be paid, if necessary, to the selected organizations for out-of-pocket expenses (such as furnishing an office or purchasing a computer) that are required to host an articling student.

To be eligible, the host organization must:

• Be Ontario-based
• Be a not-for-profit or registered charity
• Have an on-site Articling Principal
• Not have access to funds to hire an articling student

The deadline to apply as a host is October 24, 2011, 5:00 p.m. For information on applying, please see the LFO webpage.

Hat tip: @CanLawMag (Canadian Lawyer Magazine)

Ontario has the unique position of having more applicants for articling positions than available positions. A panel at the Second Annual Conference Association for Canadian Clinical Legal Education discussed the future of articling in Ontario on September 24, 2011 at Osgoode Hall Law School.

Tom Conway of the Law Society of Upper Canada Task Force on Articling shared some of his personal views on the subject. He indicated there were 1,700 people who registered for articling in 2010-2011, and the situation is expected to get worse with UofO expanding its common law section, and the new law schools recently launched. The University of Montreal has also applied to expand their common law program, which may result in even further increases of law students.

The vast majority of articling positions are in the Toronto area (55%), and the majority of those positions are with large firms. Most practitioners in the province though are sole practitioners or in firms with less than 5 lawyers. For most articling students in the province the articling experience is a big firm Toronto experience. In 2008, the LSUC recommendations were overwhelming in favour of retaining articling as part of the licensing process, and focused on increasing the number of articling positions. They streamlined the process for articling principals, provided an articling registry, and conducted an articling survey. But despite all of this, not a single additional articling position was created.

André Bacchus, Director of Professional Development, Heenan Blaikie LLP, noted that a number of small practitioners are dying to have an articling student, but the applicants are reluctant to relocate to remote or rural locations where these practices are located.

Kim Brooks, Dean, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, indicated that market conditions are poor in society, generally. Interpreting articling data should be done with careful consideration of the unemployment rates outside of law, and that many individuals without articling positions will still have meaningful contributions to society in other capacities with their legal education.

Lorne Sossin, Dean, Osgoode Hall Law School, stated that the law society has no ability to actually determine the type of training that occurs during articling. The wide variety of types of articling positions defies the ability to qualitatively assess whether articling is actually achieving its goals. There are real skills that are required for practice, which may or not be obtained through articling.

The Association for Chinese Canadian Lawyers in Ontario (ACCLO) hosted a CLE session on September 17, 2011, on "Tips and Tricks from the Trade," featuring Sean Zhang of Blakes, Jeffrey Lem of Davies, Roslyn Tsao of Epstein Cole LLP, and Madam Justice W. Low of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

Notes from the sessions follow.

IP Tips and Tricks

Zhang started out by defining IP law as an intangible personal property often associated with intellectual activity or creation. IP rights are often enforced in courts and vary between jurisdictions. Registration and application terms vary and are often for a limited term.

There are several different types of IP used to protect distinct aspects of products and processes, and can include trade-marks, copyright, patent, industrial design, and trade secrets.

A trade-mark can be a word, slogan, symbol, shape of goods or packaging, colours, or sounds, which are used to distinguish wares and/or services from those of others. Common law rights to trade-mark are acquired through use, which is usually required to obtain registration. An application is required for registration but confers enhanced rights, and can be renewed for successive terms of 15 years.

Copyright is a bundle of rights granted to protect the form of expression, not the idea. The author usually owns the copyright unless it was created during the course of employment, or they assigned the rights in writing. Moral rights to the integrity of the work belong to the author, but may be waived, not assigned. No registration is required for copyright, but the term ends 50 years after the author's death.

Patents are rights granted by the state to exclude others from making, using, or selling the "claimed invention." If there is any public disclosure it could destroy the claim to novelty. Some jurisdictions provide a one-year grace period from public disclosure. A patent term starts from granting and ends 20 years from filing, and an application is required before granting which correctly and fully describes the invention. Patents are commonly granted for methods or processes, machines and devices, manufactured articles, and chemical compounds compositions of matter.

A trade secret describes types of confidential information which confers a competitive advantage in business or trade. The Federal Court of Canada ruled in Société Gamma Inc. v. Canada [Secretary of State], (1994), 79 F.T.R. 42, at pg 45 (F.C.T.D.) that a “trade secret” must be something “that is guarded very closely and is of such peculiar value to the owner of the trade secret that harm to him would be presumed by its mere disclosure.”

Industrial design protects the look, not the function, and required registration for protection. Some level of originality is required, and the term ends 10 years from the date of registration. Protected industrial designs may include shape, configuration, pattern, ornamentation, or a combination of these, and some level of originality is required.

When advising on a business deal, consider any agreement to ownership of IP or IP rights. A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) may protect the novelty of a possible invention or originality of design. Consider any disclosure to an industry partner or customer that could trigger the 12-month grace period for patents or industrial design.

When advising on employment issues document the ownership of IP rights and confidentiality provisions. Record the obligation of the employee or contractor to disclose or transfer IP rights to the employer, and their obligation to assist the employer in obtaining registration or granting of IP rights.

IP deadlines are very rigid and often have disastrous consequences if they're missed, including a total loss of rights (deemed abandonment) with no remedy, the valuation of which could be substantial (as with the Nortel patents recently). Prosecution deadlines of IP applications vary with different types and the applications.

Real Estate Tips and Tricks

Why does real estate matter? It's one of the major reasons for malpractice claims, with over 50% of small-firm claims are related to real estate. Lem represents the prosecution side of LawPRO claims, and has seen plenty of disasters. Although 85% of these claims result in a pay-out, this does not necessarily mean that malpractice was not present, simply that proof of causation was absent for ab out half of them.

The primary tip in this area is to document everything in the retainer, outlining the scope of the retainer and the responsibilities that the lawyer is taking on. If the court is allowed to determine the retainer it will invariably be broader than intended. Putting all of this in writing helps avoid ambiguities and prevents clients from retroactively blaming the lawyer for not examining aspects of a real estate transaction.

Clients do not normally perceive this as being a negative thing because it provides realistic expectations and alerts them to areas that may need further attention. Some lawyers go beyond this and state the costs associated with expanding the retainer, allowing clients to choose to take on additional costs with a broader project.

Documentation isn't always enough though, especially when clients don't speak English fluently. Lem feels that practicing real estate in any language other than English is a risky proposition. Instead, he suggests lawyers send a letter in their first language outlining basic facts, and explaining that all future correspondences and documents will be in English, stating that it is their responsibility to obtain a translator if needed.

Another practical tip useful in this area is to use a calculator with a print-out. Not only does it help lawyers review figures that were calculated to come up with an amount, but it provides documentation of the calculation used for the records.

Family Law Tips and Tricks

Most people in law school state that the last thing they would want to do is family law due to the exposure to conflict and emotional tensions. Tsao highlighted a few family law issues that could arise for lawyers practicing in other areas.

Tsao warned of keeping a mind out for domestic abuse, but also various forms of financial abuse. These situations can often result in one partner being less forthcoming about information. Although most violence is typically male, it can also be a female abuser.

Checking the status of the children is also very important. If issues arise down the road, it's important to note that inquiries about their health, status in school, and general well-being was made.

The financial situation of the couple should be established, including any joint accounts and joint lines of credit. In many matrimonial disputes one partner removes all funds from a joint account without notification or consent of the other partner. Purchases on credit cards in both names will still be the responsibility of both partners. Money can be nasty, and a particular source of contention between partners.

Gauging the general tone of the divorce is important because it will signal whether it is amicable and whether action needs to be taken in an immediate fashion.

Before moving out of the house, the implications for custody of children should be considered. Courts like to maintain the status quo. Both partners have right of possession of the matrimonial home, whether they are on the title or not. But a different living arrangement may be necessary if the context is particularly acrimonious, especially if one partner is threatening to call the police to remove the other partner.

Tips from the Bench

Without integrity, a lawyer will not have self-respect or the respect of their peers. Without competence you will have no clients. And without courtesy you will have no friends.

