The excellent Stéphane Cottin has launched a collaborative bibliography on researching French legal information, using Zotero as the collaborative tool. The project is described in an associated website (in French); and the bibliography can be found at the Zotero Groups site Recherche doc juridique. At present there are over 300 entries in the bibliography/library.

Stéphane was until recently Chef de service du Greffe-Informatique et de service Bibliothèque – Documentation at the Conseil constitutionnel, France’s high constitutional council whose principal duty is to rule on the constitutionality of proposed legislation. He is currently working in the Prime Minister’s office, . . . [more]

Every now and then you may wish to use a feature in your browser to check out which of the sites you visit have set cookies on you machine — those tiny morsels of text that get sent back and forth between your browser and the machine serving up web pages so that your site-specific preferences are known and respected. They are by and large benign, but, given that they track some of your progress through the web, they can be used to inform advertisers of your interests. And, because cookies can carry personal information, they represent a privacy risk, . . . [more]

Slate has an excellent article up on the opening of micro-blogging standards. The piece is titled To Live, Twitter Must Die, but the content isn’t nearly so sensational.

I really like the message here. There are dangers anytime we put too much faith in a single company, and expect them to police the balance between their own business interests surrounding a proprietary technology, and the greater access to that web technology. Especially when we grow to depend on it. This article references Twitter’s dominance with micro-blogging, but it could have easily been Google’s relationship to internet search.

I also . . . [more]

The August 2009 issue of Law Practice Today, the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s webzine was just published.

Read the Law Practice Today “Wellness and Balance” issue here.

All sort of great articles on how you can find balance and wellness in our very busy world, including:

• Achieving Life/Work Balance Through Effective Time Management by Kathleen Brady
• How to Take a Vacation from Your Law Practice by Sheila M. Blackford
• A Lawyer’s Tale: Recovering from Depression by Keith Anderson
• Job Satisfaction: Little Things Lawyers Can Do to Make a Big Difference by Dan Millman
• Putting Up With Nothing—How To Do

One of the most important figures in popular music died this week, and I’m going to join the crowd eulogizing him. I’m talking about Lester Polsfuss, orse. Polfuss, a.k.a. Red Hot Red, Rhubarb Red — and Les Paul.

Les Paul, along with Leo Fender and Adolph Rickenbacher, was one of the inventors of the solid body electric guitar — that’s a recent version of Gibson’s Les Paul Standard model you see to your left — the idea being that hollow body electric guitars could be played only so loud because of feedback from the body’s resonance. And though he . . . [more]

One doesn’t normally expect a Blog quite as focused as the Huffington Post to spend much time on the legal publishing industry but Peter Schwartz’s post on the Reinvention of Legal Research is worth a bit of attention.

A couple of extracts:

When online legal research platforms were proprietary, online publishers imposed per-minute and per-use pricing structures. This pricing model facilitated client cost-recovery and allowed publishers to use law firms as information wholesalers. Because information is now a commodity, law firm clients will no longer pay for online legal research. New flat-rate pricing models for online research products reflect this

I’ve pushed a few of CanLII’s RSS feeds to Twitter, thinking that some folks might find it handy to learn when new judgments are available. Specifically, I’ve created Twitter accounts for announcements about new Court of Appeal judgments from British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. I’ll likely add accounts for other courts of appeal in due course. (I’ve checked with CanLII and they’re comfortable with this.)

I’ve gathered these under the rubric CanCourts and have put up a simple website explaining what I’ve done.

Please let me know if you experience any difficulties using these Twitter feeds. . . . [more]

Another year of interview insanity has come to an end and my firm, Adler Bytensky Prutschi, has happily matched with an outstanding candidate who we have very high hopes for in the 2010-2011 articling year. While this fact on its own is likely of little interest to Slaw readers, the technophile lawyers who follow this blog on a regular basis may be intrigued to hear how twitter – for the first time in our firm’s history – became unwittingly a very central part of our interview process.

Having started a legal twitter feed some months ago (www.twitter.com/prutschi), I . . . [more]

I like to look for patterns. Not for handicrafts like one of my knitting pals, but rather patterns in data.

I recently had the ~opportunity~ to look for patterns in lobbyist registrations. Unfortunately for me, there are almost as many registries as jurisdictions. The Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada is the federal government registry. It has an excellent database with great search functionality and many options for accessing this information:

* Recent Registrations
* Search the Registry of Lobbyists
* Search Monthly Communications Reports
* Statistical Reports
* Multimedia Tutorials
* Login
* Guides to registration . . . [more]

The Legal Resource Centre (LRC) recently launched a new blog: Blogosaurus Lex.

The LRC is the publisher of the magazine LawNow and of the legal information website Access to Justice Network.

It was registered as a charity in the late 1970s and its mandate is “to contribute to, advance and promote the legal knowledge and education of the people of Canada.” It is based in Edmonton, Alberta.

According to the initial post on June 22, 2009, the blog will feature:

• new happenings at the Legal Resource Centre (LRC)
• community engagement with other public legal educators and sharing

A while back I wondered about how “elderly tweets” would fare in discovery in an action. I was concerned that it might be difficult to exact the intended meaning from the brief blurt of yesterday. This concern was premised on the fact that no one (at least no one I know) deletes tweets, and so they stay lodged on Twitter’s server.

A recent article on ReadWriteWeb, “10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets,” by Sarah Perez, refers to the Twitter API Wiki’s Things Every Developer Should Know, where we learn that, indeed, “Twitter still maintains a database of . . . [more]

There has been lots of controversy over privacy issues relating to various services offered by Google and many others. Those issues are often not easy to come to grips with because they are in the context of previously unknown territory. Speaking of unknown territory, The Onion has a parody news report entitled “New Google Service Lets Privacy Critics Opt-Out, Relocate to Remote Village“. . . . [more]