Canada’s online legal magazine.

Archive for January, 2009

Advance Notice: Participatory LCO Law Reform Symposium

I want to take the opportunity to let Slawyers know about a law reform symposium that the LCO is organizing for this coming May 12th and 13th, in collaboration with Lorne Sossin, the Director of the Centre for the Legal Profession at the University of Toronto. It will be held at U of T. The Symposium will explore the interrelationship between theory and practice in law reform and will include people with strong opinions about what law reform should mean and activists who have played a major role in reforming law, and will be based on an attendee participation format. . . . [more]

Posted in: Substantive Law

CanLII User Meeting in Toronto – Feb. 11/09

Just posted to the CanLII blog:

CanLII invites you to a user meeting in Toronto

CanLII is pleased to invite you to a user meeting in Toronto on February 11 2009. On the agenda:

  • demo of SATAL – the point-in-time legislative system soon to be launched on CanLII;
  • creation of a CanLII users group;
  • demo of APIs developed to streamline use of CanLII content by institutional users.

The presentation will be followed by a cocktail. They ask you inform them if you plan to be present.

For more info, check their blog post for time, location and RSVP contact . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Legal Information: Publishing, Substantive Law: Legislation, Technology

Good Comparative Guide to LLM Programs

I hadn’t seen before today the Master of Laws Guide which assembles in a single site comparative information for foreign graduate students contemplating the choice of schools where to study.

Back in the last century, when I had to face the same question, one was reduced to talking to law school teachers and colleagues about what they knew of a particular school. The amount of sheer misinformation that this generated was extraordinary. A law school’s reputation (for good or ill) lingers long after any facts may have changed.

My own advice (when asked by students) is to pick people not . . . [more]

Posted in: Education & Training, Education & Training: Law Schools, Legal Information, Technology

Law Students Agree – They Can’t Write

Here’s a link to a survey from the Law School Survey of Student Engagement, as reported in (hat-tip to) Inside Higher Education, Writing Lags in Law Schools.

The discussion on Legal Writing is interesting, and I don’t know of any reason why a Canadian survey would be terribly different . . . [more]

Posted in: Education & Training

LinkedIn Becoming More Powerful for Legal Industry Use

The professional social networking site LinkedIn has slowly been making a number of changes that are making the site increasingly useful. I am still finding my way around, but changes I find of interest:

  • the addition of third party applications that allow me to do things like share my presentation slides (via Slideshare) and to see recently added presentations of others, and to see what my contacts are reading with the Amazon.com application;
  • increased and improved functionality of groups, allowing those in a group to have a discussion;
  • suggestions of people who I might know who are on LinkedIn
. . . [more]
Posted in: Practice of Law, Practice of Law: Marketing, Technology

LexTweet Helps Filter Tweets From a Courtroom Near You

As Simon Fodden pointed out earlier, one of the greatest limitations of Twitter is the amount of unwanted “noise” it produces,

What has to happen for Twitter to become useful and enjoyable for me is the introduction of filters or channels or folders… I need to be able to group them by my own taxonomy and then, depending on what I”m up to, screen out the noise and leave the signal.

A new service by LexBlog might help legal professionals accomplish this.

LexTweet gathers tweets from legal professionals on Twitter, which effectively creates a legal channel. The service has . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Technology

Short Form Google Search

Here’s a third in the series of short posts about Google, appropriately enough about a short form of searching, this time. A Norwegian with the screen name of Mr. Calzone has created a site that makes short work of the otherwise long Google search string: no need to go to his website first, no need to download an app: simply put your search term at the end of the string http://gog.is/ Thus, for example, a search for “slaw” would be http://gog.is/slaw. You can use more than one search term if you separate them with commas or + signs, so avoiding . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Technology: Internet

Slawbiquity

Just for fun I looked at how many pages Google throws up when you feed it “slaw.ca” in the search box. I’m wowed to be able to say the answer is a staggering 350,000 — or, to use Google’s more careful estimation “about” 350,000. Herewith the unaltered digital-image evidence:

Sure, there is a sprinkling of BBQ sites that got in somehow, but basically it’s turtles all the way down. . . . [more]

Posted in: Administration of Slaw

E-Discovery: Can the Clients Afford It?

The traditional rule in common law provinces is that that the producing party is responsible for the immediate costs of the production of its documents to the other party. While British Columbia does expressly address the costs of electronic discovery, in Ontario, Rule 1.03(1) provides that the Rules of Civil Procedure shall be liberally construed to secure “the just, most expeditious and least expensive determination of every civil proceeding on its merits”. The cost of documentary discovery under the present regime may easily overwhelm the amount at issue in the litigation. One legal writer has called this the perfect storm. . . . [more]

Posted in: e-Discovery

Book on Loss of Reputation and Internet Privacy

Here’s a new US title that should be of interest to Slawyers. Its available in print from Yale UP, or online for free.

Daniel Solove, a lawyer and blogger, takes a look at the long term effects of the Internet on personal privacy and the legal ramifications of a loss of reputation. People often struggle with the fine line between privacy and free speech on the Web. You can share personal information about yourself or a friend on a blog, not realizing that it will be there for anyone — including future employers and dates — to see. […] The

. . . [more]
Posted in: Reading, Substantive Law

Slaw RSS Reader Update

Here’s an update about what’s happening on the website for those of you who read Slaw via RSS.

There are some discussion threads you might want to visit, if, like most of our readers you don’t subscribe to comments:

And as always there’s a bunch . . . [more]

Posted in: Slaw RSS Site News