At the Frankfurt Book FairWhere Google isn’t the most popular outfit. Google has announced a new service bringing together some of its services as a tool-kit to promote literacy.

Excellent endeavour, although I was puzzled by the linguistic bias (English and German predominate) – why not Spanish, Hindi and Mandarin? And I’m not sure what is novel here, and what is just a wrapper for other services.

According to one commentary:

Google has asked literacy groups around the world to upload video segments explaining and demonstrating their successful teaching programs. Among the first few hundred to be

Since Steve Matthew’s post back in May about LexisNexis adding RSS feeds to their website, two more Canadian legal publishers have entered the ring:

• Irwin Law (new titles feed)
• CCH Canadian (various feeds by topic)

Congratulations, both! My dream from last February is slowly becoming a reality.

I am now regularly reading these feeds in my feedreader to stay up to date with the latest titles coming out. A news feed is a good idea as well.

When will the other publishers follow suit? Yesterday I was showing my rep from one of the other publishers how it works from . . . [more]

A company called MojoPac makes a program that will let you install practically any Windows application on a portable drive, such as your iPod or a USB flash drive or portable hard drive. You can then insert the drive into any computer running Windows XP and have your own applications and data available to you. When you’re finished working, remove the drive and leave nothing on the host machine.

This has real possibilities for someone who travels and isn’t always able to carry or connect a laptop, or someone who finds it more convenient to go from a home desktop . . . [more]

When I came in to work this morning, there was a toppling stack of cast-off books, binders, pamphlets, etc. on my desk. Lots of stuff. At a quick glance, none of it looks very promising.

People regularly clean out their offices and anything that looks somewhat informationish ends up on my desk, chair or booktruck, often without any indication of who left it. Sometimes people will “gift me” with books that are completely unrelated to anything remotely associated with law and I can tell by the looks on their faces that they think they’re doing me a favour. Most of . . . [more]

In recent decisions the Federal Court has found that Wikipedia is not a reliable form of research, at least not for doing research on immigration matters. Slaw’ers could have told them that, couldn’t we?

2006 FC 1125 (para 9)

2005 FC 261 (para 9)

So my question is: Is web 2.o concerned with authority and attribution etc.? And secondly, will it be able to satisfy the demands of the legal system with respect to these concepts? . . . [more]

I’ve realized that Firefox, my browser of choice, does a Google “I’m feeling lucky” search when I enter a partial URL in the address (location) entry field. Thus, if I enter simply “slaw” I get taken right to you-know-where — because this blog comes up first in a Google search for the term. It took me forever to stop the automatic typing in of “http://,” which is quite unnecessary in all modern browsers, but I seem to have shifted over to the “feeling lucky” approach pretty quickly.

Internet Explorer doesn’t do the same thing, though — at least my Mac . . . [more]

The following is from an email I received from RLG concerning the RedLightGreen catalogue searching service:

[O]n November 5th the RedLightGreen service will end. RLG, RedLightGreen’s parent not-for-profit company has combined forces with another organization that supports a similar service, WorldCat.org. We have decided to invest all of our efforts into developing and supporting a single product rather than continuing to support two.

Indeed, RLG itself has “joined OCLC to work together…” as it says on RLG’s home page. . . . [more]

“Five Weeks to a Social Library” is a free grassroots online course with the purpose of teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. Topics covered include blogs, RSS, wikis, Flickr, social networking and bookmarking software, and selling social software at your library. The course will take place between February 12 and March 17, 2007, and it is limited to 40 participants.
For non-participants: course materials will be available for free and all live webcasts will be archived for later viewing.
Check out the course website for more information about the course content, . . . [more]

The Law Librarian Blog today mentioned an entertaining pre-print about persuasive legal writing. It is by Oklahoma City University School of Law professor Alex B. Long and is entitled [Insert Song Lyrics Here]: The Uses and Misuses of Popular Music Lyrics in Legal Writing.

From the abstract:

“Legal writers frequently utilize the lyrics of popular music artists to help advance a particular theme or argument in legal writing. And if the music we listen to says something about us as individuals, then the music we, the legal profession as a whole, write about may something about who we are

This is probably common knowledge to many, but recently I could not remember the leading case by Lord Denning on promissory estoppel. It is of course Central London Property Trust v. High Trees House [1947] KB 130 130. So I searched Wikipedia and found a great entry for Lord Denning, links to a wikipedia entry and the full-text of some of his judgments, including High Trees. I was curious and searched for “leading cases” and found an entry for landmark decisions which I found very good. Although largely American oriented, so of limited use in Canada, there were . . . [more]

Since these cases are so spasmodic, I thought Slaw folk might want to tuck away an endorsement on an Ontario costs review, in a case called Nelligan v. Fontaine

Computerized research charges were challenged.

The judge said:

[4] The clients object to a disbursement of $359.56 for computer research. The disbursements of $531.36 are modest, and while there is an absence of evidence of the subject of the computer research, I will allow $200.00 as a reasonable amount for computer research as a substantial amount of case law was presented.

The latest issue of the New York Law Journal has an interesting piece on how the law of copyright applies to contracts and other documents drafted within a law firm.

Does contract drafting reach the necessary level of originality? I would have thought that these contracts are essentially collaborative works, given the extent to which one rarely sees someone starting with a blank sheet of paper. Novel clauses keep getting borrowed and reappearing in future contracts.

Does it matter what the status is of the lawyer drafting the contracts? Associates are employees and drafting is within the scope of their