A little while ago I blogged about legal bibliographies and highlighted some of the work that John Eaton at the University of Manitoba has done in this area. It is very nice to see that John's work has been recognised as he is the 2012 recipient of the Association of College and Research Libraries Marta Lange/CQ Press Award. This award recognises librarians who have made a significant contribution to bibliography and information service in law or political science. The press release from the American Library Association announcing the award can be found here.

Congratulations John!

Library Boy told us last year about some tentative steps that courts were making to embrace – or to sniff around tentatively – the whole subject of social media. Today's announcement from the UK Supreme Court that it will start official tweets of judgments – this in anticipation of the Assange extradition decision – represents the first wholesale adoption by a final court of appeal.

It overshadows Chief Justice McLachlin's announcement within a speech at Carleton University on the Media and the Courts, that the Canadian judiciary should start to think seriously about social media.

See the Globe, the Star, CTV and the Halifax papers

You can see a brief video clip here.

I understand that the Australians may be thinking about the issues too.

CanLII President Colin Lachance has just now released his plan for that organization's next three years. "Strategic Priorities 2012 to 2014" is available in a variety of formats: HTML, PDF, and large print PDF. Versions in French are also available, of course.

The report elaborates on four strategic priorities for CanLII:

1. Secure permanent role as foremost source of free law in canada.
2. Continually enrich content to meet the needs of public and professional users.
3. Deliver easy to use professional grade tools and a compelling site experience.
4. Continuously promote and defend free access to law

As readers will likely know, CanLII receives from Canada's courts and justice departments a welter of documents under a variety of terms and conditions:

CanLII will seek to bring as much of that content as possible within a common contractual or policy framework guided by principles of open access and fair dealing.

In addition, CanLII will, among other things:

• seek "supplementary funding" to add to the $34 per lawyer base it currently receives;
• consider incorporating secondary sources and facilitating searches of materials hosted elsewhere;
• improve access to the service for users of mobile phones;
• develop "tools, tips, and training" to make research easier;
• continue to support free access to law here and elsewhere.

Lachance is seeking feedback and can be reached at clachance @ canlii.org

Fair use (s. 107) is an intentionally drafted ambiguous provision in the U.S. Copyright Act for the purpose of defending users of copyright works from a variety of otherwise infringing acts. Although often compared to the Canadian fair dealing, the two defenses are quite different. Two interesting documents on the analysis of fair use and its interpretation were recently released.

General Counsel from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office released a memorandum on 19 January 2012 on: USPTO Position on Fair Use of Copies of NPL Made in Patent Examination. The memorandum looks at three issues: Whether it is fair use of the USPTO to make copies of copyrighted non-patent literature (NPL) and provide such copies to an applicant in the course of patent examination? Whether it is fair use for the USPTO to provide certified copies of entire file histories, including copyright NPL to members of the public, for a free? Whether it is fair use for an applicant to make a copy of a piece of copyrighted NPL and submit it to the USPTO?

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries was published on 25 January 2012 by the Association of Research Libraries and the Center for Social Media. This document addresses various questions such as how to make libraries' special collection available online; what can be digitized for student use; and, reproducing materials for faculty, staff and other users.

Those who apply fair dealing or fair use or are generally interested in these topics will find the discussions and analysis interesting in both of these documents, though at the end of the day, the application of either of these defenses very much depends upon the circumstances in each particular situation.

Canada's newest student-run law review just released its first issue.

The University of Western Ontario Journal of Legal Studies is published entirely online, and is the first student journal coming out of UWO for over 25 years. The contents of the first issue are as follows:

Editors' Note Lisa Di Valentino and Benjamin D. Tinholt

Niqab vs. Quebec: Negotiating Minority Rights within Quebec Identity Nafay Choudhury

Protecting Your Personality Rights in Canada: A Matter of Property or Privacy? Amy M. Conroy

The Rules of Professional Conduct: A Conflicting Guide for Counsel in Child Custody and Access Proceedings Jennifer L. Hiatt

Background on how this online law review was put together, approved and launched is available here on Slaw. Coverage from the UWO site is available here.

I have updated the Reference Tools page of my legal research and writing website with a new section on Law Reform Commission Reports, a topic that – in retrospect – was likely insufficiently treated in my book.

I believe it may currently be the most complete, online collection of links and other resources for researching law reform commission reports. Included, of course, are links to the BC Law Institute Law Reform Database as well as links to individual law reform commission reports websites.

For the older, online Ontario Law Reform Commission Reports, I linked to the listings from the Open Library (sorted from most recent – currently 1976 – to oldest – currently 1965), which act as an "interface" linking to the digital versions on the Internet Archive.

I was also not previously familiar with an excellent online article by Gavin Murphy, "Law Reform Agencies" (Department of Justice, 2004) (PDF, 126 pages), linked to on this section of my site.

I welcome comments or suggestions for improvements.

__________________________

On an unrelated note, I added two "missing" movies to my list of 123 law-related movies:

• Evelyn (2004): Pierce Brosnan, as an unemployed, single-parent father in 1953 Ireland battling for custody of his children taken in by a Church-run orphanage

• Michael Clayton (2007): An obvious oversight on my part, with a stellar cast of George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson playing lawyers caught up in an environmental class action lawsuit.

Colleague and fellow law librarian Sarah Sutherland let me know of her article "On Hiring Library Staff in Rural Areas" in Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

The article of course is good and worth mentioning for that reason alone but Sarah's email made me realize I had forgotten about this online journal, which was mentioned a number of years ago on SLAW. As such, I thought I would also remind SLAW readers since many of the articles would be relevant to most of you. In the current edition, for example, articles include such titles as "Optimizing Our Teaching: Hybrid Mode of Instruction" and "Roaming Reference: Reinvigorating Reference through Point of Need Service."

I like that the journal has an open access policy, making it available to anyone and includes peer-reviewed articles.

Unfortunately, the journal does not appear to have RSS feeds, but I registered just now in order to be alerted to new issues.

I read Steve Matthew's Slaw.ca column today Web Law Predictions for 2012 with great interest. I noted especially the prediction that "Firms Abandon Content, Blame Subsequent Failures on Social Media," with the implication that firms can't just by-pass creating great blog content and expect to get traction and otherwise build their reputations online.

One great start to blogging is to think about commentary that would have previously gone out via newsletter or email to clients, and make that available on the internet via a blog. However, writing for the printed text and writing for the web are two different things.

Write for your audience

First, you must consider your audience. Who are you writing for–lawyers? Or clients? Lawyers tend to like text-heavy documents, but most other audiences do not. If you are writing for clients, do not assume they will have time or the inclination to read long tracts.

Have a look at what else your audience reads and figure out what appeals to them. Perhaps video is the way to go instead with the audience you are trying to appeal to? It is very possible that clients in different industries consume content in different ways and prefer their content in different formats.

Make blog posts more readable

It can be more difficult to parse text online, and so we use a number of techniques to break up text for a blog:

• Consider breaking up a longer written article into a few smaller blog posts. You will get more mileage out of the content, and it will be easier for your audience to dip into.
• Use smaller paragraphs. I am always surprised at how a standard paragraph looks so long in a blog post. You will likely need to break these down more than you otherwise would think necessary. For example, the first two paragraphs in this blog post were originally one, but when I previewed them as a blog post, looked far too dense and so I broke them up.
• Use headings and bulleted or numbered lists inside longer blog posts to help the reader easily scan the content.
• Consider putting key words or phrases into bold to make them stand out, as I have done with this bulleted list.
• Use images to make blog posts more visually interesting. There is an interesting post today from Problogger: How to Use Images in Your Blog Posts. It is a nice introduction to using images.
• Use other media such as audio and video to lend some variety to your content. Selecting a video from another source, dropping it into your blog post with the "embed code," and then adding your own commentary to it is a nice way to change things up. If you get daring, you can try creating your own audio or video content. However, for a professional setting I suggest getting professional assistance to learn this part since it can be difficult to do well and is therefore time-consuming to get started on your own.

Vary the content

You need to keep the audience interested and engaged. Writing just commentary about recent case law is probably not going to keep them coming back for more. (I am assuming you want them to come back!) Don't forget to add a personal touch, lending a human voice with some personality. As audiences, we relate far better to other people than we do to faceless organizations.

Here are some additional ideas for content, and no doubt you can think of many more:

• discussion of newly introduced legislation
• other developments in the industry, such as new requirements from government
• what you learned at a conference or seminar
• a summary of recent surveys or report findings
• upcoming events
• a good, related article you read and your additional comments
• a review of a related book
• an interview with someone in the industry

What other types of blog posts do you like to read or write?
Image: courtesy of brainloc via stock.xchng

Lexpert Magazine has just launched a blog. It's early days yet—the blog only launched last week—so it's hard to say how it will fare. The editorial staff (Jean Cumming, Tim Wilbur, David Dias, and Gena Smith) will do the blogging, likely filling in the "blanks" and doing follow-ups between issues of the magazine. One to follow, in any event.

Welcome to the blogosphere Lexpert.

I had an opportunity to download the new Irwin Law iPad app recently along with a copy of Ted Tjaden's Legal Research and Writing text. We have a copy of this excellent title in our firm library in print or course, but for testing purposes, I thought it would be a good choice for an eBook.

