In an interesting profile in the Star-Tribune for November 15, entitled On Business: Thomson West becomes the go-to firm for online legalese the company’s strategy is clearly away from simply being in the information provision business. Indeed it’s so wedded to content and process, that Thomson West is more like an integrated information and software company. Some of this was becoming clear in its early and ambitious Westworks, whose birth is lauded at The ASP Approach: Experience Equals New Products and whose obituary can be found at WestWorks Melds Into ProLaw

The new West vision is shown at On Business: . . . [more]

At December’s Toronto Knowledge Management lunch, there was a brief discussion of how user expectations (particularly non-expert searcher expectations) have been raised by the ease and seeming reliability of the Google ease of interface. So I was interested to see how Freshfields developed their user interface for KM.

The article is called
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Launches Next Generation Knowledge Management System

International law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has launched ‘Athena’, a fully integrated legal know-how system.

The new application will standardise knowledge management (KM) working practices, enabling even faster client service delivery by providing access to the latest legal expertise . . . [more]

What to do with core legal texts? One English charity has a good idea

Legal Profession and Publishing Industry Launch International Law Book Facility

The International Law Book Facility, a unique charitable and publishing industry initiative, has been launched by the Rt. Hon. Lord Justice John Thomas, Judge of the Court of Appeal and ILBF Trustee.

With the support of Book Aid International, this important new initiative has a simple goal: to provide printed core legal texts to legal professional bodies, pro bono groups and law schools involved in access to justice in common law jurisdictions of Africa, Asia and . . . [more]

There are a couple of note-taking tools I use when I’m using my browser to do research, and I thought I might mention them here in case there’s a Slaw reader not familiar with them.

I use Firefox, now in the recently released version 1.5. There’s simply no contest in my mind, when it comes to browsers: Firefox beats Internet Explorer hands down, for a whole host of reasons that I urge you to explore (if you’re not already a Firefox user). Firefox lets you plug in extensions that can be downloaded from their site; these add to the . . . [more]