Lawyers today often enter the practice without the benefit of a structured bar admissions course, or the mentoring that used to occur during articles and the early years of practice. Justice Low indicated that one of the hardest parts of practice is managing client expectations.

Some lawyers are good rainmakers. Others are great at research and writing. Some have no difficulty getting on their feet for a motion, or have a great rapport with juries. However, very few lawyers have the luxury of doing only a few tasks that they are good at and they like, requiring lawyers to play all of the instruments in the band.

One thing every lawyer should do is help manage client expectations. Managing client expectations on the front-end helps pay dividends throughout a case. A litigation plan should include expected results, including adverse outcomes. Many litigators commence with their case with little idea of where they want to go. Planning can optimize your likelihood of getting paid, and paid on time.

There are matters that the lawyer should be clearly in control of, and not the client, such as procedures, legal arguments, and litigation strategies. Relinquishing control of those matters undermines the skill that a lawyer has. Far too often counsel are not familiar enough with the facts or the law. Building a case is like building a house. You need a foundation, and plans. Research should be done at the beginning and not the end.

Providing arguments in the form of a factum, whether it's required or not, does both you and your client a service. Not only does it help organize your arguments, if the judge reserves judgments they will have the materials on hand for review.

At least according to this poll, conducted by private US research firm Harris Interactive. The poll includes some interesting numbers on the current (general) geographical distribution of e-readers, plans of consumers to purchase e-readers, and some broad numbers on the effects of e-readers on reading habits.

This report does not state how many people were polled, does not reveal standard measures of significance, and notes that the respondents were selected from "among those who have agreed to participate in Harris Interactive surveys" so your mileage may vary. Still, the results don't seem unexpected to me.

The mixed results on the reported effects of e-readers on quantity of reading is borne out by other studies, most recently in Woody et al. (2010) but also in many other studies. The deep engagement with the text that is the gold standard of reading does not typically happen yet online. A great introduction to this area of study is free online in UNB librarian Barry Cull's "Reading revolutions: Online digital text and implications for reading in academe" 16 (6) First Monday (30 May 2011) .

In legal education, there are a couple articles that grapple with the issues of teaching critical engagement with the print and online text, both by the same authors D.M. Curtis and J.R. Karp: 41 Willamette L. Rev. 293, and 30 Hamline L. Rev. 247. There is also an interesting book that purports to teach higher-level reading skills to law students, and which strikes me as a very useful text: R.A. McKinney Reading Like a Lawyer: Time Saving Strategies for Reading Law Like an Expert, (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2005).

Once again Rich McCue has published the results of his annual survey of incoming law students at the University of Victoria. His executive summary of the results is as follows:

• 84% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up dramatically from 50% last year), with 42% of the total being iPhones, 13% Android and 27% Blackberry’s.
• 19% of students own tablet devices or ebook readers.
• 98% of students own laptops, and 16% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 50% of student laptops are Mac’s, up from 44% last year.
• The average laptop price stayed basically the same as last year at $1,186, which is down from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• The students’ average typing speed was was 60 wpm.
• 72% of all students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
• 55% of students use Gmail as their primary email account (up from 49% last year), 9% use UVic email and 22% Hotmail.
• 60% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing (down from 67%). 30% favor Google Docs (up from 27%) and 2% OpenOffice.
• 58% of students report backing up their primary computer on a regular basis. 60% of those backing up do so to an external hard drive and 25% to a cloud storage solution.
• 97% of students use Facebook (up from 91%) and 92% (up from 80%) would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar.

None of this surprises me, except perhaps the number of students using Google Docs, which is higher than I would have supposed. And while I'm glad to see that most students are backing up their computers, I wonder if I believe them. That 50% of their laptops are Macs suggests that law firms had better get ready — readier than they are, certainly — to accommodate Apple's operating system.

It would be great to see other law schools imitating Rich in this and generating some data as to what the profession might expect as regards technological devices and expectations.

This weekend I stopped by the Vegetarian Food Festival in Toronto to try out some new food products. The last thing I expected to see was a lawyer group. But there, prominently situated between food sample tables and advocacy groups was the Lawyers for Animal Welfare  booth.

University of Toronto law student Camille Labchuk and lawyer Nick Wright were staffing the booth, making members of the public aware of the group and a number of law-related animal welfare issues. I learned that Lawyers for Animal Welfare (LAW) is a registered charity dedicated to advancing public knowledge of animal practices and preventing the abuse and killing of animals through enforcement of existing laws.

Notably, the group is presenting the program The Emerging Field of Animal Law on October 3rd through Ontario Bar Association's professional development program. This program is available in person and via webcast. From the program description:

Join us for an opportunity to network and learn from a panel of lawyers and students working in the field of animal law at this inaugural Ontario Bar Association event. The field of animal law is growing rapidly in Canada. Animal law has been established and practiced in the United States for decades, and the past few years have been marked by a growing awareness of animal legal issues in Canada. Most Canadian law schools now offer courses in animal law, animal law practitioners have emerged and an increasing number of law students are entering the field. These developments have prompted many to draw comparisons between the present state of animal law, and the state of environmental law 25 years ago. For some lawyers, practicing animal law simply means working with clients who have legal issues relating to animals. Others are drawn to the field by a commitment to protecting animals – beings with few legal protections unable to help themselves. Drawing on a growing body of Canadian case law and legislation relating to animal issues, particularly in Ontario, lawyers practicing animal law are at the forefront of an exciting new field of law. This session will be relevant to various types of civil litigation practice as well as criminal prosecutions.

Program Chair: 
Nicholas dePencier Wright, LLB, MBA, Campaigner, Humane Society International/Canada and
Executive Director, Lawyers for Animal Welfare (LAW)

Speakers:
Peter Sankoff, JD, LLM, Associate Professor, University of Western Ontario, Faculty of Law
Evelyne Kostanska, JD, President, Lawyers for Animal Welfare (LAW) and Fellow, PETA Foundation
Camille Labchuk, President, Student Animal Legal Defense Fund, University of Toronto Chapter and Campaign Manager, Lawyers for Animal Welfare (LAW)

For more information about the group see their website: http://www.lawyersforanimalwelfare.com/ and find out about upcoming meetings from their Meetup.com page http://www.meetup.com/lawmeetup/. You can also sign up for their mailing list: http://www.lawyersforanimalwelfare.com/subscribe/.

Oral cultures create knowledge, and some literate cultures produce many more publications than others. In our post-literate world, we have see the resurgence of oral communications on YouTube and elsewhere. Nonetheless, citations to the printed word remains a gold standard. Other forms of verification are needed, to address this imbalance. Enter Wikimedia's Oral Citation Project. The project is outlined, and links are provided to a movie that looks at the problem.

For more interesting projects from the Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia), see here.

Orientation week is drawing to a close. 2L and 3L classes have begun with 1L to begin on Monday. To all 1Ls here are my pieces of advice. I know that not all who have experienced law school will agree with these and that's fine, I hope that Slawyers will contribute their pieces of advice in the comments. Here are mine:

• Go to Class

I know this seems self-explanatory and I also know that one of the guilty pleasures of being a student is the occasional skipped class, so if you are going to skip classes be very judicious in choosing those few occasions. Your profs don't appreciate the missed classes and if shows when you write an exam if you have missed substantial time. Some believe you can skip class and rely on CANS (see below) that might get you through but you won't excel and you won't really know what you are talking about, and it shows, on exams and when you go out to work.

• Keep up on the Readings

The corollary to the first item; this also seems self-explanatory; however, (and I hope you are already aware of this) there is a lot of reading in Law School, plan for it, allocate substantial amounts of time for it and get on top of it early because it is difficult to catch up once you fall behind. The semester is relatively short and if you fall behind you are going to find yourself three weeks out from exams with a substantial amount of reading undone and trying to prepare for exams ill-equipped (even if you have good CANS) and going into exams with incomplete knowledge. Also, going to class without having done the readings shows. Your profs are pretty clever and whether or not they call you on it, they have a good idea.