First I want to congratulate Jeff Miller and his team at Irwin Law. They made an excellent choice of partners in Nubook. The Irwin Law app was easy to find in the Apple App Store, the download process was simple. It was also very easy to register, and visit the Irwin Law eBook Store to acquire my purchase.

The app came with three pieces of documentation: a Quick Reference Guide, a lengthy User Guide, and a short user guide specific to Irwin Law. The Quick Reference Guide shows most of the features available in Nubook partner apps. The longer user guide shows the possibilities available, including embedding video clips in an eBook.

The content and readability of this Irwin Law text transfers very well to the eBook format. The electronic advantages of having a linked table of contents available on the page at will, the ability to highlight, underline, and annotate, not to mention searching the content, are excellent use cases for having a personal copy of your favourite title on your own device.

My favourite feature of this text is the ability to link out from the footnotes and the way that the app ensures you want to open a webpage.

My only problem now is budgeting so that anyone in my organization can have any item they need in any format that strikes their fancy. A better problem to have than content in only one format.

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." (Groucho Marx) "Unless you have a backlit eReader." (Shaunna Mireau)

The English media came back this weekend to re-examine the health of Thomson-Reuters and reached wildly different conclusions. The BBC talks of Thomson moving to establish hegemony over business data, whereas the Guardian focuses on the weaknesses of post-merger integration and the long-term challenge that Bloomberg presents.

The doyenne of the DC law library community, Jean O'Grady has a fascinating piece suggesting that Thomson may well acquire Wolters-Kluwer

Her analysis is:

Factors Favoring Such a Merger

1. Thomson Reuters Leadership Changes.Exane BNP suggests that TR appears to be "in restructuring

and crisis mode" since they failed to achieve top line growth through some new products including Westlaw Next.. The new CEO Jim Smith with his track record in legal, tax and scientific professional publishing may be better positioned to create new value from asset consolidation than top line growth.

2. Wolters Kluwer May be Ready to be Acquired. Former WK executives suggest that a merger has always been viewed as a good exit strategy if top line growth could not be achieved. CEO and Chairperson Nancy McKinstry has been in the Netherlands for 8 years and has not delivered expected revenue growth.

3. TR's new IT  Platform Designed for Mergers. Since both companies generate over 80% of their revenue from electronic software and services, TR has the infrastructure to allow both companies to consolidate and reduce their IT costs. Apparently TR's new IT platform was specifically designed to be able to integrate content from acquired companies. I have also heard this comment  from insiders at TR. (I whole heartedly agree that at least in the US, WK's technical infrastructure as demonstrated by their "new " Intelliconnect platform would benefit from an IT overhaul). Both companies have been trying to go global and have expanded their sale forces in some new and similar markets. The proposed merger would allow them to reduce duplicative effort in expanding their global footprint.

4. TR's Balance sheet is Ready. TR's balance sheet has absorbed the Reuters acquisition and the company  now has the financial capacity to launch such an acquisition over the next 12 months.

But remember that Bloomberg bought BNA for $990 million in August. Meanwhile Techbytes reminds us that Thomson and Bloomberg's fates are inextricably linked.

It concludes:

Perhaps it’s time for Thomson Reuters to take their cue from Bloomberg and migrate from the costly dedicated terminal to a web platform in order to meet the changing needs of its customers. The legal market underwent tremendous changes in platforms between the 1980s and the 1990s, as user demands, technological advances, economic changes and ultimately the practice of law changed. Legal terminals morphed from huge dedicated stand -alone machines, to small customized boxes dubbed “ubiqs”, to multi-purpose personal computers. Lexis and Westlaw survived the loss of monthly revenue from equipment and created other revenue streams. Executive turnovers, reduced demand for some of its products, and mergers and changes in divisions have all befallen Thomson Reuters. Maybe this is the time to re-engineer the way its products and services are packaged, delivered, and priced to the financial market. Tune in for the next installment.

The Daily Beast describes (in apocalyptic terms) Bloomberg's Plan for World Domination. The Law Librarian Blog suggest that Bloomberg's hunger for content makes Reed Elsevier's Lexis product the likely target for a Bloomberg acquisition.

Anyone think that antitrust might constrain concentration in these sectors of the information industry?

The American group blog Concurring Opinions has posted A Guide to the Eight Most Suspect Types of Law Review Articles. My favourite is number 4:

4. The One-Off

“In my previous article, I made a significant contribution to the literature. In this piece, I will coast on the vapors of that article.”

In the comments section, someone has suggested a ninth category be added:

9. Straight from the Framers!

“In this article, I uncover the original meaning of a clause (phrase, word, or letter) that no one has ever heard of, that no court (or litigant) has ever referred to, and that will never again be relevant.”

Well today is Friday, and if our friends at CanLII have predicted correctly, they will soon be delivering more than one million search results!

Congratulations to everyone involved in making CanLII happen. It's quite a milestone!

A question at a LESA seminar I was involved with brought the thought of republishing to mind. An attendee at the seminar asked if articles posted to SSRN as prepublications to a peer reviewed journal release were altered or whether they could be the same text as what the journal published. My answer off the cuff was that I had a sense that the articles could be edited after posting to SSRN and before publication, but I confess that I have no proof of this.

The republishing that I am thinking of is not the actions the SCC contempated in Robertson, but where an author submits a work to more than one forum,or provides submitted works to SSRN.

The Social Science Research Network site provides:

Each of SSRN's networks encourages the early distribution of research results by publishing Submitted abstracts and by soliciting abstracts of top quality research papers around the world. We now have hundreds of journals, publishers, and institutions in Partners in Publishing that provide working papers for distribution through SSRN's eLibrary and abstracts for publication in SSRN's electronic journals.

SSRN includes a copyright message for authors uploading a paper:

You will be shown a brief copyright message which you need to read and agree to by clicking "Continue" before you begin entering information. The statement reads: IMPORTANT: SSRN does not take a copyright. When you upload a paper, you give SSRN the non-exclusive right to post and electronically distribute your article. You retain the right to remove your paper from SSRN at any time.

SSRN was founded in October 1994, and is a clear example of successful republishing. In July 2011, SSRN was again named the Number 1 Open Access Repository in the World.

My question for Slawyers: Is it republishing or is it open access, or are they essentially the same?

CAIJ, the Centre d'accès à l'information juridique (the network of law libraries associated with the Québec Bar Association), has a revamped website with many new research features:

• the UNIK search engine that allows for simultaneous keyword searching in its caselaw, commentary and Quebec and federal legislation databases
• the eDoctrine collection of free full-text commentary and textbooks including the Développements récents (annual reviews of areas of law), the Collection de droit (Bar School materials), proceedings of the annual Quebec Bar Association congresses and a growing number of treatises from Wilson & Lafleur
• the eLOIS collection of annotated laws (right now in beta): so far, CAIJ offers the Civil Code of Quebec, the provincial Labour Standards Act and the provincial Business Corporations Act – for each legislative section, there is a legislative history, links to parliamentary debates, and links to case law and/or commentary
• enhanced legal news

Some great features that haven't changed include the free JuriBistro TOPO service, the CAIJ knowledgebase of some 2,700 questions and answers compiled by CAIJ's legal researchers based on real inquiries received from lawyers from across Quebec.

If you need to do Quebec legal research and you read French, I highly recommend the CAIJ site.

Yale law library's Open Access publishing initiative produces enormous download rates for its authors, and makes the material available to scholars and others all over the world, without regard to their location or their institution's budgetary priorities.

And many US libraries have taken this step: 55% of libraries in a just-released SPARC survey. Some other highlights:

• About three-quarters of the programs publish between one and six journals, the majority of which are only distributed electronically
• The vast majority of library publishing programs (almost 90%) were launched in order to contribute to change in the scholarly publishing system, supplemented by a variety of other mission-related motivations.
• About half of responding institutions centralize management of their publishing activities within one library unit. The number of staff allocated to publishing activities is modest—averaging 2.4 FTE for ARLs and 0.9 FTE for Oberlin Group institutions—with older programs typically being larger. Staff dedicated exclusively to publishing service programs are relatively rare, with responsibility for such services typically fragmented across multiple staff members.
• The most prevalent journal publishing platforms reported were Open Journal Systems (57%), DSpace (36%), and Berkeley Electronic Press’s Digital Commons (25%).

The Wall Street Journal has a new piece on Amazon's e-book lending service. Operating under the Amazon's $79/year Prime service, the e-book lending will only work on Kindle and Kindle Fire devices (not iOS friendly), and is intended to boost sales of the Kindle devices. And as you might guess, it's not available in Canada.

The article also has an interesting portion at the end on the relationship of Amazon's Prime lending program to its library lending program:

At the Seattle public-library system, e-book borrowing rose 32% in the month after Kindle books became available, said Seattle's electronic-resources librarian Kirk Blankenship. E-book borrowing had typically been rising 10% or 15% a month, he said.

Mr. Blankenship said he isn't worried about Amazon starting its own lending service.

"There's a lot of people that can't afford Amazon Prime," he said. "We also want to be a resource for people looking for other things beyond the best-seller list."

Followed by a statement from Arthur Klebanoff, chief executive of RosettaBooks LLC, on the value of making titles available via a flat fee arrangement:

"I'm attracted to the incremental promotion/visibility for participating titles," he said. "All site promotion, especially of backlist titles, drives sales in the Kindle Store." Mr. Klebanoff said that he's providing about 200 titles in all.

