I thought I’d typed the wrong number of zeroes, but yes the $18 billion plus place taken by the big three providers in the market for legal information is predicted to expand by 6.3% next year.

The “Big Three” — Thomson Legal & Regulatory, Wolters Kluwer, and LexisNexis (Reed Elsevier) — dominate this segment with a combined market share of 59.1 percent.

Outsell is predicting that the Big Three will keep expanding by acquiring more companies in the legal technology space. In addition, the LTR segment will experience more international acquisitions and joint ventures as publishers seek stronger footholds . . . [more]

Today’s International Herald Tribune reports that Xiamen University in China is requiring law and business students to take up golf, to “prepare them for a business world where deals are made on the golf course”. Apparently golf lessons are available at other universities byut Xiamen is the first to make them compulsory. Its interesting to speculate on the reaction if a Canadian law school attempted the same thing. Contract, Tort, Legal Research and Golf 101. How would credit be awarded? Think of the need to store golf bags – and the difficulty of moving through corridors filled with students lugging . . . [more]

A neat post over at Pandia Search CentralI hadn’t encountered Pandia before – a rival to Search Engine Watch (it looks like). joins the dots together surrounding Google Docs (once known as Writely): it joins

* Google search
* Gmail
* The Google Calendar
* Docs & Spreadsheets
* Google Groups

The blogger says that “this is for all practical purposes an Office package”.

Click on “all my services” and links to the following is revealed:

* Alerts (Google’s email alert service)
* Base (Google’s online database tool)
* orkut (Google’s online community site)
* Page Creator (a web page . . . [more]

La semaine passée, Jonathan Shwartz, CEO de l’entreprise Sun Microsystems, a fait une demande auprès de la SEC pour autoriser l’usage de son blogue pour divulguer de l’information financière. Les blogues c’est bien mais, minute, il me semble que l’on ne pas tout faire avec les technologies de l’information, et ce, quelque soit leur efficacité. Comme disait le général De Gaulle, « Bien entendu, on peut sauter sur sa chaise comme un cabri en disant l’Europe ! l’Europe ! l’Europe ! ». Pareillement, on peut vouloir de l’électronique, de l’électronique, de l’électronique.

Depuis quelques années en effet, il est . . . [more]

Just a heads up that according to this morning’s feeds, Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner will be making a major statement on Wednesday about mandating web identity protection.

Cavoukian will hold a news conference in Toronto on Wednesday to outline what could, and should, be done to foster the development of a universal identity system.

Watch this post: we’ll give you the details as soon as they’re available. . . . [more]

All good things come in threes. (Or sevens, or twelves, or…) So it is with administrative announcements. You’ve heard about the amazing change in RSS feeds. You’ve read about the exciting switch in comment spam filters. Now have a crack at Slaw’s fantastic new advanced search capabilities!

The link you’ve been longing for is just under the stuffy old search box. One click an you’re into a page of querious delight, with well over 50 — count ’em, 50! — check boxes and radio buttons to afford you hours of innocent amusement. But in our rush down the page let’s . . . [more]

We’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, the application that drives Slaw. As a result, we’re able to use the Akismet spam filter, which might make life easier for people who want to leave legitimate comments on this site. I’ve deactivated the old filter and turned on Akismet. Please let me know if you experience any difficulties or if your comment somehow disappears into the ether. I’ll try to fix things. . . . [more]

I’ve installed a plugin that should send all of your requests for RSS feeds via Feedburner, so that we can get some idea of how many of our readers make use of that way of getting Slaw. The flow of feeds should be uninterrupted for our current subscribers, but if for any reason your Slaw RSS feed stops or is somehow messed up, please let me know right away, describing the problem as well as you can. I don’t anticipate difficulty, of course; but… . . . [more]

Ever feel like one of these people? If so, it’s probably because it is still a paper world, despite IT. Those who till the hard soil of law have more reason to know this than most. So come the end of the week, when you’re still hanging in there, it can be refreshing to see that there are other things to do with paper than to cover them with texts.

English artist Peter Callesen makes cutouts. Only unlike those sidewalk artists that crowd the tourist spots who’ll do your silhouette for a few bucks, he’s really good — and . . . [more]

I stumbled across a page on the PSEPC website…

(A prize for knowing what that collection of letters stands for…. I’m sorry, your time is up. The answer is Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada. What were they thinking of when they whipped up this sobriquet? How might one say it? Pusaprec? Time to send it back to the Official Government Department and Agency Naming and Labeling Taskforce.)

… that lists all of the, well, “currently listed entities.” What that means, of course, is groups identified by the government as terrorist organizations.

The usual suspects are there, each . . . [more]

Shel Israel, one of the authors of the book and blog Naked Conversations, has written a post about Government Blogging in which he mentions he was in Canada last week and noted that Canada’s Governor General Michaelle Jean had started blogging!

Surprised to read this, I had a quick look at the GG website, and indeed found a new site called Citizen Voices/Ecoute des citoyens on the gg.ca domain. There is a blog by the GG, forums, news, and even a space for regularly scheduled chats with the GG herself! Q & A from the first chat on . . . [more]

Rory Litwin at Library Juice directs the following to academic librarians:

We tell our students to go to our databases for articles that are “scholarly and reliable,” but we don’t often tell them that most of the articles they will find there, in addition to being scholarly and reliable, are not really intended for an undergraduate audience. These journal articles are mostly narrowly defined studies intended for an audience of scholars who are advancing their fields at the highest levels of learning. Our students can’t even understand the titles of half of these articles.

Often our undergrads need to read