• CANS

Ahh CANS or – Condensed Annotated Notes I would never be so bold as to suggest you ignore the grey market for CANS, even though I believe that your best CANS are ones you create yourself. Those legendary CANS that are floating around the law school are likely several years old and there are likely at least one or two cases which have been superseded or overturned. SO what I will suggest is that you take the CANS and update them yourself, use that legendary copy as a template. Furthermore, you stand a better chance at understanding your own work than that of someone else.

• Don't listen to your classmates

I'm not suggesting that your classmates are dumb or malevolent, this simply means don't let talk affect you. As in: "I read xx number of pages" or "Did you study xxxx" or the pre and post exam talk (albeit this one is difficult to avoid), whether it is intended or not this type of talk psyches a lot of people; you can only take care of yourself don't let what others say they are doing, affect you. I'm not saying avoid your classmates, you will make friendships in law school that last a lifetime. And in fact a small group of friends whom you trust and rely on can be extremely helpful. I'm simply saying that there is a wave of hysteria that can pass through a law school and catch many people in the wake. It is the type of talk referred to above that fuels the wave, don't let it affect you.

• (At the Risk of self aggrandizement) Get to know your friendly neighbourhood law librarian

While we can't do whatever a spider can; action is our reward. Or more concisely, stopping short of writing your exams or doing your studying for you, we can make your life a lot easier. We know the databases that are available whether that be case-law, legislation, citation managers, legal literature indexes or full-text, blogs, wikis you name it, that is our stock in trade. Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly we know our way around the law school and the university you are attending- what support is offered, good places to study, tips, talks and what we like to call our ninja tricks. We also know legal citation.

Above all, enjoy yourself! it is a lot of work but if you wanted to go to law school you should find most of the work interesting. You may feel that you have entered a different dimension, but the three years goes by in a relatively short time and when it is over you will look back on student life fondly. And to finish with the thoughts of local artist Matt Mays "You gotta move your mind; if you wanna feel welcome; around here".

Attention: what follows is not me, my head shot to the left is not representative of the following paragraphs. Over the summer we have had a library school intern working in multiple capacities at the Sir James Dunn Law Library as our student reference assistant. During this time Amanda (Andie) Bulman has become a fan of Slaw and I thought that as the summer is drawing to a close I thought I would give her a chance to craft a post for Slaw on what her experience has been like over the past several months. I gave her a free rein to write what she desired, with a few editorial suggestions before I posted the text, and what follows are her thoughts on law, legal research and legal librarianship in an academic setting.

Lesson #1. Don’t screw up the job interview

I was not the first choice for the summer reference internship at the Sir James Dunn Law Library. I kept my beige trench coat on throughout the interview (a pen had exploded on my sweater minutes before the interview was scheduled to start) and nervously made some jokes about a province some of the interviewers were from. These were the first lessons. Wear a blazer. Keep the jokes to a minimum. Be professional in the job interview.

Lesson #2. Sometimes “The Answer” does not exist.

In June slews of undergraduates were taking a business law course and came to the library on a semi-regular basis. They frequently requested my help in searching for case law or legislation that had very specific criteria and I frequently went home feeling frustrated by my inability to find “the answer”. I eventually realized that it is unlikely that “the answer” would be found in a single document. Legal research is a time consuming process and well-crafted legal arguments are usually constructed from a variety of resources. The answer is a myth. Legal research rarely works that way.

Lesson #3. Reference librarians are trained in the art and science of answering questions. Reference librarians are not lawyers. Don’t play one on TV!

The questions that people ask in a law library differ significantly from the questions that get asked at other academic libraries. The questions can be complicated and weighty and often quite depressing. Your heartstrings will be tugged. Show restraint. Provide instruction and show patrons how to use the available resources. Do not get involved. Do not provide legal advice!

Lesson #4. Law libraries attract a weird and wide variety of patrons. Be prepared to help everyone.

I should qualify this by stating that I do receive the normal everyday questions about citations and databases. However, many questions seem to border on the absurd. Fridays are especially rough days at the reference desk. The research students have decided to take the day off, the faculty have made tracks for their summer homes, and the residents of Arkham have come to play.

I’ve met: a gentleman who does not “believe or trust computers”, several individuals who sue people for a living, and a host of conspiracy theorists attempting to prove that the Federal Income Tax Act is illegal. Law librarianship is a service profession. The law library is here to serve students and faculty, but we are also available to help anyone who wants to learn to navigate our resources. I’ve helped students with Quicklaw, assisted professors in their search for obscure newspaper articles, and have tracked down various amendments to the Income Tax Act for several very enthusiastic conspiracy theorists. The final and most important lesson has three parts: treat everyone with respect, teach everyone to use the library, and know when and how to exit a conversation that’s taken a turn for the weird.

Lesson #5. I want to be a legal librarian or an academic librarian. Please give me a job.

The most important thing that I have learned is that I want to work in this field. Before accepting this position, I only had a vague sense of what being a legal reference librarian entailed. I imagined that the reference librarians at the Sir James Dunn Law Library mainly created library guides and sat behind the information desk looking knowledgeable. The reality is very different. Besides working the reference desk the librarians create information guides for library users, they collaborate on policies and procedures, test drive new technology, committee work, present at conferences, collaborate with faculty on research, conduct their own research, catalog the collection, shelf read, work in acquisitions, and a host of other things. Their schedules are varied and interesting and their days rarely seem routine. Most importantly, the legal librarians here have an opportunity to teach research skills to students in a classroom setting . That’s the aspect of this career that seems most interesting. Having the ability, time, and opportunity to teach research skills would be amazing.

It has been a long while since we mentioned the Innovaction Awards. The 2011 winners were recently announced, and a Canadian group are among the winners:

Berwin Leighton Paisner, LLP (BLP) was selected for their Lawyers On Demand (LOD) initiative which began in 2007 after BLP observed two important issues affecting the UK legal market: (1) legal services clients want to stretch their budgets further and (2) many lawyers are looking for greater flexibility and autonomy in their work. BLP created LOD to address these issues. LOD challenged the traditional models of legal service delivery and brought talented freelance lawyers to work directly with clients. LOD lawyers work at the client office or their home office but are nevertheless vetted and supported by BLP know-how resources, the LOD service unique in the market. LOD began as a pilot in 2007 with eight lawyers. Since then, it has increased ten-fold in size and gained a fantastic list of clients.

The University of Toronto Faculty of Law received an InnovAction Award for its Internationally Trained Lawyers Program (ITLP). When immigrating to Canada, one of the biggest challenges internationally-trained lawyers (ITL) face is the lack of access to opportunities to receive practical, hands-on experience in the Canadian legal environment, particularly during the lengthy accreditation and licensing process. In recognizing the limited opportunities for ITLs, the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law created a bridging program for ITLs who wish to practice in Ontario. The ITLP is a comprehensive 10-month program to help participants obtain their license and secure full-time professional employment. The program includes intensive academic, cultural fluency and career development classroom sessions, design to support international lawyers.

The University of Miami School of Law in partnership with five other law schools was selected for theirLawWithoutWalls initiative. LawWithoutWalls is a part-virtual, collaborative academic model that unites students, faculty, practitioners, and entrepreneurs from around the world to innovate legal education and practice. It’s designed to help those engaged in the education and practice of law to embrace the impact of our changing world. LawWithoutWalls exemplifies what 21^st century education can be. Students are not educated on-line in the same old way. Instead, technology is utilized to create an entirely new educational experience, a platform for interdisciplinary interchange and community.

Check out the video for LawWithoutWalls (for video from Lawyers On Demand, you will have to visit their website):

LawWithoutWalls from LawWithoutWalls on Vimeo.

The papers recently carried the news of the death of Paul-André Crépeau, C.C., O.Q., c.r., LL.D., D.h.c., m.s.r.c., who I would argue was the most influential law reformer in Canadian legal history.

