Happy New Year, all.

I thought I would take advantage of the international nature of Slaw’s contributors and readers, to search out an answer to a question that occupies my mind from time to time. Across Canada, “legal research” is conducted by lawyers, at the courts and in private practice. By “legal research”, I mean to include the finding of relevant law on a given issue; the analysis of the state of the law; and the application of the law to the given problem/file/issues. In our firm, the reference librarians will find law if given the parameters such as the . . . [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

The BBC’s Technology magazine has one of those end of year lists that someone must have obsessed over:

I particularly liked the following factoids:

8. Devout Orthodox Jews are three times as likely to jaywalk as other people, according to an Israeli survey reported in the New Scientist. The researchers say it’s possibly because religious people have less fear of death.
11. One in 10 Europeans is allegedly conceived in an Ikea bed.
14. It’s possible for a human to blow up balloons via the ear. A 55-year-old factory worker from China reportedly discovered 20 years ago that air leaked . . . [more]

I missed the Carswell announcement just before the holidays that the weekly newsletter that Professor Jay McLeod published on family law has now become Epstein & Madsen’s This Week in Family Law. The great thing about McLeod’s family law scholarship was the personal voice, the willingness to articulate a strong and sometimes ideosyncratic view of where Canadian family law was going. Simply having an intelligence wrestling with the issues, rather than doing a paraphrase of judgments was welcome in itself.
Let’s hope that Phil will be as willing to stick his neck out.

His manifesto is: “We intend . . . [more]

Just as we thought it was getting quiet again, along comes the latest Pew Internet Survey to suggest that

* Women are catching up with men in overall web use. They differ from men in using online to deepen connections with people.

* Compared with women, online men are more likely to: check the weather, get news, get do-it-yourself information, get political information, get financial information, do job-related research.

* Compared with men, online women are more likely to: use email, get maps and directions, look for health and medical information, use web sites to get support for health or . . . [more]