The Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing
This year the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD) presented its annual award for legal publishers at its conference in May to Québec-based online vendor SOQUIJ. One highlight that stuck out in my mind is that SOQUIJ is now making some of the Québec case law available translated into English. From the SOQUIJ website:
Parmi les raisons pour lesquelles SOQUIJ a été choisie, on trouve notre forte présence sur Internet, la traduction récente de certains jugements en anglais, Le Citateur et l’appui important que nous avons reçu de nos clients.
See the full write-up on the SOQUIJ site.
Each year since 1999 CALL/ACBD has given out an award to a publisher. Description of the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing from the CALL/ACBD website:
An annual award to recognize excellence in legal publishing was established by the CALL Executive in 1998. This award was initiated as a means of acknowledging the work that is done by publishers to provide the legal profession with high quality materials for use in understanding and researching the law. It is hoped that this award serves both as a means to honour publishers who have produced excellent products and to encourage excellence in new publishing endeavours.
Purpose
The award may be given for a wide variety of publishing endeavours – a specific book, series, service, or a particularly innovative publishing venture or body of work. English and French-language publications will be considered. Similarly, the format could be print, electronic or audio-visual. The intent is to recognize excellence in any form. Eligible items will have been published, or in the case of a series or ongoing body of work, will have achieved a particular goal within the last two years. This is an award for publishers, however, recognition will also be given to the author/editor of the publication or product if applicable.
The Award was renamed after Hugh Lawford when Mr. Lawford retired two years ago. He was a co-founder of Quicklaw and a strong supporter of CALL/ACBD.
Congratulations to SOQUIJ!
Update:
CALL now has the press release posted on its website. See: 2006 Award.
From the announcement:
“The members of the Award Committee recognized SOQUIJ for its commitment to excellence in legal publishing in the development of its AZIMUT databases, which contain a wide variety of legal resources. AZIMUT offers the largest selection of Quebec jurisprudence available on the Internet through its Juris.doc service. In 2005, SOQUIJ achieved a substantial goal when it introduced Le Citateur, which allows decisions on AZIMUT to be noted up. Le Citateur also provides status information on pending appeals.
“Other resources offered by AZIMUT include its Plumitifs service, which provides access to computerized court dockets, and the Code civil du Québec annoté Baudouin Renaud. In a move which is sure to be of great assistance to the Canadian legal profession, SOQUIJ recently embarked on a program to have decisions of the Court of Appeals of Quebec and the Court of Quebec translated into English.”