From the initial invitation in 1965 from Jean Lesage's Justice Minister Claude Wagner to take over the Office de Révision du code civil, originally set up during the Duplessis years with Thibaudeau Rinfret and André Nadeau, Crépeau's vision and his life work was la révision du Code civil, and under his leadership the Office focused on the daunting task of updating the general provisions of a century-old Code. The Office de Révision du code civil was originally set up during the Duplessis years with Thibaudeau Rinfret and André Nadeau, but only really blossomed with Crépeau.

Crépeau's background was unusual for someone who was so closely identified with the civil law tradition. He was born in rural Saskatchewan, and obtained his Licence in Philosophy at the University of Ottawa (1947), followed by a B.C.L. at the Université de Montréal (1950). He won a Rhodes Scholarship that took him to study common law and comparative law at the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Civil Law (1952) and a doctorate at the Université de Paris (1955). He began his career as an assistant professor at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Law (1955-1959), and soon after joined the McGill University Faculty of Law (1959-1994), and after that a doctorate in classical civil law from the Université de Paris. He had six earned degrees and seven honorary doctorates, and was honoured with a Festschrift on his retirement. He was justly honoured in Ottawa and Québec

In 1965, Professor Crépeau was entrusted by the Québec government to reform the Civil Code. As the president of the Civil Code Revision Office, he aspired to create a work that would serve as a “collective reflection on the very foundations of private law institutions”. In 1978, this work culminated as a presentation to the National Assembly of the Draft Code Civil, accompanied by explanatory Commentaries. It served as the framework for the project (bill) which eventually became the new Civil Code of Québec, adopted in 1991 and came into force on 1 January 1994.

The story of the new Code is one that is known to too few Canadian lawyers – a helpful interview can be found here. The Justice Minister at the time the new Code was implemented, Gil Rémillard, was justly proud of the project, but he was at most the sage homme – and Crépeau and his team, the ones who did the intense intellectual study and design, that resulted in today's Code.

Radio Canada's obituary is here, and the Law Faculty's here.

He dedicated his professional life to studying and developing Canadian civil law from a comparative law perspective as well as to promoting the French-inspired civilian tradition, in Canada as well as internationally. With a hat tip to my colleague – and occasional blogger – Alejandro Manevich, here is a cartoon from the Barreau's Journal this month, which illustrates the point.

After his work on the Code, he dedicated his work to the Centre de recherche en droit privé et comparé du Québec, which has a remarkable set of publications.

Peut-il reposer en paix.

When you teach at law school, as I have, you become familiar with a variety of reasons as to why students choose to study law—perhaps there's a history of lawyers in the family; or their parents want them to do something, anything professional; or they want to right wrongs, get that BMW, enter politics, point damning fingers at witnesses… Even with those students who wound up in law school with apparently only a shrug for a reason, some explanation eventually surfaced.

Now there is a novel explanation—at least for a small portion of the student body. Two recent studies have explored the possibility that a student's name might make the difference. Ernest Abel ("Influence of Names on Career Choices in Medicine," Names Vol. 58 No. 2, June, 2010, 65–74—abstract only free online) has found that thanks to "implicit egotism" we may be motivated unconsciously to prefer career choices that remind us of our names. Thus, if your name is Doctor or includes "doc" or "med", you're more likely to become a doctor than a lawyer; and if your name is Law or starts with that syllable or "leg" or "att", for example, the reverse is the case: you may feel drawn to law school.

Another study done a few years earlier ("Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions," Pelham et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002, Vol. 82, No. 4, 469–487) came to similar conclusions. 

One is… sceptical. I have to say that there's no possibility that my name influenced me to pick law; I learned in high school biology class that it sounded unhappily close to "silaged fodder," and yet I did not feel a pull towards farming. But things might be different for you. Or you. So I thought I'd experiment just a little. Now, I've no ability to run a proper study here, lacking nearly all statistical knowledge as well as the time it would take to do a proper job. But I decided that a down-and-dirty comparison might be fun, so I consulted the directory of the Law Society of Upper Canada and, for comparison, the Directory of Public Accounting Licensees, looking to see whether or not "law" names formed roughly similar proportions of each group. (Because the Law Society database required me to enter a city, I chose the largest, Toronto.)

As you see from the table below, the results are at odds with the outcomes of the Abel and Pelham studies. Indeed, having "law" within your name seems to incline you to accounting. Of course, it could be that we here in Canada or, indeed, here in Toronto, are somehow perverse — or just different from our American sibs, lacking, perhaps, that "implicit egotism" that would have, well, made me into a farmer.

For the last few months a colleague from our marketing department and I have been attending SMBYEG. This is the 140 character form of Edmonton's (Edmonton International Airport code being YEG) combined with the abbreviation for Social Media Breakfast. Not everyone who attends has a Twitter handle, but #SM users are certainly in the majority.

Social Media Breakfasts serves two main purposes:

• Face-to-face networking: Bring together marketers, PR pros, students, entrepreneurs, and social media practitioners and enthusiasts of all stripes over breakfast.
  
• Education: Through panel discussions, presentations, case studies, debates, and breakout sessions … teach, share, and learn social media best practices for business.

I like to learn new things. SMB topics are somewhat generic, unlike my usual choices in learning opportunities, which are most often targeted toward the legal industry or librarianship. Generic is a good thing. I am using the hour every last Friday of the month to try and understand what people outside the very small world that is the legal industry are thinking about when they use the words Social Media.

Check out the SMB website to see if there is a breakfast in a city near you. If there isn't, perhaps you could start your own.

I just received this information from the CALL webinar committee, and thought the SLAW community would be interested. I work with Rick – he has incredible knowledge of legislation and a wicked sense of humour. Caroline is not unknown to the CALL community – she has spoken at annual conferences before, and has always impressed me with her skill as a speaker and her encyclopedic knowledge.

This is a session not to be missed!

Thursday September 15, 2011
1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. EDT 

Join two legislation experts in the first of a series of webinars that will share tips and tricks about legislation across the nation!

The first half hour of this webinar will focus on Federal legislation. Learn about the traps and pitfalls of online legal research in the federal context and become familiar with what is and is not available electronically. Expect to discover at least one thing you did not already know about federal bills, parliamentary documents, statutes, regulations or coming into force provisions. The second half of the webinar will focus onOntariolegislation. Listen in on 20-things that may have slipped under the radar about Ontario's statutes, regulations and the e-Laws website.

 Speakers:

 Caroline Hyslop has been working in the legal information profession for more than ten years, and is currently in the Legal and Legislative Affairs Division at the Library of Parliament. 


Twenty-four years ago Rick Sage toured the Ontario Legislative Library as part of a library school orientation. He has left the "Ledge" only once. In 2000, Rick was seconded to the Office of the Legislative Counsel where he joined the team that developed e-Laws, the government of Ontario's official website for statutes and regulations.

Register today!

Each webinar costs only $45.40 for members ($67.70 for non-members) or purchase the whole series. Recordings of each session will be available to registered participants so you can still sign up for the series even if you missed the first live session. 

For more information and to register for this webinar, please visit the Webinar Series website.

Thank you,

 The CALL Webinar Subcommittee

Liana Giovando, Connie Crosby, Meris Bray and Eve Leung

A short while ago the first issue of the UC Irvine Law Review became available via the UC Irvine website. Given the school’s initial growing pains it is welcome to see this first issue. Many SLAW readers may remember the political controversy involving the initial offer, withdrawal of offer, and rehiring of leading US constitutional law scholar (and frequent critic of the Bush administration) Erwin Chemerinsky as the school’s Founding Dean. Dean Chemerinsky addresses the controversy in the journal’s opening article on the school’s founding and his vision for a new law school. Of interest to SLAWers is that he saw the hiring of a librarian - my colleague Beatrice Tice, formerly of the Bora Laskin Law Library – as an important part of building a new law school.

Beatrice has an excellent article in the inaugural issue: “The Academic Law Library in the 21st Century: Still the Heart of the Law School”. The title is a reference to Harvard president Charles Eliot’s descriprion of Harvard’s law library as “the heart of the school” in his 1872-73 Annual Report. Beatrice gives us an excellent overview of the role and perceptions of the law school library from the 18th century to the present. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that a lot of the very interesting history that Beatrice recounts was new to me.

