For some reason the vulnerability of today’s documents came to mind repeatedly this week. It’s a serious and continuing problem for everyone — archivists, librarians, private citizens… and law firms. The email files, the CD-ROM’s (remember them?), WordPerfect files, PDF files, Polaroid photos, all have an uncertain life span, and all are produced with a proprietary technology that will almost certainly have an even shorter life span than the fruit it bears. The anxiety is that in some future we (or our children) will be looking at flaking, curling, crumbling, or unresponsive and cryptic physical objects, and at character strings . . . [more]

StatsCan’s most recent Juristat contains a study, “Impacts and Consequences of Victimization, GSS 2004” by Kathy AuCoin and Diane Beaucham. The study explores in detail the costs to people and the society generally of criminal victimization. The full content is available in PDF. . . . [more]

Always on the lookout for hints on how to successfully build and maintain a corporate blog, I stumbled across these 2 helpful articles:

“As blogging grows, so do its do’s and don’ts”, Law.com, February 20th
Focuses on what you should and shouldn’t do to ensure your corporate blog is legally compliant.
Highlights:
DO
-monitor content regularly
-train employees on how to comply with relevant corporate blogging policies and laws
-establish clear objectives for the blog(s)
DON’T
-allow employees to post corporate trade secrets or patentable information

“Five ways to improve your corporate blogs”, Special Libraries Association Information Outlook, January 2007 . . . [more]

A new training organization called the Supreme Court Advocacy Institute has launched its website.

The Institute will “provide pro bono, non-partisan advocacy advice to parties appearing in an appeal before the Supreme Court of Canada”.

Litigants will be able to apply to appear in front of a panel of senior counsel, former Supreme Court law clerks, and professors of law who will critique their presentation and advocacy skills.

It will be a bit like a moot court session that will simulate the experience of appearing before the Supreme Court.

The National Advisory Committee is chaired by former Supreme Court . . . [more]

Joel Alleyne, whom we haven’t heard from in a while here at Slaw (busy man!), was the moderator at the Ark Conference I participated in last week. The conference had the unwieldy but search-engine friendly title Best Practices & Management Strategies for Legal Library & Information Service Centers. I heard Joel speak a few years back to the Toronto Association of Law Libraries on Communities of Practice so I was quite surprised at how much the discussion has changed. In a Web 2.0 world, social media has made it even easier for communities to come together.

Without giving . . . [more]

En même temps, ou presque, qu’en France, une récente étude menée sous l’égide du projet Sentinel, dont la FTC est partie prenante, vient de présenter l’état des plaintes qui sont déposées auprès de leur organisme. En effet, alors que certaines projections, particulièrement de hausse de la fraude, m’apparaissent parfois quelque peu fantaisistes, et motivées parfois par un discours de la peur commercialement rentable, ces données incluses dans ce rapport s’intitulant «Consumer Fraud and Identity Theft Complaint Data – January – December 2006 » sont pour le moins tangibles. Certes, plus de plaintes ne veut pas dire plus . . . [more]

It appears that the major law firms in Toronto are equally divided on subscribing to Hein Online based on my recent informal survey.

Nine law firm law libraries subscribe to at least the law journal module on Hein with nine law firm law libraries not subscribing. Some noted that their incoming law students are well aware of the product (from law school) and seem to expect the firm to have it. Those that subscribe seem to love it and cannot imagine life without it. Many of those who do not subscribe expressed cost and budgetary restraints as a factor.

Although . . . [more]

As many of you may know, I’ve been working at establishing The Court, a new weblog at Osgoode Hall Law School that focuses on the work of the Supreme Court. In the course of editing contributions I’ve come to realize how handy it would be to be able to link over to a designated paragraph in an SCC judgment, para numbers being the points of internal reference for online judgments since there are no page numbers, of course.

Unfortunately, in the official judgments available online, the paragraph numbers are not also html internal anchors in the way that . . . [more]

Today’s Education Guardian leads with a provocative statement:

Legal research, by tradition dreary and droning, is epitomised by the study Mental Decrepitude on the US Supreme Court. It is 93 pages of dreary, depressing documentation.

What’s it about – judicial retirement.

The issue of gaga judges seems to afflict the US Supreme Court, where lifelong tenure and the prospect of political pitched battles keeps judges sitting long after their best-by datesSee Supreme Court Senility or the even more provocative Slate piece on Chief Justice Rehnquist’s penchant for serious prescription drugs. Canadians will smile and remember Chief Justice Lyman . . . [more]

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE LAUNCHES NEW WEBSITE FOR ACCESSING ACTS AND REGULATIONS

OTTAWA, February 27, 2007 – The Department of Justice has recently launched a new website that incorporates a cutting edge, made-in-Canada search engine for accessing federal acts and regulations.

The press release touts the improved search engine that can be used to quickly and easily find the most current version of a statute or regulation, and to get point-in-time searches of statutes and regulations, as well as track changes and amendments to them. For statutes, point-in-time versions date back to 2003, and March 2006 for regulations.

The new Justice . . . [more]

Steve Matthews kicked us off with LinkedIn way back last summer with his post Building Profile Beyond Blogs. At that time he invited a number of us into LinkedIn and we have since watched our personal networks grow!

Up until now this has been primarily a networking tool for the hi-tech group, not to mention a number of consultants. Sure, there were your early adapters from other areas, including librarians and lawyers, but it was largely a few of us inviting each other into our networks.

That is now changing! Almost overnight, this thing has gone into overdrive and . . . [more]

There’s a nice little caselaw blog over at enotes.com called Decision of the Day. It offers you three or four hundred words on a recent decision, which might be a painless way to surf atop the froth of U.S. law in general. The entries are pretty-much summaries — think of them as readable headnotes. And some garner commentaries that are interesting to pursue.

enotes is a sort of upscale and free “Coles Notes” for a bunch of topics, law being one of them. . . . [more]