I find the intersections between these two programs interesting on two counts:

1. Loss leader remains a good strategy for publishers. Libraries have traditionally provided this value to the publishing industry, and it won't disappear in e-formats.
2. It doesn't matter whether Amazon is providing the lending program or a library system. The ease of access to related titles, and the subsequent sales, should make publishers open their eyes to the exposure e-lending services can provide.

Now, I recognize the reduced circulation of law library titles, but that's not much different than any other low-demand item sitting in the stacks at a public library. When Publishers need to tap into smaller audiences, gaining exposure with these readership groups is going to remain a critical challenge.

My point would be this: law library e-book lending may not only be important from an altruistic, educational standpoint – in my view, a required contribution from every publisher. But that in the future, these programs will be fundamental to connecting with readership, provide a 'proving ground' for secondary source materials, and will define each product's reputation and the demand for associated products (author & subject). Publishers must figure out which products to give away, and which to sell; but the question of whether or not to participate in e-lending programs? Doesn't seem like much of an option.

Libraries and librarians (legal or not) have a much stronger role in the book industry than most people recognize.

According to yesterday's press release, Irwin Law and Quebec digital publisher Nubook have agreed to distribute Irwin's ebooks on a Nubook reading app designed for use on a tablet computer.

Irwin publisher, Jeffrey Miller, says:

…the Nubook solution allows us to preserve the unique and attractive design that differentiates our law books, while providing our readers with great features like refined search, links, and markups set up according to our editorial choices for the best reading experience.

Nubook has already developed an equivalent app for Wilson & Lafleur, as well as its own general purpose app.

I've come across a couple of new law reviews that might be of interest to SLAW readers…

1) The Washington Journal of Environmental Law and Policy from the University of Washington in Seattle. WJELP is a student run journal. Issues will be available for free online and the first issue is here. You can sign up for e-mail alerts of new issues at the journal's website. All issues will also be archived at the University of Washington's digital repository.

2) The Southampton Student Law Review is a new student publication from the Southhampton Law School in the UK. There are two issues so far, both online.

And while not a new law review, I wanted to plug the recent Canadian law journals tables of contents service that the Bora Laskin Law Library has been offering via our Blog. The October listing will be up in a day or so. You can now sign up to follow our Blog by e-mail.

This has been Open Access Week across North America and even further afield. There have been many events. In Canada, CARL/ABRC has a list of OA Week events, but not everything is noted there. UVic's own events, for instance. The ACRL Blog has collected a few highlights.

Of course, it is libraries that are often organizing these events, as librarians are best positioned to witness the daily spectacle of publicly funded research given away for peanuts or less into private hands. These in turn do very well by it, whether it is delivered in print or electronically. Libraries seek relief from the escalating costs. Between 1984 and 2005, journal prices increased 637%, and Law titles by 386% (see Table 9) in the US, while distribution and printing/binding costs, presumably, were much reduced. This is compared to a CPI increase over the same period of 188%. Remember, remuneration to authors or universities for these materials is unheard of. And of course, the public is not allowed access.

The staff at HeinOnline have a new, free HeinOnline iPad app to access their database.

Logging into the app is easy and users are invited to have their login and password information remembered.

Once logged in, one gets a table of contents of the various libraries in their database, depending on the scope of one's subscription (e.g., Law Library Journal, US Reports, English Reports, Legal Classics, and so on).

Browsing by law journal title and volume is easy to do. At that stage, there is an option of viewing the table of contents for the particular volume. The screenshot below shows the "view" of the first page of a recent article on HeinOnline from the Canadian Law Library Review written by SLAW's own Mark Lewis.

When viewing the articles in PDF, it is easy enough to expand the text or slide from page to page.

One can also search the full-text of the various libraries by keyword. The screenshot below shows the search example they use in their iTunes page, being:

<< title: "Right to Privacy" >>

This search, when run in the Law Library Journals library, returns articles with that phrase in the title of the article.

Prior to this app being available, I was accessing HeinOnline on my iPad using the Safari browser. The app is definitely easier and quicker.

I just stumbled upon the fact that the decision to discontinue publication of the print version of the federal Table of Public Statutes was reversed.

An issue, up to date to Sept 30, 2011 is now available from:

Queen's Printer

or from

Federal Publications Inc.

This is good news!

Way back in March, LexisNexis Canada announced an app for Quicklaw on the iPhone. Ted Tjaden covered this new development with a review. The app was updated recently, and I thought it might be worthwhile checking out the new features, including an enhanced search interface and results list.

My personal test of the app found it a bit buggy: app shuts down if you go back to the app from the "view in browser link", view in browser asks for a client id rather than transferring. This may have been due to settings on my device, or my internet connectivity.
The screen shots below show what a nice, clean, easy to use interface it has.

My biggest issue with mobile research tools is a practical problem that librarians should consider: If you are using a server based third party software for collecting search data or for charging disbursements, mobile device use likely doesn't fit with your setup. This might only be a big law problem, but it is something Slawyers may need to consider.

LexisNexis offers several mobility solutions. For comparison, check out Wireless Westlaw Canada and CCH mobile access.

Recently, I had occasion to look at the speeches and presentations made by members of ultimate courts of appeal – the Supreme Court and its equivalents. And Canada ranks somewhat disgracefully last in terms of making the speeches publicly available.

Eugene Meehan has monitored the court too for speeches and presentations, but his pickings are similarly slim in recent years.

Compare this record to Chief Justice French of the High Court whose seventeen speeches from 2010 and eleven to date from 2011 are available here

His predecessor Chief Justice Brennan's speeches from the Nineties are there prominently available.

The new UK Supreme Court has a decent record, though some falling off between 2010 and this year.

Even Chief Justice Balakrishnan has a better record in New Delhi.

The US Supreme Court seems to publish only speeches by justices nominated under Democratic administrations – Chief Justice Roberts speaks often but you won't find the speeches archived. I found remarkable a speech by Justice Ginsburg from July commenting on the most recent term.

All I can assume is that the updating of the SCC website has lost priority because of other pressures, or that the controversy from the conservative press' reaction to the Unwritten Constitutional Principles speech has led the court to permit publication of remarks in other places, but not the court's own website.

There is an important speech by Justice Ian Binnie entitled, Sondage Après Sondage . . . A few Thoughts about Conflicts of Interest” by Justice Ian Binnie, edited version of remarks at a panel discussion at Les Journées Strasbourgeoises in Strasbourg, France, on July 4, 2008, which illuminates the court's decision in R. v. Neil but you won't find it anywhere electronically, only in a conference volume published by Les Editions Yvon Blais.

And speaking of Justice Binnie, the entire transcript of his interview with the Globe and Mail's Kirk Makin is well worth reading.

I have in the past complained about the abysmal lack of online access to Canadian court dockets at the same time as trying to compile a list of known links to Canadian court dockets to my Case Law research page on my legal research and writing website.

In addition to the new LexisNexis Canada dockets service I mentioned last week, a colleague has pointed out the free Canadian Federal Courts dockets service at IPPractice.ca, a website maintained by Alan Macek of Dimock Stratton LLP, a great site that does not yet appear to have been mentioned on SLAW (there is also a blog on the site, here).

At the Federal Docket Browser on the site, you can enter the court file number (e.g., T-780-08) and be brought to a free results page that provides more enhanced information than the actual dockets page from the Court, including links to any published decisions in the matter, appeal information and detailed docket information. A great feature!

The site also includes a Federal Court Hearing List, although this information appears to simply mirror the hearing information on the Court's website.

I have updated the court docket information on my website to include both the LexisNexis Canada service and this free Federal Courts dockets service from IPPractice.ca.

Library and Archives Canada announced today that, to celebrate the 170th anniversary of the Canada Gazette (on October 2), the back issues of that publication have been made available and searchable online. There are four entry points to the database:

• Keyword Search
• Advanced Keyword Search
• Search the Consolidated Regulations of Canada
• Find an Issue

Issues published since 1998 have been available online for some time.

[hat tip: @richards1000]

The 7th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation is over a year old already. In a normal world, the newness and newsworthiness of this book (commonly known as the McGill Guide) would have worn off. Still, whenever someone asks for assistance with citing materials, I find myself in need of 'more' information. What are you citing, cases, articles? For whom, an academic paper, an internal document, the courts?

A book review published in the 2011 Saskatchewan Law Review at Volume 74, page 275 tells me that I am not alone with struggling for the correct answer to the citation question. Joanne Colledge and Lea Lapointe wrote an engaging article titled "How Does a "Uniform" Citation Guide Fail to Be Uniform? A Review of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation. 7th Ed."

The authors were kind enough to cite the discussion about this work at Slaw. Both LexisNexis Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada carry electronic copies of the Saskatchewan Law Review.

For your Tuesday chuckle, note how I completely avoided having to properly cite anything in this article!

I see that LexisNexis Canada has announced a new court docket service in Canada for dockets at the Federal Court, Federal Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada:

From one intuitive online interface, LexisNexis CaseConnection Dockets enables fast access to key case information for ongoing and new proceedings filed with the Federal Court, Federal Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada. This information helps law firm, government and corporate professionals stay on top of emerging legal issues and cases quickly, cost-effectively and securely.