Beatrice concludes with a discussion of why the academic law library is still relevant in the twenty first century. There has been a lot of recent discussion among and between librarians on this topic. Here Beatrice is addressing non-librarians and provides a good summary of some of the strengths of the academic library– including the increased need for the library’s “information facilitation” function in a hybrid digital and print environment (what John Palfrey calls “digital plus”), and the observation that “The indefinable ambience of the law library as an environment for work of great consequence—as the ‘laboratory of the law school’—is felt and understood by those who use the library, even in the information age.”

In a bit of tragic irony last week, I finished my post on some of Canada's constitutional documents and hit the publish button and left Slaw to discover that Dalhousie, and indeed, Canada had suffered a terrible loss with the passing of Professor Peter Aucoin. I'm sure that many Slaw readers are familiar with the name as he was one of, if not the, preeminent scholar on Canadian government and public service; he was a key figure in many Royal Commissions and published books and journal articles of high quality, too numerous to mention here. His scholarship and contributions were acknowledged in 2008 with investiture as a Member of the Order of Canada. I, personally, had the privilege of being in one of his classes and considered myself fortunate to be a student of his; I remember myself and my classmates being in awe of his knowledge on a weekly basis. At the same time a person of that level of accomplishment did not have a hint of pretension and was a true gentleman. He was a frequent witness at the Supreme Court of Canada, which is a statement unto itself both as a direct witness and also his works being directly quoted. I could not hope to give a fitting tribute in this forum so I simply wanted to highlight some direct quotes from SCC cases where, it is perhaps, a tribute to the clarity and quality of his thoughts that there is no need to provide context to these quotes:

In, Libman v. Quebec (Attorney General), [1997] 3 SCR 569 at para 40:

The purpose of spending limits in an election or a referenda campaign is to promote fairness as primary value or objective of the democratic process. . . .

Fairness is promoted in order to ensure that to the greatest extent possible that various sides in an election or a referenda [sic] have a reasonable equal opportunity to present their case to voters in the hopes that their case will influence the vote and that voters themselves will have a reasonable opportunity to hear the various views put forward by the participants before they cast their vote.

Thomson Newspapers Co. v. Canada (Attorney General), [1998] 1 SCR 877

While I support this particular proposal [the 72-hour blackout period], people must understand its purpose. The purpose is not, as has been said even in the Senate, to give voters a rest or breather from a flood of public opinion polls published just prior to election day. In fact, voters find that polls are useful information to them. They have a right to those polls. In terms of the electoral contest as we know it, the more polls the better.

The issue here is twofold. Public opinion polls purport to be scientific and are reported as such by the press. There is a question of the accuracy of public opinion polls in reading public opinion. There is clearly some need for regulation, given that particular assumption.

P]arties and candidates need access to the polls and this requires some time. In particular, it means they have to be able to respond to the poll. They cannot do that if the poll is published either on election day or the day before an election. Therefore, the ban of 72 hours is to ensure that polls cannot be published after a point in time where candidates and parties cannot respond. It has nothing to do with giving voters a breather. [Emphasis added.]

As a country that concerns itself with how we govern ourselves, we are certainly poorer for the passing of Peter Aucoin but greatly enhanced for his lifetime of work in the field.

One of the saddest chapters of Bill Kaplan's excellent biography Canadian Maverick – the Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand, is his account of Justice Rand's post SCC appointment as the founding Dean of the University of Western Ontario's Law School. Rand didn't fit, was remote from students, and was ill at ease and isolated. {For further references see Omar's post and Jamie Cameron's review.]

A different challenge awaits the former chairman and chief executive officer of McCarthy Tétrault LLP., Iain Scott who will be moving to take over the deanship of Western in September. This is a time of transition for Canadian legal education in which many of the founding myths of the profession are up for re-examination by a generation for whom Caesar Wright is scarcely a footnote. The balance between academic and professional emphasis in legal education is ripe for re-examination thirty years after Harry Arthur's seminal Law and Learning Report. The future of legal services in a very changing marketplace. Shifts in models of lawyering. The unmet legal needs of millions. The linkages between business schools and law schools. The challenges and opportunities offered by new technologies.

I worked together with Iain on the CBA Conflicts Task Force and he's an impressive, intelligent, shrewd and tough lawyer, who has a splendid grasp of the bigger picture.

Western is fortunate to have him. It'll be interesting to see what happens at UWO over the next few years.

♬ I've seen the bridge and the bridge is long
And they built it high and they built it strong
Strong enough to hold the weight of time
Long enough to leave some of us behind…♬

Lyrics by Bernie Taupin, music composed and recorded by Sir Elton John.

SFU Convocation

Simon Fraser University's Masters of Arts in Applied Legal Studies has received a 2011 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education.

The prestigious award was presented at the CAUCE national conference recently held in Toronto to John Whatley, the CODE program director. Dr. Whately received the award on behalf of SFU’s School of Criminology, Centre for Online and Distance Education (CODE) and, in particular, all the people responsible for the design, implementation and continuing delivery of the program.

The SFU's CODE program uses software called "eLive":

eLive is a communication tool that offers synchronous (real-time) audio, video, text and graphical connection with your tutor-marker and classmates. Types messages to one another, speak to one another over the computer, and draw pictures—all in real time—to communicate ideas and images.

The Elluminate Live software (commonly known as eLive at SFU) is an online synchronous audio visual platform. It allows for students – located anywhere in the world – to sign onto the web site and participate in the class using the interactive features of the software. The students can present a powerpoint, take over control of the class and show their desktop (and whatever is there). They can chat, raise their hands and basically interact with each other as if they were all in the same physical room.

Kristy Martin, who completed the program in 2011, says that the innovative delivery of the program was essential: “My favourite experience in this program was e-live, which provided a more interactive learning opportunity without the need for in class attendance. That allowed those of us who do not live in Vancouver an opportunity to have lectures from our professors and to interact with our fellow students.”

eLive software is truly the 'next generation' in university education. Having used the software (and others like it), I can testify that it is truly amazing to be fully participating in the class from your easy chair with your laptop on your lap, without having to fight traffic, find parking or go through any of the typical time-gobbling activities that are otherwise necessary to be in the same classroom at the same time. The software fully enables the type of high-quality engagement among the attendees that is necessary for a university (and in fact, Masters-level) class.

Congratulations to the Dean: Dr. Robert Gordon, Dr. John Whately and the rest of the team for 'elluminating' how the eLive software combined with the web can build a bridge and bring people together for world-class results.

My sense is the the inaugural New Law Librarians' Institute last week in London, Ontario, sponsored by the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/L'Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit (CALL/ACBD), was very successful.

It was a 5-day event, with sessions on substantive law led by various University of Western Ontario law professors, combined with sessions by various law librarians, including me.

Sessions included, for example, a Thursday morning session by Professor Sam Trosow on property law for law librarians (including a session on copyright law), followed by a session by UWO Law Librarian John Sadler on researching secondary legal literature. There was then a session in the afternoon on Quebec civil law followed by a computer lab session with hands on practice, with both John and librarian Elizabeth Bruton, also of UWO, leading the various hands on sessions. Others days had other substantive law sessions led by law profs, with other law librarians discussing different aspects of law librarianship.

On the Friday, I presented on the topic of Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession, espousing my views that knowledge management is fully integral to (and ideally fully integrated with) the practice of law librarianship. Aside from discussing the importance of knowledge management within the legal profession, a theme I focused on was the evolving nature of legal knowledge management by updating, in part, the 7 faces of legal knowledge management from my previous paper on that topic.

I was impressed with both the quality of students (around 20 enrollees from as far away as the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Massachusetts) who represented a wide variety of law libraries (private law firm, courthouse and academic) across a fairly wide range of experiences. Although a few of the attendees had specific experience with knowledge management, many had not, and my hope was that I was able to convince them that they all had opportunities to augment their skills by bring knowledge management principles into their daily work as law librarians.

