I have never had the opportunity to practice my craft in a law school library having only worked as a law librarian in private firms. By the time I meet law students, they have had the benefit of learning about legal research in the academic setting. Though legal research practice in a law firm setting may operate differently than in academia, the principles of legal research are the same. Law firm librarians enjoy the fruits of the labour that takes place in law school libraries.

Recent news from the U of A Law Library was unexpected.

We regret to announce

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Nothing in the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Rules of Professional Conduct places much real pressure on the profession to incorporate equality in a meaningful way. If law schools cannot instill the true worth of equality into the minds of future lawyers, the expectation for a truly diverse Canadian legal profession becomes no more than an unrealistic pipe dream. By presenting ethical training as the sort of “easy” course students take in order to graduate, law schools may simply be creating new lawyers who are, as Professor Rosemary Cairns Way described, only “rhetorically committed” to equality.

Handbooks for equality: Hiring . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries is holding its Annual Conference in Montréal May 5-8, 2013. This post is a shameless suggestion to attend Librarian: a multi-faceted professional. Full disclosure, I am proud to be a member of the CALL Executive Board.

Starting with a Pre-Conference Workshop on Saturday, May 4 titled Leading Teams Through Change, lead by Terri Tomchyshyn, the conference program has many interesting offerings.

I am looking forward to the session by Monique Stam, Project Manager, Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (CAIJ), Damien Lefebvre, Co-President, W.illi.am Digital Intelligence, and Anastasia Simitsis, User . . . [more]

As FaceBook executive Sheryl Sandburg observes in Lean In, “If someone has to ask the question, the answer is probably no. When someone finds the right mentor, it is obvious.” While Sandburg joins the growing ranks who praise the benefits of mentoring, she also recognises that finding a mentor can be a challenge.

What factors might increase a lawyer’s chances of finding a mentor? Fiona Kay and Jean Wallace have explored this very question. Their research is part of a twenty-year, longitudinal study of the mentoring experiences of over 700 Ontario lawyers. Not surprisingly, they found that lawyers who . . . [more]

Nobody said starting a new law school would be easy.

Lakehead University plans on opening the first new law school in Ontario in over 40 years in September 2013. The school stylizes itself as the law school "in the North for the North," and will focus on pressing issues in rural Ontario, including:

Development of this specialized curriculum has sparked controversy, before it has even started. The conflict started when the university Senate replaced a mandatory 1st-year full . . . [more]

There are many roads to enhancing access to justice across Canada and I have been fortunate to travel several of these via involvement with Manitoba organizations like Legal Aid Manitoba, Community Legal Education Association, Fort Garry Women’s Resource Centre and Legal Help Centre of Winnipeg. Government funded legal aid, public legal information and education programs, and free legal advice services are all essential routes to providing broad-based access to justice.

Another route to access to justice runs straight through our law schools. For the past several years, I have had the privilege to work with law students . . . [more]

Last week a new applications for this year's award for members of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries was announced: the Janine Miller Fellowship established by CanLII to provide funding each year for one CALL/ACBD member to attend the Law Via the Internet conference. I think this is a fabulous opportunity for Canadian legal information professionals to get more involved in the free access to law movement.

From the announcement:

Janine Miller was an integral part in the vision and development of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) and served as Project Manager from its inception and later as its

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After a visit to the Mayo Clinic, the dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University decided that there was a need for a “teaching hospital” for law school graduates to gain experience and learn their trade while being assisted by experienced lawyers. Thus, this summer, Arizona State is setting up a non-profit law firm for some of its graduates to work under seasoned lawyers and be paid to provide a wide range of services at relatively low cost to the residents of Phoenix.
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The Canadian Association of Law Libraries 2013 conference  will be held this year in Montreal from May 5 to 8. The theme is Librarian: Multifaceted Professional.  Note early bird pricing is available only until the end of this week so don't delay in registering!

Programming this year looks excellent:

• Pre-conference workshop on Saturday - Leading Teams Through Change - with Terri Tomchyshyn, Department of National Defense
• Sunday afternoon – two roundtable discussions at 4 pm: CALL Book Club - Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. Susan Cain and E-books and Collection Development

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While the RFP process for the LSUC's Licensing Pilot Project proceeds in Ontario, Memorial University of Newfoundland is contemplating their own bid for a new law school in St. John's. Students interviewed by Heather Gardiner in Canadian Lawyer 4Students express concerns about an articling crisis developing in the Atlantic provinces.

Although I don't believe in blaming the law schools, it's worth considering this graphic by Andrew Langille, depicting Ontario law school admissions for the past 5 years:

A new law school in the Atlantic will inevitably add to the pressures of creating adequate numbers of articling positions. We also know . . . [more]

Last Fall, I read an article about the General Counsel for Kia who creates tests for his external legal counsel. The tests have nothing to do with law and everything to do with process. In one test, external counsel should have taken 20 minutes to complete a mundane task using an excel spreadsheet. The average time taken by Kia’s nine outside law firms? Five hours. Simon Fodden also has a great piece on this, here.

There are many takeaways from this, but an important one is that its shows that lawyers are not always the most efficient personnel . . . [more]

I bought my copy of John Rawls A Theory of Justice for £5 in 1972. It would have been inconceivable then that I would be watching a YouTube video of a musical version of Rawls' Theory by Eylon Aslan-Levy. Geek heaven.

Actually, the fact that a musical itself could be produced would have been inconceivable. But it's more than a musical – it describes itself as an all-singing, all-dancing romp through 2,500 years of political philosophy, by Eylon Aslan-Levy, Ramin Sabi & Tommy Peto.

In order to draw inspiration for his magnum opus, John Rawls travels back through time

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