The press release was not clear on cost of the service, although registration here was free. I registered and there appears to be small charges for searching dockets or running saved searches to monitor docket activity. At this stage, it does not appear that one would be able to obtain the full-text of court filings from the Federal Court or Supreme Court of Canada (or at least the press release is silent on this point).

In addition, their litigation services appear to open the door to lawyers and law firms to serve court documents with an option to also sign up for their US court dockets service (trade-marked as CourtLink, a "fee" service I already use to access US court full-text court filings).

Having now mentioned this service on SLAW, I imagine I will be contacted by my LexisNexis Canada rep who may be able to provide more information or clarification at which point I can update this post in the comments if there is any additional information.

In what is very welcome news, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has released a practice direction, effective 1 October 2011, authorizing the use of reliable online versions of court decisions for filing in books of authorities and providing for special citation rules:

Practice Direction Regarding Filing of Judicial Decisions from Electronic Databases, and Regarding Citation of All Judicial Decisions

Practice Direction

Judicial Decisions from Electronic Databases

Effective October 1, 2011, copies of judicial decisions obtained from approved electronic databases are acceptable for filing provided the report of the judicial decision contains paragraph numeration consistent with the numbering of the paragraphs in the decision as released by the court. “Approved electronic databases” are databases that are dedicated to the publication of judicial decisions (e.g. Quicklaw, CanLII).

Parties should be aware that judicial decisions posted on electronic databases may be subject to correction or editing within a few days of the initial posting and, accordingly, parties should ensure that any decision obtained from an electronic database has not been subsequently amended.

Citation of All Judicial Decisions

Parties citing decisions from electronic databases should provide the citations for any paper versions of the decision in addition to the citation of the electronic database.

Parties should provide the date that the copy of any decision was obtained from an electronic database, as part of the citation information.

For decisions of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice released on or after January 1, 2010, parties should provide the neutral citation number (e.g. 2010 ONSC 1) in addition to the other required citations.

Osgoode Hall, Toronto
September 1, 2011

The Honourable Heather Forster Smith
Chief Justice, Superior Court of Justice

A few comments:

• "Approved electronic databases": The practice direction unfortunately gives what I assume is an unintentional, inadvertent limited view of examples by mentioning only Quicklaw or CanLII as approved electronic databases. Ideally, the practice direction would have preferred or encouraged the use of CanLII, where available, and then either referred more generically to the commercial databases or to include a more exhaustive listing (e.g., Westlaw Canada, BestCase, Maritime Law Book, SOQUIJ, DCL/REJB, and so on) or simply identified the major legal publishers as opposed to specific databases.

• Citation: I don't think I have a problem with including both a citation to the print-published version of a decision (if available) along with the online citation. I do find it interesting (and different) for the court to require "the date that the copy of any decision was obtained from an electronic database." If the court was going to otherwise change McGill Guide style, I would have liked if they had gone further to provide that, for decisions on CanLII, citing the neutral citation alone would be sufficient. In addition, the practice direction is ambiguous in its example of citing to the neutral citation for Ontario Superior Court decisions. A more preferable practice direction would have stated something along the lines that counsel are encouraged to file decisions from CanLII from all courts (not just Ontario) and when so doing may include only the neutral citation.

Despite these nit-picks, all-in-all this is a welcome and long overdue development.

Larry Bodine, former law firm marketing consultant known for his LawMarketing Blog, has been named the new editor-in-chief of Lawyers.com and Martindale.com. (If you are in Canada the Lawyers.com link may flip you to the Canadian site http://www.canadian-lawyers.ca/ unfortunately).

According to an article from the Law Technology News on September 16, Bodine has indicated he is going to overhaul the Lawyers.com site:

…the site could stand improvement, Bodine said. Currently its content is aggregated from other sites. "The switch that I want to make is generating our own material. You're going to see a complete change on the homepage as soon as I can get that accomplished," he said. Also, "I want to start putting a lot more video on that site. I'm going to make the site much more interactive. You'll be able to ask a question, there'll be stuff to play with. The whole idea is to get people to come to the site when they don't have an immediate legal need.

Once he has finished re-working the Lawyers.com site, he is going to have a closer look at Martindale.com:

Bodine said he'll work on the Martindale site after instituting the Lawyers.com rebuild. "We need to weave in and reach out to the legal marketing community … We need to do it in a way so it's their sandbox to play in," he explained.

No word yet on whether other related LexisNexis web properties around the world–including Canadian-Lawyers.ca–will similarly go under the microscope.

Hat tip Nina Platt of Pinhawk Librarian News Digest for picking up the LTN article on Larry Bodine's move.

If you've done a CanLII search in the last few days, you'll have noticed that they've introduced contextual snippets into the search results. The searched for term is highlighted and shown with some surrounding text, apparently in a number, if not all, of the instances in which the term appears in the relevant document. The graphic below illustrates:

The snippets apply to both caselaw and legislation results.

This is a welcome (albeit stealthy) addition to a fine service.

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke announced today that Bills will shortly be introduced in Parliament to overturn prohibitions on cameras in the courtroom.

The media will only be allowed to film judges’ summary remarks only – victims, witnesses, offenders and jurors cannot be filmed.

Filming and broadcasting in court is currently banned under two Acts of Parliament and new legislation will need to be passed to allow cameras into the courts.

The Guardian reports that Clarke had intended to consult with senior judges but in recent days Downing Street had moved to circumvent this consultation process and support the change, whatever the judges thought.

In addition to allowing broadcasting, Mr Clarke announced that an unprecedented level of information about the performance of courts will be published in future to allow everyone to see how their local courts are working. This will include:

Court-by-court statistics for the time taken for cases to be processed, from offence to conviction, allowing people to compare the performance of their local courts

Details on how many trials were ineffective and why they were ineffective

Anonymised data on each case heard at local courts and the sentences given

Details of how many people have been convicted or released from prisons in each area and how often they re-offended afterwards

From next May justice outcomes will be placed alongside crime data on police.uk so people can see what happens next after crimes are committed in their areas

More information on how the civil and family justice systems, including how long it takes each court to process small claims hearings, larger cases and care proceedings.

They'll be having a bonfire with Reporting Restrictions in the Crown Court.

The new rules will apply in Wales. No solace to Gavin Hughes, who in April 2003, sitting in the public gallery of Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court, found himself in the dock after a police officer witnessed him taking a photograph of a defendant in the court using his mobile phone. He was brought before the judge and fined £250 for contempt of court. He apologised and explained that "I hadn't seen my friend for a while, so I took a photo of him for myself and to show his wife". Snapping the goings on in Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court will still be an offence unless he snaps the judge while summing up.

Not everyone is overjoyed at the prospect: Charles Harris, last year's president of the Council of Circuit Judges, also told BBC's Today:

A trial is actually an entity of various parts, and you can't legitimately split it up into bits and pieces.

What about a defendant who doesn't agree to [filming], is sentenced in the full light of publicity and then appeals and is acquitted?

Tory MP Roger Gale said

it risked turning justice into a reality show and providing a platform for "eccentric" legal professionals. Mr Gale, a former TV producer, said screening Parliament had resulted in grandstanding by MPs and a concentration on "juicy" extracts at the expense of less entertaining debates.

I believe that the televising of the closing speeches in law courts and the passing of sentences will create the same effect as thrusting barristers seek to impress the media with fee-improving performances and the more eccentric members of the judiciary use the TV platform to address the nation," he said.

The courts are supposed to be a place where justice is done and where it is, by those actually present and listening to the evidence, seen to be done. That must not be allowed to change. This is not about transparency or democracy, it is about television showbusiness and we do not need our law courts to be turned into yet another reality TV show."

England has more eccentric members of the judiciary than Canada – His Honour James Pickles and Mr. Justice Cocklecarrot come to mind immediately.

The 1925 Criminal Justice Act states:

41 Prohibition on taking photographs, &c., in court.

(1)No person shall—
(a)take or attempt to take in any court any photograph, or with a view to publication make or attempt to make in any court any portrait or sketch, of any person, being a judge of the court or a juror or a witness in or a party to any proceedings before the court, whether civil or criminal; or
(b)publish any photograph, portrait or sketch taken or made in contravention of the foregoing provisions of this section or any reproduction thereof;and if any person acts in contravention of this section he shall, on summary conviction, be liable in respect of each offence to a fine not exceeding fifty pounds.
(2)For the purposes of this section—(a)the expression “court” means any court of justice, including the court of a coroner:(b)the expression “Judge” includes . . . F38, registrar, magistrate, justice and coroner:(c)a photograph, portrait or sketch shall be deemed to be a photograph, portrait or sketch taken or made in court if it is taken or made in the court–room or in the building or in the precincts of the building in which the court is held, or if it is a photograph, portrait or sketch taken or made of the person while he is entering or leaving the court–room or any such building or precincts as aforesaid.