Following my session was a wrap-up panel with John, Elizabeth, me and Gail Brown, a courthouse law librarian from the Middlesex Law Association. Our goal in part in that session was to provide attendees a sense of the working environment in all three types of law libraries. Discussion turned to the job market and advice when interviewing. I am not sure I was entirely happy with my advice, which centered around several things: show confidence, leadership, and an entrepreneurial spirit; and be prepared by anticipating what the employer is looking for – even if you are not asked to prepare a lesson plan or sample research guide, I think it shows initiative to bring examples of what you have done or what you could do for a new employer, depending on the circumstances.

I had to laugh when one of the attendees said that I appeared much less stodgy in person than I did in my SLAW posts!

Although CALL/ACBD will formally evaluate feedback from attendees and make decisions on offering the Institute based in part on those evaluations, my hope is that the program will be offered again, if not annually, at least periodically, and perhaps in rotating locations. One of the attendees, who came to the Institute from the United States, commented during the wrap up session that the Institute was one of the best courses she had attended, compared even to those that are offered in the States.

John Sadler and his team (and CALL/ACBD and its Education Committee) are to be commended for this initiative.

Nineteen people graduated today in Philadelphia at the annual conference of the Special Library Association (SLA) with a Certificate in Copyright Management (CCM). The graduates included one Canadian, some rights managers in publishing positions, and many librarians in a variety of positions from pharmaceutical and engineering companies to law firms and financial institutions and academic institutions. One thing all had in common was a desire to understand domestic and international copyright issues, Web 2.0 and other digital copyright issues, special library provisions and fair use/dealing, as well as educating others about copyright and licensing. Canadians in the program are required to take the online primer on Canadian copyright law and have the option to also enroll in the U.S. copyright law primer.

The program includes 6 online courses beginning with an intro to copyright management and concludes with 2 in-person courses. In the next offering of the CCM program, a new online course will be added on the author/owner's perspective on copyright. The participants in the CCM program gain much more than knowledge about various practical aspects of copyright and licensing; they learn to manage fair use/dealing; find practical strategies and tools to say "yes" when asked by colleagues to use copyright-protected content; gain confidence in applying their knowledge; and join an excellent network of like-minded people. 2011 marks the 4th year of the Certificate program. The 2011-2012 Schedule for the CCM will be available in July.

A few of us here at Slaw have been giving testimonials to our tablet experiences and I am going to follow the trend today, I am very early in my iPad relationship, you could even call me a Pad-awan, if you will. I am currently using the iPad 2 as a test project to try and determine the applicability of the iPad as tool in legal education. In this post I'm going to try to focus on specific apps and why I use them and attempt not to reiterate the specifics of previous posts on this topic. I expect that some of my uses may differ from some readers as I work within an academic institution but I'm sure that some uses cross over. This is also a call for suggestions for apps and uses.

With that background, it is a great tool for "keeping in touch" with the office and work items (half-hearted "yay"); not the hard core nose-to-the-grindstone work but great for keeping tabs on what is going on whilst you are away. I expect the nose-to-the-grindstone stuff will become better with the keyboard. It is also a great communication device, especially personal communications, Skype, Facetime, you name it. It is a great social media tool; on the iPad it is easy to quickly survey the social media landscape, make your contribution and move on. I haven't tried the dictation app yet, but have downloaded one (Dragon Dictation) and intend on giving it a go. Several years ago I went to an electronic daytimer and found the experience unsatisfactory and moved back to the conventional print daytimer (my guess is that I am in the minority on this), I'm now giving an e-daytimer another go on the iPad; however, it is too early to report back. The iPad is also a great tool for news and current events but most of you are aware of this and have seen it discussed elsewhere.

I use both Safari and Mini-Opera web browsers and am using this as a public call for Firefox to get in the game in a substantial way. Both Safari and Mini-Opera have different issues with handling things such as java and some course content software used at this institution but between the two of them most of the functionality I want is there, but there is room for improvement. In my line of work a PDF reader is essential, as I'm sure it is in many lines of work, where I find it especially useful is for the multitude of committees one finds themselves on at a university. Agendas, minutes, whatever files are being examined in PDF are great for use on the iPad. I think I can safely say that this is the first time since the proclamations of the paperless office began (30-40 years ago?) that I can honestly say I'm using something that consistently cuts down on the amount of paper I handle. I am currently using several apps to determine which suits me best, GoodReader, PDFReader and even iBooks and there are more out there. The more annotating features these apps have the better. On the subject of iBooks, this is my first real foray into a personal ebook reader. I rather like the experience in many respects but there are also limitations to it. The tablet is not as convenient to hold and read for a prolonged period of time and not as convenient on a dock at the cottage. For academic study, annotating features in ebooks are valued, but differs from tabs and highlighting not in a better-or-worse type of way but in how these features affect your workflow. That and legal publishers have been slow to move legal books to ebooks (before you make comments I said "slow" to do it rather than "not" doing it). In many respects I believe that comparing ebooks and print remains an apple and orange type comparison, they are different experiences each with their own merit and demerits, similarly I don't think print is going to disappear quite yet. Lose market share? Absolutely and quite dramatically, but disappear altogether? Not yet. Will print remain relevant? For the short to medium term, yes.

I applaud the existence of the Quicklaw app, discussed here previously but my thoughts are similar to Ted's. WestlawNext is an app, unfortunately my academic password doesn't work on this app. Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.com have apps, here I don't have a quibble with the functionality of the app but the content, there seem to be a paucity of information for Canadian lawyers and firms. While I readily acknowledge that the iPad is not a device one should be using for hardcore word processing, I still want to do word processing, say in those committee meetings, and I've yet to find an app that satisfies my humble word processing wants, suggestions are welcomed both for this purpose or any other that works for you.

An unconference is a participatory style gathering where attendees contribute as much to the content of the event, or more, as the organizers. They're frequently used in the technology and computer industries (i.e. "geeks") to foster innovation, creativity and collaboration.

Unconferences though are relatively scarce in the legal community, probably due to an aversion of many to unstructured environments subject to constant change and revision. But this is also exactly what makes Law Tech Camp so fascinating.

A number of Toronto-area legal bloggers have decided to spontaneously launch a Bar-Camp style unconference on June 18, 2011 at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. There will be some pre-planned speakers, myself included, but I can't really tell you what it's going to be like because even the organizers don't necessarily know until the day of the event.

Registration is free, but organizers are asking for pre-registration to help with some planning. What makes an unconference successful is attendance and active involvement.

So come out on June 18, especially if you're situated in Southern Ontario, and we'll find out what happens. If you're not nearby then host your own unconference and let's share some of the ideas between camps.

Currently Universities and Colleges across Canada are spending hundreds of man-and-woman hours pulling together a list of copy machines, computers, scanners, etc., at the whim of Access Canada Copyright (got the name wrong throughout this post, initially), the agency created, and then named in high irony, to restrict the educational use of materials, to pursue an obsolete model of protecting the interests of creators, and to funnel the resulting funds into pockets unknown. At least, that's what you might think their mandate was if you judged by their actions. For their self-image, see their About Us page.

Backed in this request by the Copyright Board of Canada, Access Canada Copyright intends that all Canadian students should increase their payments from $5.16 to $45/$35 per student. It's all in their Statement of Proposed Royalties.

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, the Canadian Library Association, and many others have objected to the increases, and not only on financial grounds. All objectors were dismissed, except the AUCC and the Association of Canadian Community Colleges.

I cannot believe the Board dismissed the CLA. The best summary of objections is produced by the CLA (see above). From the university library community, this letter of support for the AUCC.

In any case. it is obvious that Access Canada Copyright suffers from the effects of too much of their own Kool-aid. Their recipe for a Board of Directors is one part publishing industry advocates, one part creator advocates, and zero parts public interest advocates. No wonder they are sleep walking into this. If they knew a bit more about who they are trying to sell their licenses to, they might come up with a better strategy.

Howdy from Calgary! I am at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries.

