Ontario lawyers might be familiar with the Law Society of Upper Canada’s AccessCLE service, which is a database that provides electronic PDF access to papers and materials from LSUC events since 2004. Previously this service was pay-for-view.

However, the Law Society just announced that articles older than 18 months are now free of charge! Articles newer than the 18 month time frame will still be available on a pay-per-view basis, at costs ranging from $25.00 to $35.00 per article. Lawyers outside Ontario can access all these articles as well.

AccessCLE allows you to conduct a full text search, preview the . . . [more]

On Thursday night the OBA Civil Litigation and Insurance sections held their end of term dinner.

The keynote speaker was Alan Lenczner. I have heard many speeches about how to fix the broken civil justice system, but this was different because of its focus on how the judiciary can assist in the fix.

Lenczner’s message was that sophisticated litigants are leaving the civil justice system in droves, opting for private arbitration. The result is a shrinking body of decided cases. To get these litigants back into the civil justice system, we have to get rid of the inefficiencies.

One of . . . [more]

Actually, the big news, of course, is that the U.S. Library of Congress has integrated its web archives into its main web search function. For quite some time now, LOC has been archiving significant websites, of which Slaw is one. At the moment there are 940 such sites being archived. Though archiving began in 2008, the archives of Slaw contain some posts reaching back to its inception in 2005 but extend only up to 2010, because the archiving process lags by a few years. (As a digital archivist at LOC explained to me by email, “We do have an . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from forty-one recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Doorey’s Law of Work  2. Official Clio Blog  3. Precedent: The New Rules of Law and Style  4. Thoughtful Legal Management  5. Clicklaw Blog

Doorey’s Law of Work
Unpaid Intern Scams Continue to Flourish in Ontario. What Can be Done?
Almost every ‘unpaid internship’ that is not affiliated with . . . [more]

There are a number of articles about how libraries can be part of law firm-wide Knowledge Management projects and initiatives. Ted Tjaden has written a particularly good article on the subject: “The Evolution of Law-Related Knowledge Management in North America – Opportunities for Law Librarians”. However there is very little literature out there on how law libraries can use knowledge management processes within the library.

Private law libraries tend to be small, so they may not feel the need to have a formal KM program. That said, most law libraries are already practicing some sort of informal KM, . . . [more]

♫ Innovate and stimulate minds
Travel the world and penetrate the times
Innovate and stimulate minds
For now I appreciate this moment in time…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Hard Driver.

The 2013 edition of The Pacific Legal Technology Conference, Canada’s first and foremost conference on all aspects of legal technology, will feature two major new developments this year!

First: This year’s conference will be webcast….all three concurrent tracks in the morning and in the afternoon…making this conference fully available across Canada and the web (all except for the lunchtime presentations -we are still seeing if we can make . . . [more]

Like most Canadians I have been watching the news of flooding in Alberta. The images of downtown Calgary and other communities under water have been shocking. Our thoughts go out to colleagues, friends and family affected by the floods–we wish you a safe return to home and work.

Here are a few key websites with more information:

• Donations to the Alberta Floods support – Canadian Red Cross
• Flooding information (emergency information, advisories, community updates, disaster recovery) – Government of Alberta
• How you can help – (donations and volunteering) – Government of Alberta
• Court-related closures – (emergency information) – Alberta

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Public housing termination / Mens rea / Mistake of fact:

New Brunswick Housing Corp., Re 2013 NBQB 150
Government Programs – Housing – Rental accommodation – Termination, forfeiture and reentry
On November 22, 2012, the New Brunswick Housing Corp. (NB Housing) received Community Safety Warnings from an employee of the New Brunswick Department of . . . [more]

If I were to start to discuss politicians and expense scandals your mind would likely turn to events in Ottawa; however, here in Nova Scotia, we have been there, done that and so have that T-Shirt. The popular topic earlier this week was whether or not the legislature was going to be recalled in order to expel a sitting MLA. In the end that did not happen, but if it had, it would not have been the first time in Nova Scotia.

Twenty-six years ago in 1986, An Act Respecting Reasonable Limits for Membership in the House of Assembly, . . . [more]

Today’s the summer solstice. So what do you do when the sun just won’t quit shining? You go outside, of course. And what do you find outside in the summer? Bugs, that’s what, mini-critters that creep, crawl, buzz, bite, flit and fly. Now, few of us have the . . . wisdom? . . . to appreciate these minuscule machines in the flesh; but cartoon a hopper or a spinner, and we like them just fine.

Sometimes more than just fine. A French company, Futurikon, has for some time now been making charming stop-motion, short, animated films under the . . . [more]

Recently, there has been a renewed discussion about Patent Assertion Entities, also known as non-practicing entitles (NPEs), or colloquially, patent trolls. In early June, President Obama announced new initiatives to combat what he called, Patent Assertion Entities, which “don’t actually produce anything themselves,” and instead develop a business model “to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”

The U.S. president made a number of recommendations to congress for legislative changes and announced executive actions to address these Patent Assertion Entities. The recommendations included legislative changes to permit judges to . . . [more]

Earlier this month, a controversy erupted over a proposed deal between Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Canadiana.org, a not-for-profit partnership of major research libraries in Canada, to digitize the LAC’s vast collections of print and photographic material and make it available to the public via a new online portal.

The so-called Héritage Project, a 10-year initiative, involves the digitization of approximately 60 million pages of primary-source documents from the 1600s to the mid-1900s and will include making digital copies of such material as: immigration records, church records, land records, family histories and papers, voters’ lists; documents relating to . . . [more]