The Contempt of Court Act 1981 states:

9 Use of tape recorders.

(1)Subject to subsection (4) below, it is a contempt of court—
(a)to use in court, or bring into court for use, any tape recorder or other instrument for recording sound, except with the leave of the court;
(b)to publish a recording of legal proceedings made by means of any such instrument, or any recording derived directly or indirectly from it, by playing it in the hearing of the public or any section of the public, or to dispose of it or any recording so derived, with a view to such publication;
(c)to use any such recording in contravention of any conditions of leave granted under paragraph (a).
(2)Leave under paragraph (a) of subsection (1) may be granted or refused at the discretion of the court, and if granted may be granted subject to such conditions as the court thinks proper with respect to the use of any recording made pursuant to the leave; and where leave has been granted the court may at the like discretion withdraw or amend it either generally or in relation to any particular part of the proceedings.
(3)Without prejudice to any other power to deal with an act of contempt under paragraph (a) of subsection (1), the court may order the instrument, or any recording made with it, or both, to be forfeited; and any object so forfeited shall (unless the court otherwise determines on application by a person appearing to be the owner) be sold or otherwise disposed of in such manner as the court may direct.
(4)This section does not apply to the making or use of sound recordings for purposes of official transcripts of proceedings.

You know it is September when:

• The College and University crowd adds 15 minutes to your commute
• You hear yourself saying "put some protein in that lunch girls"
• Life suddenly resumes warp speed

September is proving to be interesting on the eBook front.

Sarah Glassmeyer posted to the Law Librarian Blog today about some free eBooks. These include Federal Rules of Evidence, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. The books were compiled by the Legal Information Institute and made available through CALI's eLangdell Press.

There are interesting questions on a CanLII survey. Fill it out and you will see what I mean.

Courtney Minick has written a post on Universal Citation for State Codes over at VoxPopuLII, a blog published at the Cornell University Law School.

She discusses the spread of universal, or vendor-neutral, citation in the United States. The bulk of the article is devoted to developing neutral citation for state laws, but one detail attracted my attention. In contrast to Canada, where neutral citation has been widely adopted for caselaw, the practice is still not very widespread South of the border:

To date, 16 states assign universal citations to their highest court opinions. (To date, Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming have adopted universal citation for caselaw.) Illinois is the most recent state to adopt the measure (in June 2011)…

In March 2010, Ivan Mokanov of the Université de Montréal, wrote on VoxPopuLII about neutral citation practices in Canada. He pointed out that "nearly three quarters of citations to recent case law [in Canada] use the neutral citation".

Publishers across the board, not just legal publishers, are under George Monbiot’s microscope in this very interesting article in The Guardian the other day. The title is enough to make you look twice — ‘Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist’.

It is a similar tale in legal publishing. We need to be aware of the added power we put into publisher hands every time we cancel a paper subscription….

I agree, this is not news. Our lives are getting faster and we expect to know what is happening right now in the world, not what happened five hours ago or yesterday. For those of us who work with information and live online, television and radio are often not fast enough. We expect to hear about things as they happen.

Lawyers need to stay on top of what is happening to clients so they can help respond in a timely manner. As librarians, the challenge is pulling information together so that those we serve are up to date. In the journalism realm, reporters strive to get coverage out ever faster. When a crisis occurs, PR machines now are expected to get responses out within an hour or two. It is no longer acceptable to wait a few days to allow for crafting of messages. David Meerman Scott, author of Real-time Marketing & PR talks about this phenomenon in his video:

Real-Time Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott

Kady O'Malley, CBC report who covers the Parliament Hill beat in Ottawa, was at the recent Canadian Bar Association conference. The CBA caught this interview with her after her talk, in which she discusses real time reporting and its affect on politics:

Kady O'Malley

One thing she doesn't address in the video is the growing prominence of citizen journalists, people without journalist training reporting on things they are seeing. Citizen journalism really comes into play on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube when people mention things that are happening to them or near to them. For example, when we hear of natural disasters it is usually first seen on Twitter now, especially when it comes to earthquakes. This past week for those of us on or near the east coast has been particularly exciting in this regard, with tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes (oh my!).

For myself, I appreciated Kady O'Malley's real time reporting of the Jack Layton visitation in Ottawa last week via Twitter. Some of us who attended his funeral in person (I was on the street outside Roy Thompson Hall), shared photos, video and impressions of what was happening around us. I noted, watching the coverage on TV later, that it dulled in comparison with being right there. The citizen journalistic efforts were not about getting the facts correct, but about sharing impressions and feelings. It was not about a political agenda (at least, in my case) but about becoming more engaged as a citizen with the story at hand and, in some cases, feeling more a part of a community. We see this when people post tweets from events such as last week's ILTA conference.

So, not only is real time news and information allowing us to consume more individually, but also it is allowing us to feel more connected to the story and perhaps even become a part of it. Lines are increasingly blurring in this regard: consumers are not just consumers, but also reporters.

Where does that leave us? As librarians we can no longer wait for requests for information to come our way, and then take a few hours to pull sources together as far as day to day information goes. We need to think about what sources are important, find their related real-time feeds, and pull those together automatically as much as possible (ideally with RSS feeds if available), filtering and sorting according to the interests of our clients. Especially those of us in law firms need to know what is happening so that responses can be made in a timely fashion. No longer can responses wait a week or sometimes even in a day. It is a real challenge to figure this out and get it working, but once in place it can fill that need for immediate information. From there it is a matter of tweaking the results, adding or subtracting to improve the content over time.

What are the challenges you face with looking for real time information? How are you meeting these challenges?

Bloomberg announced this morning that it was acquiring the legal publisher, BNA for $990,000,000.

Bloomberg will acquire all 25,116,830 outstanding shares of BNA for $39.50 per share in cash for a total purchase price of approximately $990 million.

It is a key development in Bloomberg's strategy to challenge Thomson West and Reed Elsevier in the lucrative legal information market.

In Bloomberg's history, this is only the third acquisition – they bought Businessweek and New Energy Finance in 2009. Bloomberg's growth has all been internal and organic to date.

Normally, prices aren't given so this one is revealing – the $990 million price reflects premium multiples paid (P/Revenue of 2.9x, EV/EBITDA of 14.5x, and P/E of 32.6x on a LTM basis).

So why? Essentially this is about access to a new customer base, but even more than that, it adds content to Bloomberg Legal, when content is what it will need to take on the established incumbents. BNA's customer base fits nicely with Bloomberg's.

The Company counts amongst its customers the250 largest law firms, 98% of the top 100 accounting firms, 97% of Fortune 500 companies, and a substantial number of large and mid-sized law firms. In law firms alone, BNA serves over 5,500 firms with an estimated 205,000 attorneys. BNA reported revenue of $331 million in 2010. BNA is completely employee-owned, and is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, where most of its 1,465 employees are located.

Here is what the FAQs said:

Together, Bloomberg and BNA will be a unique combination of premium content, deep subject matter expertise, proprietary data and world-class technological capabilities to provide distinctive products and solutions for professionals and decision makers in law, government, business and finance.

This acquisition would immediately strengthen Bloomberg’s offerings in the legal information market by complementing Bloomberg Law – the only legal research system that fully integrates primary research, dockets, company information and proprietary news – with BNA's trusted legal, tax and regulatory content.

The acquisition would significantly grow Bloomberg’s presence in the Washington, DC area through its multiple operating units, Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Government, Bloomberg Law and BNA — which would work together to provide unparalleled coverage and analysis of U.S. policy and regulatory issues for customers.

BNA will benefit from Bloomberg’s technology and data expertise as well as the significant analytical and news reporting resources of the company, including Bloomberg Briefs, Bloomberg Industries and Bloomberg News, among others.

And a legal publisher founded by David Lawrence in 1929 will be no more.

For the last few months, I have been tracking new issues of Canadian law journals for Bora Laskin Law Library's Recent Law Journals Tables of Contents service (July issue here) . This was as part of a bigger project, that will hopefully see the light of day someday. One of my collaborators on that project Andrea Davidson (a lawyer who is currently a masters student at the University of Western Ontario's Faculty of Information and Media Studies) thought it was worth noting that a number of the journals we were looking at were not available on either Lexis or Westlaw. This is a bit of a surprise as I had half-assumed going into this project that I would be able to find most journals I needed online by looking in one or two places. While most journals are indeed online somewhere, you have to look in a few different places to find them all.

A closer look at what I found is surprising. There may be errors here – I have relied on UofT's list of law journals, but this gives a good general picture. We certainly do have a way to go.

Of the 66 Canadian law related journals I am tracking:

- 11 are on all three main commercial platforms (Lexis, Westlaw and HeinOnline)
- 12 are on two of these platforms (10 Lexis, 10 Hein, 4 Westlaw)
- 20 are on only one of these platforms (3 Lexis, 7 Hein, 10 Westlaw)
- 2 are only on Hein but are not current
- 21 are not on any of the three platforms (some of these are published on the web only, others are available on other online platforms such as Gale or Proquest or a CLB database, and some (about 12) I could not find online at all)

Looking at things another way, if I was expecting to get one stop shopping - of my 66 journals I would find:

- 24 of them on Lexis
- 25 of them on West
- 30 of them on Hein (not all would be current)

I guess there are a couple of lessons here. One, it looks like neither of these sources has a clear competitive advantage in their journals coverage. The second is one that my library mentor Ted Tjaden made sure I understood when I joined UofT: if you are doing journal research and want to know what has been written on a specific topic use an index - full-text searching is (still) not enough.

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.