There is a lot of interest in the discussions taking place at this year's conference. I am hearing from law librarians, legal publishers, knowledge management directors, and many others as to how they can follow along if not in attendance. There is a lot of buzz about greening the library, time management, workflow, digitization, budgeting, cost recovery, legal project management, and ebooks. All the hot buzzwords! I have had more than a few people ask me to let them know the outcome of discussions. Wow!

The best way to stay in touch with this conference from the outside is by Twitter. The official hashtag is #callacbd. Whether you are in Calgary or not, you can follow along the public tweets in real time with the tag #callacbd at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23callacbd

Those of use currently tweeting (posting to Twitter) in case you prefer to follow individuals:

Shaunna Mireau

Susannah Tredwell

Colin Lachance

wenlib

Susan Munro (please check back–soon to have open tweets)

biblio citizen (I'm curious to know who this is!)

LibrarySherpa

Connie Crosby

In light of the upcoming law library conference season (notably including the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference–CALL 2011–next week), I am taking the liberty of sharing a few reasons why I see conferences as essential to law library staff.

If you have a law library, sending at least one library staff member to a professional conference each year is worth more than the equivalent dollar cost of books.

Let me repeat that in another way: you will get more value from conferences than books.

Radical, I know, and my legal publishing friends are perhaps going to hate me for saying this. Please allow me to explain.

6 reasons why in-person conference attendance is essential for your law library staff:

1. Building a network - A big strength of law library technicians and librarians is their professional network. In times when you do not have certain resources on hand, or the know-how for a particular task, the library staff member's network is an essential resource. Think about how many times your organization, after cutting back on a resource, looks to just borrow it in. This is largely impossible unless your library staff member has already built a relationship with the lender. This is sometimes enabled by membership in an association, but if you are looking for something at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, only those who care about the borrower are going to help out in a pinch. And by far the best way to build and develop that network and those relationships is in person. A conference facilitates this networking.
2. Access to the legal publishing industry - It is the one time of year library staff have direct access to the publishing industry's senior management. And they are all in one place. Particularly at the CALL conference, presidents of the Canadian legal publishing companies are typically present because this is a key target market. As such, library staff get the first look at new developments, often launched at the conference. It is also an essential time for building positive relationships with the publishing representatives and having your needs heard.
3. Developing new or existing skills – by participating on committees, speaking at the conference, or helping to run aspects of the organization such as by sitting on the executive board of an association or being a conference planner, participants learn new skills and develop existing ones. I certainly improved my management skills over time by working on CALL conference planning committees and sitting on the Board. Knowing how to present ideas in front of a group is also an increasingly important skill. One can, of course, participate in committees from a distance, but the real work of committees and special interest groups often takes place at an association's annual conference.
4. Transfer of tacit knowledge from colleagues – the knowledge that can be written down and passed along through an article or blog post is called "explicit knowledge". Knowledge stuck inside someone's head, passed along best by doing something alongside someone else or comparing notes, is called "tacit knowledge". It is much easier to gain this tacit knowledge by being there in person. A lot of learning takes place at conference lunches and social events, when law librarians and technicians seek each other out for advice. Unless you have a very large library staff or they already have a large network, they could be working in a vacuum without getting a "leg up" from the learnings of others.
5. Learning the latest trends and techniques – in addition to hearing what is new from the legal publishers, and learning new thinking informally from colleagues, the professional development program at a conference is specifically designed for more formal learning about what is new, how people are handling specific challenges, and where the industry is heading. It would be great if these programs were livestreamed and recorded for posting to the web. Some are. But we are still a long way from having access to all this content on demand via the web. It will get there, but in the meantime attending in person is really the way to go.
6. Meeting future staff members - the best way to hire a valuable new employee is to already be familiar with the person and perhaps even have already worked with him or her. Meeting new faces at conferences, working with them on committees are ways to establish a working relationship and sense of teamwork before you have even hired the person in question.

So often decisions about whether library staff should attend a conference is based solely on the program. But as you can see, the program as just one element in benefits from attending a conference.

I get tired of hearing that conference attendance is a "perk". It is absolutely not. When I have attended the CALL conference through the years, it is always an intense few days, seeing me connecting, sharing and learning from 7:30 am often until midnight. There is little down time for leisure activity as we try to pack as much as humanly possible in a few short days.

Today as a consultant, I invest twice as much now in conference attendance as I did in my role as a library manager: I not only pay for my attendance, but also I give up time on client projects (and therefore income) to attend. And still I see it as essential. It is too bad there cannot be a CALL conference in everyone's home city every year. But, the reality is that for learning opportunities specifically suited to law library staff, one must typically travel to attend the key conferences, be it CALL or one of the others: American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), Special Libraries Association (SLA), Internet Librarian, Computers in Libraries, KMWorld, or any of at least a dozen others.

If you do not have library staff attending at least one conference each year, think to yourself: will your organization fall behind? Don't you want to give your staff as much advantage as possible to excel?

The time is ripe for the creation of an online repository and clearinghouse for Canadian legal scholarship in digital form. There are perhaps 70 Canadian journals publishing articles on or immediately relevant to law, making for a manageable supply of material. And the software and associated technology is readily available for free or at a very low cost. Of course, the labour necessary to construct and manage such a resource is not free, and may be less than readily available; but it seems to me that the major obstacle at the moment is simply the lack of will. Someone — some institution — needs to "pull the trigger" to launch the thing.

And launching would entail beginning the task of persuading authors and journals to submit material to the repository or, at least, to licence the use of a copy obtained otherwise. I don't mean to imply that this task would be easy. But I believe it could be accomplished. The willingness of authors now to publish drafts or "preprints" via the Social Science Research Network suggests that there is an appetite to make their work available in a professional setting.

It's hard to judge exactly how much of Canadian legal scholarly output is online at the Legal Scholarship Network within SSRN. Most is submitted by authors from the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, two of the top contributors among non-US law schools. There are, however, ten Canadian law schools among the top 100 non-US law school contributors. (Top contributing law schools are divided into "US law schools" and "International law schools"; "foreign" is what's meant, or, perhaps "non-US".) But so far as I can see, there are no means of isolating articles by national origin or principal jurisdictional focus from the pool of 100,000 LSN items.

While the availability of some Canadian research in the LSN is an unalloyed good, a repository such as the one I'm advocating would have a broader purpose than that served by the Scholarship Networks. It would aim to develop a catalogued, rationalized and searchable collection, creating the sort of metadata likely to prove useful in the foreseeable, technological future. And, of course, the articles along with their metadata would be made freely available online for use by anyone, according to an appropriate license. Once the repository had current publications under sufficient control, there could be a program to bring into the repository material from the past, akin to that pursued by CanLII with respect to older judgments.

It might be that a project such as this would work best as a cooperative venture among a number of law schools. This would help to spread the cost, of course, and to encourage adoption by scholars in the contributing institutions. Too, it would seem a project likely to appeal to various funding sources — law foundations, governmental research councils and the like.

But these are details, capable of being worked out by someone — some institution — willing to take the plunge.

A message on the American Law Libraries – Private Law Libraries SIS Listserv has alerted me to: (i) A new blog by Law Librarian Jean O'Grady called Dewey B Strategic which has the subtitle of "Risk, value, strategy, libraries, knowledge and the legal profession," and (ii) a recent intriguing post on this new blog called The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training that raises the challenge (if not impossibility) of trying to teach "cost-effective searching" on Westlaw or Lexis to students or associates given the complexity of how these products are priced. Some examples of the points being made from the post:

Handing an associate a Lexis or Westlaw password and asking them to be “cost effective,” is like handing someone a credit card and sending them into a store in which none of the merchandise is priced and then berating them when the bill comes in exceeding your budget. No consumer affairs department would allow a retailer to perpetrate this kind of thing on the public. How is it that almost every law firm in the US has put up with this for the past 3 decades?

