To Litigate, or Not to Litigate

Most of you are familiar with, WestlaweCARSWELL’s Litagor service. Until recently, those of us in the academic setting were able to use it and found it very useful from a number of different perspectives. Students taking part in moot court competitions, civil procedure study and paper writing all found Litigator to be an excellent tool for use in their research and learning experience. Faculty members were also finding it most useful as an access point for material that was not otherwise readily abundant. I’ve used the past tense in describing Litigator’s use in the academic context, because it is no longer available as part of their academic programme. Apparently, it was never intended to be part of the complimentary subscription for Law Schools, but it is particularly disappointing that they chose to flick the switch in the middle of the academic year. From their viewpoint, I don’t fully understand the logic, seeing as how these students are going to be practitioners in a relatively short period of time. My way of thinking would be to give them the free sample now so that it will become an indispensable tool for them when they enter into practice.

This follows the Irwin Law decision to remove access to their texts from student Quicklaw accounts. Described more fully in a Slaw post from last August and Irwin’s logic explained by Jeff Miller. That was their business decision to make but I will raise two points that might not have been fully considered; again, timing, on the eve of the academic year after faculty members have already made the decision on which texts to use in their classes. It has been my experience that faculty members were more inclined to include the Irwin texts in the knowledge that an alternative form of access was available to students. Secondly, if a class of 50 were being offered and two-thirds of the students in the class bought the book, that is 33 sales, hey, even if half bought the book that is 25 sales that otherwise might not have happened if the text had not been selected for the class. Given that one could only access a few paragraphs at a time, students were still purchasing the print. Now, that incentive to include the text as part of the course is gone.

This has been a Friday gripe, for more information on gripes visit www.hww.ca

Beyond that have a great weekend! Here in Halifax we are scheduled to have 100 km/h winds this afternoon. Here is a Halifax harbour Webcam which I particularly like; however, the view is rather fogged today, there are a few more cams linked near the top left of the page.