I am sorry to report that @ordersincouncil, a twitter stream with 318 followers and 25 listings seems to have gone silent. No ceremony, no fanfare, no last word, no announcement. The account sits, with a lovely background, the descriptive tagline "Monitoring updates to Privy Council Office listings of cabinet orders," and a last tweet from May 2011.

I was among those who found tweets of federal Orders in Council extremely useful. I was happy to weed through tweets on government appointments and interesting tidbits like tax remission orders among the regulations and proclamation announcements that were of true interest to me.

I guess it's back to the PCO Secretariat Orders in Council database search and monitoring the Canada Gazette as sources for this information.

I will miss you @ordersincouncil, you were a handy tool. I was hoping you were just on vacation.

Well only as an intervenor.

According to a Press Release out this week, CanLII and the Federation to Defend Free Access to Law at the Supreme Court

CanLII and the Federation of Law Societies of Canada have been granted leave to intervene at the Supreme Court of Canada in SOCAN v. Bell et al., a copyright case to be heard later this year in which the Court will be asked to provide guidance on the meaning of “research” as a fair dealing user right under the Copyright Act.

While the facts of the SOCAN case relate to online music previews and not legal research, the legal questions at issue include the meaning of “research” as a head of fair dealing and how, in the internet age, courts should balance copyright holders’ interests with user rights. CanLII and the Federation will argue for a large and liberal interpretation of the term “research” as set out in CCH v. Law Society of Upper Canada and in subsequent cases.

Here is the factum and the court file.

While the ability of the Federation to provide free access to Canadian law through CanLII is not under immediate threat, CanLII and the Federation are concerned about the detrimental impact on access to law and justice that could flow from a narrow interpretation of “research” and from a restrictive approach to fair dealing rights in respect of copyright material.

Last year, when Thomson Reuters acquired the Canada Law Book Company, we expected that CLB's President and CEO, Stuart Morrison would enjoy a well-earned retirement, after winding up all the Cartwright Group businesses that West didn't acquire. That is why we were shocked to learn that he died of leukemia on Saturday.

Stuart was a real character among Canadian legal publishers, a man of strong views and language, who lived his life with gusto – he would tackle any challenge. There are stories of his bungee jumping, when all around quietly slipped away. Any opportunity to shock, he would take.

I first encountered him around 1982 at CLIC meetings, when he was a young sidekick to Wally Cowing and Stan Corbett, the then top management of Canada Law Book. Stuart spent the next 28 years at CLB – surprising, I suspect to both him, and them.

For the roughly thirty years I knew Stuart, there was pugnacity in our dealings. If there is an edge in any of my post, it comes with his character.

His was an extraordinary career in many ways. To see Stuart debate with the legal great and good, you would not have known that he was, in his own words, “a drop out from a respectable British school with its accompanying tradition of cross-dressing”. This post won’t dwell on “cross-dressing” but Stuart was right at home riding his hog with the Hells’ Angels.

He lacked any formal education after his pre A Level drop out from his minor public school in England. He fetched up in BC, where I seem to recall he joined the Attorney General's department, under the Socred government, in the courts. Slaw readers who are bibliographic obsessives might even like to see if there are any extant copies of Stuart's sole published work, the Victoria Family Court Maintenance Study – a work that is scarcely consonant with his subsequent career. It was the lightning strike that galvanized him, since it exposed him to the legal system. Then he persuaded to appoint him as a Justice of the Peace. Victoria was a little dull for Stuart, and it would have been impossible to see him as a bureaucrat administering traffic offences.

He reached Vancouver, where Jack Cram gave him a job at Western Legal Publications. He was in a marketing role and when Canada Law Book bought out Jack, they also acquired Stuart. They needed a marketer, and Stuart was the closest one to hand. Phil George went west, and Stuart came east to Aurora Ontario.

He was the marketing face of Canada Law Book, until after Stan's retirement the controlling shareholders picked Stuart – rather than the company's young publishing VP, Geralyn M. Christmas – to be the CEO. He was the CEO until the sale.

Stuart loved controversy – paradoxically, because he was, in many ways, an arch-conservative. His prime contribution to Canadian legal publishing was probably his creation of the Law Times, which in its early years was a provocative, irreverent, muck-raking publication which was fun to read and which generated a fair number of libel suits. After a few damage awards, Stuart decided that libel insurance might be a good idea, and perhaps fact checkers had their uses. After a few controversies too many, the advertisers started to walk, and Law Times pulled in its horns.

But the Law Times was always willing to puncture a few legal egos, to grade judges like any other commodity, and to pursue stories for the sheer whim of it. Stuart regarded it, as he did the Canadian Lawyer, as his personal vehicle for whatever interested him. What’s happening in post-independence South Africa? Well let’s get Morris Manning to accompany Stuart on a fact finding mission – with great wine and safaris, of course, thrown in. Then CBC interviews afterwards, on the basis of their mission.

He liked to try and influence legal opinion. But any legal newspaper is ultimately ephemeral. Stuart was a gadfly.

Stuart wasn’t a conventional legal publisher.

Hell, Stuart wasn’t a conventional anything.

Printers’ ink didn’t flow in his veins. His heart did not go pitter patter at the prospect of publishing an academic work that would transform Canadian law. Alan Marks – who ran CLB’s publishing programme in its glory days – he wasn’t.

CLB ventured tentatively into electronic publishing – but after an early investment in QL, Hugh Lawford squeezed CLB out, and it never really became an innovator. It had its law reports, of unrivalled quality, and a modest back list. It became, frankly, a little complacent. Attempts to diversify the business seldom made money.

Thirty years ago, Canada Law Book’s reputation was unparalleled – the quality of its list, and the resources it devoted to new works put it ahead of its then competitors. The slow decline matched the rise of Thomson as the dominant legal publisher in legal Canada. They weren’t easy years for Stuart. Margins were squeezed – see Stuart's testimony in front of the Commons Heritage Committee . A relentless focus on the bottom line – on the business of publishing rather than the traditions of professional publishing.

Ultimately the only future for Canada Law Book was to be sold. The Cartwright family preferred a sale – as opposed to the major investments that might have been required to turn the business around. Stuart was the one who prepared the business for the acquisition. The family got what it wanted – and Stuart did well. Over a century of legal publishing history is scarcely visible when swallowed up by Thomson Reuters West. Stuart's leadership of CLB was not without its critics – Ian Cartwright had been criticized as being too hands-off and Stuart was a safe pair of hands, not a publisher.

A pity he didn't get to enjoy his rewards.

Stuart was a bundle of paradoxes. Every Stuart story had a twist. Highly opinionated, though undereducated. Canadian though somehow terribly English. Convention-shocking in a conservative trade. A legal publisher whose heart was more in marketing – and running a tight business – than publishing books. A bon vivant who put in time on the line learning how to be a sous chef. Hard headed, though with a soft centre for blind horses and vulnerable animals.

In the end a combination of malaria (picked up in Namibia) and leukemia did him in. He will be mourned and missed by his family and friends.

He didn’t want a funeral. You’ll see no obituaries. Next time you have a drink, think of him and smile. That’s all he would have done.

These are notes are from a panel presentation session at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto last Thursday. Panelists included lawyer/librarian Matthew Braun, Legal Reference Specialist at the Law Library of Congress in Washington, DC, Sara Sommarstrom, Program Director, Minnesota Justice Foundation, and Prof. Nanette Elster, Vice President, Spence & Elster and Adjunct Faculty, The John Marshall Law School, Chicago, IL. Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own. I welcome your comments and follow-up thoughts!

This session was made up of three very different presentations exploring how technology is being used to provide legal or health care services and information to populations that otherwise would be underserved:

• In the first presentation, Matthew Braun described online services from the Law Library of Congress, including how the Global Legal Information Network has become a key portal–and even the main repository–for legal and national documents for some countries that do not have their own online repositories.
• In the second talk, Sara Sommarstrom described ways in which the Minnesota Justice Network is leveraging a small staff using new technologies, providing services to homeless veterans, those in rural areas without lawyers, and reaching out to a certain population in urban areas who could possibly be need specific legal advice.
• In the third talk, Prof. Nanette Elster spoke passionately about the growing divide that is being created with increasing inaccessibility to legal services, healthcare services and Internet by parts of the population. She spoke specifically about the use of social media to improve health care for the underserved.

These talks provide examples on how this divide can be narrowed with existing technologies and social media.

Matthew Braun, Law Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/law

The first mission of the Library of Congress is to support the Congress, but they also support constituents. It is the oldest U.S. federal cultural institution, with a permanent staff of about 3,600 employees. It has the largest collection of libraries in the world and 144 million items in 420 languages.

Researchers can find additional information by going to: http://www.loc.gov/rr/

The Law Library of Congress (LLC) was established in 1832 as a separate department of the LOC. They currently have about 30,000 volumes in a public reading room.

Some of the resources they offer:

• Global Legal Research Center - www.loc.gov/law – the GLRC has a staff of foreign law attorneys who can advise on law in other countries
• Global Legal Information Network – www.glin.gov - "a public database of official texts of laws, regulations, judicial decisions, and other complementary legal sources contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations."
  For some jurisdictions, GLIN serves as the primary repository for legal information. For countries with a legal system in place, this might also serve as a central place for their legal information. Searches can be run in several languages.
• THOMAS – www.thomas.gov - legislative information from the U.S. Congress. Allows for search of legislation. Staff members of the law library add content daily
• A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation - http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw - includes U.S. congressional documents and debates from 1774 to 1875.
• Legal Blawg Archive – captures an archive of a selected number of legal blogs. Searchable, and divided by subject area. Because this is an archive, they do not actively capture current blog posts.

