Today’s Information Week has a provocative piece in which a Sweet & Maxwell executive talks about Web 2.0 and the legal marketplace.

A few choice quotes:

“The challenge to publishers is how we put our content into new and meaningful contexts,” says Peter Lake, managing director of legal information provider Sweet & Maxwell , which after 207 years of serving the same marketplace could certainly be accused of being a traditional publisher.

Lake understands the need to adopt Web 2.0 themes for his digital services, but is at pains to point out that some markets present real challenges. “The problem

The digitization effort continues. And with it comes the problem of serving text (or audio and video) up to users. Two services have come to my attention recently:

Digital Book Index provides links to more than 130,000 title records from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. About 90,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free, while many others are available at very modest cost.

Many Canadian Universities are involved, along with a host of other suppliers of online data. I browsed under the topic of History: Canada: Law, at first getting . . . [more]

Nostalgia is a funny thing — how it fixes on a past of a certain age, and only on certain aspects of that past. For example, I fondly remember writing on early computers, particularly on a Kaypro with a tiny screen that was black on which amber or green letters glowed.

Now this experience can be yours, but on the widescreen of your modern monitor. Dark Room (an avowed copy of the Mac program WriteRoom) commands your whole screen, paints it black and lets you focus on your writing free of the discractions of menu bars, desktop icons etc. . . . [more]

McGill University organized a conference last week on the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Osgoode Hall Law School site The Court has listed some of the media coverage for the conference (see bottom of the article).

There are other conferences this year to mark the 25th anniversary of the Charter. Some of the key ones are:

• 25th Anniversary of the Charter – A Tribute to Chief Justice R. Roy McMurtry (Law Society of Upper Canada, April 12, 2007, Toronto): “Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Charter and honour Chief Justice R. Roy McMurtry’s pivotal

Of late I seem to have been duplicating previous postings, but I’ve looked through recent postings and searched previous ones, and to my surprise nobody on SLAW seems to have put in a direct plug for the upcoming CALL/ACBD Conference from May 6-9 in Ottawa. The conference organizing commttee has put together some impressive conference sessions, including some members of SLAW.

Of course a chance to stay at the Chateau Laurier ain’t bad either. I love the art deco pool! . . . [more]

A small reference to a quite charming page which clusters all the various tools available to us to communicate ideas effectively using pictures. Enjoy while you wait for Tufte’s books to arrive . . . [more]

This is old news but I believe it hasn’t been blogged about here (I’ll be corrected swiftly if I’m wrong). The B.C. Justice Review Task Force released a report, Effective and Affordable Civil Justice [PDF], back in November. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, particularly in the Appendices (see, e.g., Appendix N: UK and Australian Approches to Expert Witnesses). But anyone looking for something about the role of technology in all of this will be disappointed: the report acknowledges that more work needs to be done on this. I’d say they’re right. . . . [more]

Socialtext offers wikis for use behind your firewall (or hosted on their server) in order to facilitate collaboration among employees. In their words:

As the first wiki company, Socialtext is the leader in making web collaboration secure, scalable and easy to use. A Socialtext wiki is a secure, group-editable website.

Nothing wildly new here, though I have to say they’ve got some powerful folks on their board in Tim Draper, Joi Ito and Jimmy Wales, which suggests to me that they’ve got a good chance of being around for a while.

I got a sales-ish email from one . . . [more]

This is not a frivolous issue but rather a tragedy that should prompt sober reflection on all of us who work within large law firms, and who may face extraordinary pressures. This is a Cross Posting from the College of Law Practice Management‘s blog

Today’s Times has a lengthy discussion of the death of an overworked young associate at Freshfields who was putting in 16 hour days seven days a weekNote that any suggestion that Courtney’s death was causally related to his workload at Freshfields is a distortion of the facts as they currently stand. It is still . . . [more]

It’s likely everyone knows that this year daylight saving time kicks in the second Sunday of March (the 11^th) to the first Sunday of November (so it’s now “remember, remember the 4^th of November) everywhere in Canada except Saskatchewan, which never went for this nonsense anyway. Because the U.S. thought it might save some energy, they pushed out the usual dates of the first Sunday of April to the last Sunday in October by a month and we followed suit.

As I said, you probably know this. But does your computer? The old dates were in . . . [more]

On Jan. 2, 2007, the Canadian Bar Association launched the National Class Action Database, a repository for information and documents about new class actions across Canada.

This two-year pilot was initiated by the CBA Civil Litigation Section, following a recommendation by a Uniform Law Conference of Canada’s Working Group on Multi-jurisdictional Class Actions. . . . [more]

The Madrid train bombing trial opened last Thursday. 29 defendants are on trial for the bombing that took place almost a year ago. As you might expect, the BBC has a good summary online and videos of some aspects of the trial’s opening. In light of the Ontario Court of Appeal’s test of cameras in the courtroom for the recent Truscott appeal, I thought some readers might like to know that the Madrid trial is being broadcast live on the internet. But because of the time difference, you’ll have to get up early to see a Spanish court in . . . [more]