In looking up a judgment of the European Court of Justice I wound up in the (Luxembourgeois [delicious word]) European Navigator (ENA), which:

provides high quality research and educational material on the history of European integration on a single website: www.ena.lu.

ENA is a multilingual, multisource and multimedia knowledge base that contains more than 12,000 documents on the historical and institutional development of a united Europe from 1945 to the present day.

This “knowledge base” is acessed through an extremely sophisticated front end, the “Multimedia Content Explorer,” written in Flash. You’re presented with at least three different integrated panes, . . . [more]

THE HAGUE, 16 April 2007. Today, as its sixtieth anniversary year draws to a close, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, launched its new website.

This user-friendly tool, which has a powerful search engine, contains five times more information than the old site, particularly on the 136 cases which the Court has dealt with since 1946. Easier to use, with its improved navigation, the site complies with international accessibility standards established for web users with visual impairments, who will thus be able to access the full range of content.

The new website

Couldn’t get access to the Federal legislation and regulations at the official site, either yesterday or today, either through IE or Mozilla. Does anyone know what’s happening? . . . [more]

Just stumbled on a wonderful blog on legal translation, at the same time as Deborah Cao at Griffith has published a major monograph on Translating Law. . . . [more]

[this post is the last of a series covering the Leg@l IT Conference]

The last session of the day was the much awaited panel on the topic of e-discovery, featuring Justice David J. Waxse, USA District Court of Kansas City; Me Patrick L. Oot, Verizon Communications; Mr. Robert M. Gerbrandt, TD Bank; Mr. Rafael Gonzalez Caloni, PSS Systems; and Me Dominic Jaar, Bell Canada (Beaudin Legault).

Mr. Caloni put some numbers on the potential importance of e-discovery, noting that in the Verizon v. Vonage case, during 9 months 100 lawyers billed 53,000 hours, 232GB of data as involved, . . . [more]

[this post is one of a series covering the Leg@l IT Conference]

Me Yvan Houle, from Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, presented a session titled “La boîte à outils quotidienne: un cabinet virtuel sans papier”. His presentation covered the views of a litigator concerning the daily paperless office.

Me Houle took some time to explore the issue of “the importance of paper: myth or reality?” The conclusion was that although paper is not likely to be used any less any soon, less paper will be kept.

He next moved to the case of a national law office with a . . . [more]

[this post is one of a series covering the Leg@l IT Conference]

The Judges Panel was the highlight of the conference. I was looking forward to hear the views from the Bench concerning “Judicial IT”. The panel included Justice Bastarache from the Supreme Court of Canada, Justice Morrissette from the Court of Appeal of Québec, Justice Wery from the Superior Court of Québec and Justice Waxse from the US District of Kansas City.

Supreme Court of Canada

Justice Bastarache gave the audience many insights concerning the impact of Information Technology at the Supreme Court of Canada. In appeal, some . . . [more]

The wireless network dropped this afternoon, so I’m resuming the blogging, now not-quite-so-live (!) after a nice Zen AJBM dinner…

[this post is one of a series covering the Leg@l IT Conference]

Me Jean L. Beauchamp presented “Les outils de l’avenir… dès aujourd’hui”. His presentation consisted mainly in an overview of suggested tools for the small paperless law office, including:

• Scanning: VRS – Virtual ReScan
• PDF: Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro: to create, combine, collaborate, collect and control
• Telephony: Skype, using the Linksys IP telephone
• File Management: Filecenter (available in French)
• Outlook synchronization in

[this post is one of a series covering the Leg@l IT Conference]

Michel A. Solis, from Solis Juritech, and John D. Gregory, from the Attorney-General Office (Ontario), presented the session titled “Le cadre juridique des TCI dans les provinces de common law”. Michel piqued the interest of the audience right from the start with the innocuous question “does an email provide the same legal value as a formal letter?”, before he turned the podium over the John.

After briefly referring to 1996 – UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce, the 2001 – UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic . . . [more]

[this post is one of a series covering the Leg@l IT Conference]

Professor Simon Fodden – nice to see you blogging too Simon! :-) – is a well-known founder of the slaw community and recently launched another site for debate and data about the Supreme Court of Canada. He was the obvious choice to speak on the topic of blogging by law professors and judges.

When he stepped on the podium and began his presentation, Simon was very candid in sharing his views to the effect that professors are often too ponderons and lawyers are too careful when it . . . [more]

[this post is one of a series covering the Leg@l IT Conference]

Me Bernard Brun presented the session titled “Le blogue: équilibre délicat entre communication et responsabilité”. This is a topic of particular interest to lawyers, as they may be called upon to provide legal advice on the responsibility of blog authors.

Before the issue of responsibility was considered, Me Lebrun explained what is a blog, situated the “blogosphere” in context of other media, noted that the blogosphere counts as many as 75 million blogs and is still growing at a fast rate.

Blogs come in many . . . [more]