• Their blog In Custodia Legis is getting good traction
• On Facebook at www.facebook.com/lawlibraryofcongress
• On Twitter @LawLibCongress
• YouTube – the Law Library includes their videos on the Library of Congress channel
• "Ask a Librarian" – questions can be directed to the law library. Includes live reference chat.

Question from the audience: Is the library planning to digitize?

Braun: They are in the same building as the US Copyright Office, so are not looking to digitize monographs as others have. They are working with the GPO to make primary legal material available electronically. They are also working on ways to make the case law more accessible; a lot of the content is in proprietary systems.

Sara Sommarstrom, Program Director, Minnesota Justice Foundation, http://www.mnjustice.org/

Minnesota Justice Foundation Pro Se Clinics is a "tiny little non-profit" of 7 staff members who have been able to do some amazing things with free technologies.

Helping homeless veterans:

For example, they recently participated in a Stand Down event for homeless veterans. They used online resources with laptops and wireless to provide information. They used ProJusticeMN and LawHelpMN as resources. According to the ABA Commission on Homelessness and Poverty, child support services for homeless veterans are essential. There are currently more homeless veterans in the U.S. than service members who died in Vietnam.

Serving rural populations:

Minnesota has a lot of rural area with few lawyers, so they use technology to link in to expertise in the urban areas. They are taking advantage of Interactive Television (ITV) currently present in every courthouse in Minnesota. It was set up so that those in other counties could appear in court, but is under-utilized. They use the equipment in law firms and courthouses to link in with private attorneys to get advice from them for pro se litigants. It allows attorneys to take part without giving up days for travel. They are asked to be available on certain days when clinics are run; if a topic in their area comes up, they are contacted to participate via video. This allows those attorneys to participate while giving up as little time as possible from paid client work.

Technology:

• bridges geographic divide between clients and legal services
• allows them to provide services where there are no attorneys
• makes it easy for attorneys to volunteer
• allows for effective use of volunteer resources (especially students who are familiar with the technology)

They also use Skype successfully to "stretch across boundaries". They find video conferencing works best because attorneys feel more comfortable giving advice if they can see the litigants.

Remote technologies at clinics are easy and cheap to set up; can be used anywhere:

• use wireless "hot spots" to set up their own wifi;
• scanner/copier/printer

They have even used this in army tents.

Outreach to tenants in foreclosed properties:

How could they identify tenants in foreclosed properties so they could reach out to them with legal information? The solution was to cross-reference foreclosed properties with rental license data (all done by law students). They used a program called batchgeo.com to map them on Google Maps, and sent out law students to the properties (giving them directions to properties and a phone number in case they needed help). The students provided free legal advice, giving information to the people who needed to know their rights in the case that the property they were living in was being foreclosed.

Question from the audience: Would Skype help outreach to a Spanish speaking population?

Sommarstrom: Find out language skills of the lawyers providing service and make sure they are available when needed.

She also participated in an Externship using Skype, including someone based in Alaska where there are no law schools.

Additional notes on this talk can be found on the ABA Journal blog: Pro Bono Goes High Tech, and Homeless Veterans Benefit.

Prof. Nanette Elster, Vice President, Spence & Elster and Adjunct Faculty, The John Marshall Law School

Using social media to improve health care for the underserved: we have great tools out there, but not everybody is informed about them. Health and social media has been in the news a lot. One of the key missteps traditionally in emergency management has been miscommunication. Social media is changing this.

23% of internet users with chronic illness have looked online for others with similar conditions. Even if people do not have internet access, they can use cell phones to access medical information. However according to Pew in 2007 there is a digital divide between different demographics. There are things that can dramatically improve this.

Example of a health care organization providing service via social media:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) participates online:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Daily Strength – safe and anonymous support groups
• CaringBridge - connecting families with health challenges

Inaccessibility to legal services, healthcare services and Internet is creating a growing divide.

There is also blurring of boundaries now for physicians. Not everyone putting information out is credible. There needs to be a mechanism in place to ensure what is put out is accurate. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) views mobile medical apps as posing potential health risks, so they want to create some oversight.

Standards for physician/client confidentiality are changing. What do you do in an age when patients can "friend" a physician on Facebook? Lines get blurred as to what is personal information and patient information. The American Medical Association put out a social media policy for physicians: AMA Policy: Professionalism in the Use of Social Media.

Social Justice or Social "Injustice"?

• seeing some disparities crossing boundaries, but also seeing some things coming together for fewer disparities
• Example: the "text4baby" program is a free text messaging service in English and Spanish for prenatal and postpartum care
• According to "Peer-to-peer Healthcare" from Pew Research Center (February 28, 2011), when they find information and support through the Internet, people feel less isolated; the Internet is a source of emotional support
• Mayo Clinic is a pioneer, feeling that people should drive their own health care support
• Partners Healthcare's Center for Connected Health in Boston use cell phones and computers to help monitor people at home, text pregnant teens and have outreach for drug users

Healthy People 2020 (HP 2020) recommends increasing the use of social marketing in health promotion and disease prevention.

Some considerations:

• who is using it and in what form?
• understanding who is not using it and why not is just as important
• most libraries now have free Internet access
• how do you encourage use so that it engenders trust?
• the need to maximize the potential of social media
• what kind of oversight is needed? Right now there are a lot of legal disclaimers, but what about thinking about ensuring the information is really true and accurate? Focus energy on medical/legal partnerships.

Do what Public Health is designed to do, for prevention rather than later care treatment. This would improve the health care costs. In sharing resources, there is a need to speak different languages and understand different cultures.

Question from audience: What about the use of Skype?

Elster: Skype is a great way to build a different kind of community, and allow law schools to connect remotely without moving their families. It also means they have to become better at written communication

[Colin Lachance is the President of CanLII.]

In his recent column on Slaw entitled Funding the LIIs, Sean Hocking wrote of the challenges faced by BAILII, the successes of AustLII and, to the extent information was available, the various funding models pursued by other legal information institutes. In referencing CanLII, he noted:

They don’t tell us much just that “CanLII is funded by the members of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, in other words, the law societies of Canada’s provinces and territories and the Chambre des notaires du Québec.”

It’s true, our site does not tell much of our funding story, a shortcoming that will soon be remedied because ours is a story worth telling.

With your indulgence, I’m pleased to share our funding backstory and provide as well a glimpse into our future.

In the beginning there was nothing….

Well, not quite nothing.

Beginning in the late 1990’s several visionary leaders from across the country set about developing and then implementing an audacious vision of creating a Canadian virtual law library that would provide free access to primary legal materials to anyone. (The story of the people, their motivations, efforts and tribulations will have to wait for another day) CanLII’s promoters sought funding from Canada’s legal profession by way of their provincial and territorial regulatory bodies, with the hope that additional funding would eventually come from other sources.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

History has shown that CanLII’s first step was a big one in the right direction.

Recognizing from the outset the interdependency of succeeding in the CanLII project and addressing the legal profession’s interest in affordable electronic access to legal information, Canada’s law societies knew that progress required substantial and ongoing commitment. Accordingly, through their umbrella organization, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, the 14 member societies committed in 2000 to an initial 16-month funding allocation of close to $500K. Viewed from the perspective of individual lawyer and notary members of the law societies, that worked out to approximately $7.40 per full-time-equivalent law society member.

So what did $500K buy?

When CanLII officially launched in 2001, it did so with 18 collections comprising approximately 20,000 documents.

By early 2003, with annual law society contributions now at $14 per member, CanLII featured 65 case law and statutory collections containing over 150,000 documents and the database was growing at a rate of 1000 decisions per week. As the goal of access to current information was nearly achieved, attention turned to enhancing site functionality and utility through the addition of hyperlinks between decisions, de-identification of named persons where required to meet privacy obligations, and addition of historical collections. A proposal in support of these enhancements was advanced to the Federation, and if accepted would bring annual per FTE law society member contributions to $27. I will spare you the blow-by-blow and jump to the present state.

10 years from launch, CanLII now hosts nearly 1 million documents across over 170 collections; adds over 125,000 decisions each year; and receives over 20,000 visits each day. Beyond mere usage stats, CanLII also boasts several professional grade tools such as the Reflex record for case citations, the Satal tool for point-in-time comparison of statutes, and, more recently, search-based RSS feeds and deep-linking functionality to support sophisticated research and reference practices.

Annual funding of CanLII’s core operations continues to come from the provincial and territorial law societies. The current contribution is approximately $34 per FTE law society member. In light of the benefit to the profession and the public, CanLII humbly suggests that their investment is money well spent.

In any discussion of CanLII funding, I cannot fail to mention the many other parties whose critical contributions have supported the development of a free resource that is both deep and broad. To help CanLII approach (or in some cases far exceed) a targeted case law depth of at least 10 years for superior and appellate courts, Canada’s provincial law foundations have provided substantial funding grants for the scanning, digitizing and publishing of pre-2003 case law. CanLII has also received considerable indirect financial benefit from LexUM through low cost access to leading edge technology and service as LexUM’s prior affiliation with the University of Montreal allowed it to attract support from a variety of sources and LexUM’s own passionate commitment to CanLII led to the sharing of its technological advancements. Beyond these resources, CanLII has benefitted from contributions of incalculable value from the many volunteers and supporters among its board members, law society and Federation representatives and professional advisors, and the Courts and other public agencies.

