I am currently in Seattle at the Special Libraries Association annual conference. SLA is a large international organization made up of specialized information professionals.

SLA awards were handed out last night, and I am delighted to report law librarian Sabrina Pacifici was honoured with the J.J. Kellar Innovations in Technology Award for her long-standing work as creator, founder and sole editor of law and technology blog beSpacific and e-zine LLRX.com. Sabrina Pacifici was one of the first in the legal research industry to harness the Internet and especially blogs as a way to communicate with colleagues and bring together . . . [more]

Almost two years ago, Simon C. posted this entry about the many distractions created in the Information Age. Two years later, we’re probably just as distracted but now we need to worry about whether the Internet is messing with our intelligence. In the July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?.”

I’m glad I’m not the only know who’s noticed that longer texts are much tougher to absorb and that “power skimming” is what I regularly do. However, I’m still very much amused by the fact that I once bought a book on . . . [more]

Forms of practice are changing — in the U.K. certainly. MyLawyer is, or plans to be, a front end for participating law firms who want a way of delivering legal services over the web. In the language of the website:

Epoq Group (www.epoq.co.uk) with its 10 years’ experience in developing legal services for customers of financial institutions, is now working in conjunction with a limited group of leading UK law firms, to develop a symbiotic partnership network (the MyLawyer network)…

And aimed at the potential client:

We will enable you to provide instructions to your lawyer over the Web instantly

Let me quote from the Thursday news release on the CanLII site:

Thanks to a grant from the Law Foundation of Ontario, the following additions have been made on CanLII:

• All Supreme Court of Canada cases originating from Ontario back to 1876 in searchable HTML and PDF-image format (2,100 cases)
• All Court of Appeal for Ontario cases that were appealed at the Supreme Court of Canada (1,300 cases)
• All reported Ontario Superior Court of Justice cases back to 1994 (3,500 cases)

This project added 100,000 pages of historical material on CanLII. CanLII wishes to sincerely thank the Law Foundation of

The benefits that knowledge management can deliver to a law firm are well documented. They include reducing wasteful duplication, increasing the firm’s intellectual capital, enhancing the firm’s ability to anticipate and meet client needs, improving the firm’s recruitment and retention arsenal, and more besides. Firms that get KM right, like Morrison & Foerster, have every reason to boast about their success.

But the obstacles to successfully implementing a KM program in law firms are equally well-known. They include:

• Hoarding: lawyers who believe their livelihoods depend on the knowledge tucked away in their files, both print and neural, are

The colour of this post changed given yesterday’s introduction of Bill 61 but I had completed some research on this prior to yesterday and I would be willing to wager that I put more thought into this post than the BGH’s ((Big
Giant Heads)) put into Bill C-61 so I’m going go ahead anyhow.

In May, the Canadian Association of Police Boards released a report which stated that Cybercrime is a close second to Drug Trafficking as the #1 crime committed in Canada. A Report on CyberCrime in Canada. I don’t want to get bogged down in the report but . . . [more]

Sometimes, though perhaps not on Friday, you want to be elsewhere — or elsehow. Come to think of it, wandering and mood-altering were probably among the very first things that people took up way back at the beginning. (A moment of respectful silence for travel and legal drugs.) Now the internet wants to help you escape the moment and the momentary you. There are lots of ways it can do this, and I’m sure you’ve probably discovered most of them. A late entry in the field is Moodstream, by Getty Images, the folks who make available some 70,000,000 still . . . [more]

The BBC is reporting that late Thursday night a convoy of lawyers left the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore to converge on the capital Islamabad to demand the reinstatement of judges who were removed last November. The government is undecided as to how to reinstate the judges, or even if they should. The lawyers are planning a peaceful sit-in after their 270 km motorized trip through various towns along the way to Islamabad.

According to the BBC report:

Organisers said the struggle of the lawyers had now reached a “decisive phase”. The lawyers have been joined by some civil

Today’s The Daily from Statistics Canada reveals new 2007 data from the Canadian Internet Use Survey. Interesting findings include:

• Digital divides in Internet use persist, specifically on the basis of income, education and age.
• High-speed connections are becoming far more popular.
• More Canadians are participating in blogging, chatting and downloading.
• Internet use rates are highest in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario.

This was the first time the survey included Canadians aged 16 and 17. . . . [more]

It has now been posted on the Canadian Parliament website:

Bill C-61 – First Reading

Hat tip to John Sadler, Chair of the Copyright Committee of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries / Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit who shared the link via the CALL listserv. . . . [more]

Minister Jim Prentice is about to table the government’s new copyright law, Bill 61. Although the text is not available at this time — 12.11 p.m. — it should be online shortly, once Parliament deals with a few other matters.

The press ban is lifted, however, and you can read what the Globe and Mail and the CBC have to say about the proposed legislation.

If someone could post the link to the bill as a comment to this post, that would be great. . . . [more]

From cbcnews.ca (June 12, 2008):

The federal government has introduced legislation to make it easier to prosecute people who download copyrighted material from the internet.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice tabled amendments to the Copyright Law in the House of Commons Thursday. Individuals caught downloading copyrighted files would be fined $500 under the proposed amendments. The current copyright law — intended to catch commercial cheaters — carries a maximum fine of $20,000 for infringements.

The bill has been in limbo since the Conservatives first put it on the Commons order paper in December. Prentice was caught between business interests who wanted