_________________

The obsession with being “cost effective” distracts the associate from focusing on the real goal — finding the right answer. Here comes the brain theory. Effective legal research requires deep focus and concentration yet… “the myth of cost effective research” requires an associate to engage half of their attention on a collateral and competing analysis of factors which have nothing to do with the substance of the law. (Am I in hourly or transactional mode? Is this content included or excluded? Should I print or read online? Should I execute a new search or will that cost too much? Have I selected the cheapest file? Is it cheaper to print by the line or print a page or print a document or should I email the results to myself?)

Yesterday I was catching up on some of my television viewing and happened to watch Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, whose guest was author and New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell. Among other topics, they discussed the legitimacy of US college rankings. Gladwell maintained that, while not all rankings are bad, summarizing such complex analysis, and putting completely different organizations side-by-side in a simple ranking list oversimplified the information at hand.

Gladwell went on to talk about the Law School Ranking Game, a tool created by Jeffrey E. Stake at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. The introduction to the Law School Ranking Game explains:

What kind of game is this? You tell us.

We Americans love rankings. The creators of some rankings play to win your money. Law schools play ranking games to win your attendance.

The Ranking Game lets you make your own rankings of law schools based on your preferences.

How do you win

By learning how much play to give rankings in the "choosing a law school" game—a game of High Stakes, indeed.

I gave the Law School Ranking Game a whirl. I found that it did not work with all the browsers on my machine (not on Firefox or Chrome) which may have had something to do with the version of Java enabled. The third attempt was a charm (Safari on my Macbook). It popped open a little spreadsheet (left in the screen shot image) along with a list of weightings (right). I was able to click on the weightings and change them to suit me, and then hit the "ReRank now" button at the top to change the rankings. I think clicked on "Sort" to put the rankings in order.

I like that it shows what the original rankings are. Rankings can be created based on a number of factors (such as price, LSAT percentile, employment of graduates, student/faculty ratio, number of volumes in the library, budget for learning, and whether Tibetan food is available within 600 m from the law school) weighted however you like.

This is obviously poking fun at–and poking holes in–law school rankings. They call it a "game" I'm sure to avoid any liability in case of inaccuracies in the data. Still, it looks to be a useful tool.

Under the section How to Protect from Ranking-mania there is a discussion about the problems with rankings, and how to evaluate a law school. Some good advice:

Do your homework.What should you look to choose a school if rankings are so unhelpful? To determine which school should be tops on your list, read what you can about all the schools under consideration. Look for information on internet web sites and in libraries. Other sources you might consult include The University of Richmond Pre-Law Handbook, the Boston College Online Law School Locator, and the listserv at lawsch-l@american.edu. More important, visit the schools. Find out what courses are regularly offered in specialties you consider important. Talk to the students. Find out if teachers are accessible and committed to devoting substantial energy to teaching. Find out if faculty members have published in areas important to you. Talk to faculty members. Only by doing those kinds of things can you begin to tell where you will fit in well. Along with the Deans of more than 150 law schools, I urge you not to rely on published rankings. Instead, do your own leg work and find the school that best meets your needs. It will be worth it.

Related:

I have spent the last few weeks preoccupied with making sure E exams here at Schulich Law proceed in an orderly fashion, and being grateful that I was spending my time on this side of the classroom, so to speak, as in not writing 100% finals. Law School pedagogy has been point of some conjecture here at Slaw in the past, but what I thought I would do this time is go old skool on this post and provide a bibliography of some of the literature that has been produced on the gauntlet that is the law school exam….what can I say? The atmosphere at exam time around a law school does strange things to one's mind. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the law school exam has not been a frequent topic in law journals; perhaps once they have been written most want to forget the experience?

• Bell, Derrick A. "Law school exams and minority-group students." (1981) 7 Black Law Journal 304.
• Crane, Linda. "Grading law school examinations: making a case for objective exams to cure what ails 'objectified' exams." (2000) 34 New England Law Review 785.
• Filisko, G.M. "How best to build a lawyer? Ideas float about changing law school and bar exams, but few show that they have sticking power." (2006) 92 ABA Journal 38.
• Gomberg, Linda. "How to Do Your Best on Law School Exams." (1988) 15 Western State University Law Review 875.
• Henderson, William D. "The LSAT, law school exams, and meritocracy: the surprising and undertheorized role of test-taking speed." (2004) 82 Texas Law Review 975.
• Hunt, James L. "Thinking like a lawyer? Two Southern law school exams from the 1870s." (2003) 11 The Journal of Southern Legal History 107.
• "Learning and licensing: law school and bar exams." (1982) 68 ABA Journal 544.
• Motley, Janet. “A foolish consistency: the law school exam” (1986) 10 Nova Law Journal 723.
• Phillips, Jerry J. "Thirteen rules for taking law exams." (2005) 72 Tennessee Law Review 797.
• Shekerjian, Denise G. "How to do your best on law school exams." (1983) 2 Adelphia Law Journal 121.
• Sheppard, Steve. "An informal history of how law schools evaluate students, with a predictable emphasis on law school final exams." (1997) 65 UMKC Law Review 657.
• “When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It, and Other Sage Advice for First-time Law School Exam Takers” (2006) 22 Georgia State University Law Review 653.

This is the season that brings joy to the heart of many a law firm training librarian. Summer students are starting next week – or in some rare cases, yesterday. At Field Law this year we are welcoming one summer student in our Calgary office (Hi Daniel!) and one in our Edmonton office (Hi Kelsey!). April is always an opportune time to revisit the legal research learning objectives so summer associates.

I am certain that most law firm libraries have input, if not full purview, over summer student research training. In the past, my team has used a two prong approach to this task.

1. Sharing tools
2. Sharing methods

We have a list of resources that we need our summer associates to be aware of. We also have to reinforce the work done by academic librarians and LRW instructors as to the research process. Finally, we need to have our summer studnets thinking about timelines and applying their research and writing skills to the law firm environment – lawyer demands, client demands, prioritizing, etc.

My April question is always: Are we sharing the right information with the correct methods? Is it appropriate to give born digital students demonstrations of free and fee electronic research sources? Should we be offering questions with hands on assistance – like the "Mom over shoulder" method? What is the best way to share to tools and the methods this year?

The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History has been publishing a new blog, Canadian Legal History, for just over a month now. (Shame on us for not finding out faster. Shame on them for not telling us.) With the exception of the first welcoming post by University of Toronto law professor, Jim Phillips, all the posts thus far are by Mary Stokes, the R. Roy McMurtry Fellow in Canadian Legal History at Osgoode Hall Law School. Posts are running at about one or two a week.

Currently on Blogspot, the blog will be moving to the Osgoode Society's new website in the near future.

[hat tip: @OsgoodeIFLS]

The most recent issue of the Canadian Law Library Review has a nice article by American attorney Sonia J Buck titled "Movie Therapy for Law Students (and Their Instructors)."

Consistent with my views, the author advocates the use of law-related movies in teaching the law to students. She draws on several movies for specific purposes (e.g., Adam's Rib and Suspect for ethics, evidence and criminal law), North Country for employment law, and Flash of Genius for IP Law).

In hindsight, I was embarrassed to not have included the obvious choice of Flash of Genius for my law-related movies website, so I have updated my site to include that movie (along with Hart's War, a military court martial movie), bringing the total number of law-related movies on my site to 118 movies.

I have also added reference to her book Movie Therapy for Law Students (and Pre-Law, Paralegal, and Related Majors) (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2009), along with some other books about law-related movies she cites in the article.

The number of Canadian law firms delivering CPD courses expanded today with the launch of Gowlings U.

Full disclosure that Gowlings is a client of ours at Stem, but the general trend of law firms teaching their expertise to other lawyers, corporate counsel, notaries and other professionals seems worth noting. That a number of these courses also comply with law society requirements for CPD credit is also significant.

It's a role that I've long thought that law firms could fill. Especially when firms are widely recognized to have strength in certain practice areas, or regional knowledge that other firms might not. One can imagine sessions from Gowlings, for example, that leverage their presence in Moscow or London UK.

Other Canadian firms that I know of jumping into this space include Blakes Business Class Seminars and UniversiTorys. If you know of others, please chime in within the comments.

This will certainly be an interesting area to watch going forward.