While the CanLII funding story to date is very positive, I’ve admittedly glossed over the rocky bits. The story is not entirely one of a high and harmonious correlation between the demands of its users, the ambition of its leadership and the support of its funders. Much of what is desirable and technologically possible has not been pursued for lack of funding.

What’s next?

Through a decade of investment by the legal profession, CanLII has become a robust and respected legal research tool. CanLII has room to improve in delivering on its core functionality, but its stability also allows it and its users to dream of much grander possibilities.

Law society funding at current levels could support evolutionary growth, but the demands of today’s sophisticated user of legal information and search call for development at costs and at a pace that may exceed the appetite of CanLII’s traditional funders. Moreover, responding to public demand for improved access to justice and to legal information requires that CanLII direct greater energy and resources to generating public awareness of its service and to the education of users.

CanLII’s Board of Directors is currently developing a 3 year Strategic Plan that it hopes to unveil before year-end. The Board recognizes that meeting new and growing demands will require diversification and amplification of CanLII funding.

The last word

As CanLII enters its second decade, the funding experience and lessons of LIIs from around the world will be very instructive. We hope that legal communities in other countries will similarly find inspiration in the Canadian example and support their LIIs to the fullest extent possible. There are few better ways for a lawyer to spend $34 than to unlock the legal heritage of their country and make it freely available to all citizens.

My post earlier this morning complaining about "and/or" has got me on a roll.

Here are a few more pet peeves or commonly seen grammar errors:

1) Commas in Pairs (Rule 6.17, Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed)

Whenever a comma is used to set off an element, a second comma is required if the phrase or sentence continues beyond the element being set off:

– Incorrect: Judy went to Italy on June 15, 2004 to eat pasta.
– Correct: Judy went to Italy on June 15, 2004, to eat pasta.

You need a comma after the year in the example above (and yes, I realize the meaning in the sentence could be conveyed more easily by rewording the sentence).

2) Superscript is evil

According to the McGill Guide and my dainty sensibilities, legal citation and legal writing more broadly should not use superscript.

Your Microsoft Word may default to convert ordinal numbers to superscript:

– Incorrect: 14^th
– Correct: 14th (McGill Guide, Rule 3.7.3)

You can change the default settings using the “Word” button in the upper left of Microsoft Word and choosing “Word Options and then selecting “Proofing” and “Auto-correct” options.

Never use superscript in legal documents, especially in case citations.

3) Do not use “et al” in a case citation (McGill Guide, Rule 3.3.1)

– Incorrect: Brown et al v ABC Systems (1985), 42 OR (3d) 112 (CA)
– Correct: Brown v ABC Systems (1985), 42 OR (3d) 112 (CA)

[note: the case is fictitious]

4) Prefer single spaces after periods

Any number of leading authorities call for a single space after periods (these authorities are summarized by Matthew Buttrick in Typography for Lawyers at 43 and include the Chicago Manual of Style and Bryan Garner).

This point was already made on SLAW a few years ago.

Word processors are designed for single spaces after periods. The habit of putting two spaces after a period dates back to monospaced type on old-fashioned typewriters.

Addition: since posting, I remembered one more:

5) Pin point citations to cases

Rule 3.6 of the McGill Guide is clear: the pinpoint citation (to a paragraph or page number) always precedes the parenthetical jurisdiction and court:

– Incorrect: Brown v ABC Systems (1985), 42 OR (3d) 112 (CA) at para 5.
– Correct: Brown v ABC Systems (1985), 42 OR (3d) 112 at para 5 (CA).

As reported last week internet activist Aaron Schwartz “was charged … with sneaking into a computer closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and making unauthorized downloads of more than four million journal articles” from JSTOR. While there is a long list of charges (a copy of the 15 page indictment from the US District Court can be found here), the charge that has generated the most online debate is “intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access” 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2).

Academic libraries pay for access to JSTOR – an enormous repository of full-text journals. The Boston Globe reports that a subscription to JSTOR can cost a university up to $50,000 a year. It is not widely available outside of the academy. As a Harvard student Schwartz has free access to JSTOR via the Harvard library. As the author of the "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto", it appears that Schwartz's download at MIT was designed to protest the fact that this material was not free for everyone. Schwartz wrote in 2008:

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Online discussion has focussed the general unavailability of this content and whether downloading too many articles is actually wrong enough to justify charges that carry a maximum of 35 years in prison. This is a curious story, where ultimately the hard drives of downloaded content were never distributed and JSTOR itself decided not to peruse any action once the content was secured.

As an academic librarian I support the open access movement for scholarly communications. There is a lot of work to be done and the recent Calgary Statement issued by the Council of Canadian Academic Law Library Directors is a good start to what will be a slow moving process. I however can't see how Schwartz and his supporters are helping the cause of access at all. There seems to be a wilfully naive attitude to the questions of how all these articles actually were collected into a database and the important role that publishers and libraries play in the process of making this scholarly content available.

In addition to the blog posts I put together from selected sessions at the PLL Summit on Saturday, I have also liveblogged a few of the other conference sessions I have attended:

• Barbara Tillett and John Mark Ockerbloom on Authority Control Vocabularies and the Semantic Web
  These are notes are from talk by Dr. Barbara B. Tillett of theLibrary of Congress and John Mark Ockerboom of the University of Pennsylvania.
• To Recover or Not to Recover: Trends, Solutions, and Alternatives for Taming Online Research Costs
  These are notes are from a panel discussion session with Joan Axelroth, Axelroth & Associates, Anthony A. Licata, CFO of Dechert LLP and Nuchine Nobari, Library Director of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, LLP. The session was moderated by Sarah Mauldin, Head Librarian of Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP.
• Coding Potpourri: A Survey of Programming Languages and Tools Used in Library Applications Today
  These are notes are from a panel discussion session with Nicole Engard, Director of Open Source Education ByWater Solutions, Ted Lawless, Library Applications Developer at Brown University, Jason Eiseman, Librarian for Emerging Technologies at Yale Law School Library, and Tom Boone, Reference Librarian, Loyola Law School. The session was moderated by Cynthia Bassett, University of Missouri Law School Library.
• E-books and the Future of Legal Publishing
  These are notes are from a panel discussion session withScott Meiser of LexisNexis, Dan Bennett of Thomson Reuters Professional, and Steven W. Sutton of YBP Library Services, A Baker & Taylor Company . The session was moderated by June Hsiao Liebert, Coordinator, John Marshall Law School.

I've had some good feedback to the blog posts. These are selected notes; any errors or omissions are mine. I welcome comments! So far I haven't put any analysis together; it is all muddling around in my brain currently. I thought the E-books session in particular was a good follow-up to our similar session at the CALL conference in May. It is now Tuesday afternoon. The last few sessions are running and people seem to be quietly moving out, heading back home. See you in Toronto!

I am currently in Philadelphia for the American Association of Law Libraries 2011 conference. Today is the PLL Summit put on by the Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section (PLL-SIS). I have live-blogging the sessions I attended:

• James Jones on Understanding Law Firm Trends
• Esther Dyson on Technology Changes in Business and Libraries
• Steven Lastres, Julie Bozzell and Toby Brown – Moving Beyond the Library Walls to Support Strategic Knowledge Management
• Joan Axelroth – What Law Firm Administrators Want Librarians to Know
• Greg Castanias – How librarians add value to their law firms
• David Curle on transformations in the legal publishing industry
• Joelle Coachman – Resistance is Futile: Integrating New Technology into Your Library
• Larry Guthrie and Doug Malerba on Developing Collaborative Communities

This day was an incredible testament to the keen engagement of the law firm librarians. The PLL Summit was started last year, and this year they doubled the attendance. All sessions (except one) were recorded, so all will be posted.

Law library consultant Nina Platt is the editor of the new PinHawk News free daily email alert service for law librarians, the Librarian News Digest.

From the inaugural issue:

Welcome to the first issue of the daily Librarian News Digest, a free digest of news from publications and blogs on the internet that focus on topics of importance to librarians. As editor of Librarian News Digest, my goal is to track pertinent news and select what's most important to you as a librarian. Expect to see news and ideas that help you manage, acquire, organize, research, and market your library, along with other interesting topics.

As you scan through this issue and those to come, please remember that this is your digest. I welcome your suggestions on what sites to track or what topics to include as well as other feedback. Please send suggestions and feedback to nplatt@pinhawk.com.

Happy reading! Nina Platt

Click on the image below the fold for a sample.

Justia.com is now providing free daily and weekly opinion summaries for the US Supreme Court, all US federal courts of appeal, and state supreme courts. As well, free weekly opinion summaries are available for nearly sixty areas of practice. These, it would seem, are delivered by email; there doesn't seem to be an RSS feature. If you're curious, you can look at a sample daily email for the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals or a sample weekly summary for the practice area of environmental law.

Needless to say, this is a powerfully impressive service and a considerable contribution to the open access to law movement.