The Law Courts Education Society of BC has launched a new website – Court Tips: Representing Yourself in Chambers.

Here are the first set of videos:

• Presenting Your Case in Chambers
• Changing A Child Support Order
• Putting Your Best Case Forward
• Avoiding the Pitfalls in Family Matters
• What to expect from the Chambers Process
• Frequently Asked Questions about Chambers
• What to Expect The Day of the Hearing

I supervise the student law journal at UVic, so I have been encouraging them to consider open source publishing, and in the course of reviewing some of this, I came across an good article on this from last September, care of Project Open Source at the University of Toronto.

I have referred to this earlier postings, but this is part of a larger initiative from north american research libraries called “The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition” or SPARC. . There are also similar initiatives in Europe and Japan., although you will need to know Japanese to be able . . . [more]

La publicité sur Internet décolle, tout le monde le dit, et ce, même s’il a fallu attendre des années pour que cela se concrétise. Mais maintenant, çà y est. On l’a vu récemment au Québec avec l’affaire Igor et moi de Saputo, la publicité en ligne peut-être d’une efficacité redoutable. En l’occurrence, il s’agit d’un muffin en forme de gorille sympatique, drôle, présentant un message peu intrusif, différent (très différent même) de la publicité papier ou télévisuelle, par le biais de jeux disponibles sur Internet.

Sauf que, plus je lis la Loi sur la protection du consommateur, et plus . . . [more]

Two recent graduates of the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia have pointed me to their website, Legaltree.ca, which has the tagline “A growing resource for lawyers.” The idea is that lawyers will submit “research resources” they have written, building a corpus of valuable material for use by everyone. The idea isn’t a bad one, although, as with Wikipedia, the evident model, much will depend upon the editors’ willingness to check the quality and currency of the submissions. There are few resources in fact available at the moment, and what there is, unsurprisingly, has a B.C. . . . [more]

A blog carnival is a a regular review meant to highlight new and bright shining stars among the blog community in a particular subject area. Typically the carnival moves around, hosted by a different blog each time. I will soon be hosting two such carnivals on my personal blog :

Carnival of the Infosciences #67 – I am hosting the next carnival on Monday, March 19th. Please submit your suggestions for library and information sciences blog posts by Sunday, March 18th. I need you to keep open your eyes and ears! Find and send me the best, brightest, most exciting . . . [more]

IBM is returning to an industry leading position in software. One of the things that is helping in this revival is their commitment to research labs in various places around the world. The IBM Watson Research Center at Cambridge (Mass.) houses the CUE Group (“Collective User Experience”), which is exploring, among other themes, interactive visualization. They’ve developed a Java app called Many Eyes, which is available through IBM’s Alphaworks, a point of release for trial software (and well worth visiting regularly).

From the “about” page:

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence

“Scott E” over at Library House‘s Venture Blog (which has nothing to do with libraries, really) has researched the location of Read/Write Web’s “Top 100 Alternative Search Engines.” For what it’s worth, four are located in Canada:

Although, the article doesn’t say which search engines are located in the various places. . . . [more]

This is related to Ted Tjaden’s Slaw post Custom Google Search Engine to Search Major Canadian Law Firm Websites.

Over the weekend, I also played around with Google Coop, which allows anyone to create a custom search engine that will search only sites or subsites specified.

I have come up with 2 search tools for Canadian legal material. Both are fully bilingual:

• Canadian Law School Websites: this searches the websites of all Canadian law schools in all provinces. For example, try searches for ‘feminist legal theory’ or ‘anniversaire “Charte canadienne des droits” ‘ .
• Legal Research / Recherche

The media often have a difficult relationship with the law. Complexity, ambiguity tedium – all combine to prevent readers from fully coming to terms with a case.

Within the last 48 hours, however, I’ve witnessed three contesting approaches.

The first is this week’s Macleans which is unprecedented in giving over 50% of its space to People v. Conrad Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, the major criminal trial taking place this month in Chicago. Of course it’s factually a juicy case with larger than life protagonists.

For me one of the most interesting parts was the sharp contrasts drawn between . . . [more]

I have created a rudimentary Custom Google Search Engine for searching major Canadian law firm websites. As many of you know, there are often excellent newsletters and other bulletins on the law firm websites, especially on new or recent areas of law or important court decisions.

Readers of SLAW are encouraged to try it and provide feedback (make it a “Favourite” or a “Bookmark”). If anyone is willing to work on improving it, let me know and I can “invite” you as a contributor. Ideally, one of our colleagues in an academic law library in Canada would take ownership . . . [more]

I try to read (or at least skim) SLAW postings daily, along with 3 other BLOGS whose daily updates arrive by an email in my Outlook in box. Although our firm uses an enterprise RSS aggregator (which allows us to either display RSS feeds in the context of our portal or to show the RSS feeds as folders in Outlook), I personally don’t seem to have the discipline to check either of these locations on a periodic (ie daily or twice daily) basis. I am forced to admit that without the daily emails, I would miss a lot of useful . . . [more]

This question came up in a recent meeting I attended, and now I am curious: for those tackling bilingual blogging, is anyone using bilingual software? That is, software that has the navigation available separately in both French and English.

Most popular blogging applications were created in the U.S. and are in English only. I have had a look at the Drupal website. Drupal is Open Source and is available in quite a number of languages now. Has anyone tried to use Drupal for more than one language simultaneously?

Inquiring mimes want to know. . . . [more]