Montreal is currently playing host to the Canadian Association of Law Libraries’ 2013 conference, completing our celebrations of the 50th anniversary year of CALL/ACBD. Information and research professionals from across the country are connecting, sharing and learning in an intense 3 1/2 days.

Awards were handed out during today’s luncheon and–among other deserving winners–we applauded the University of British Columbia Press. They have won the prestigious Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing for their Canadian Yearbook of International Law–itself marking a milestone with the 50th annual volume about to be published.

Michel-Adrien Sheppard has . . . [more]

Today and tomorrow I am at the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (CCCA) 2013 National Spring Conference in Toronto. This morning the CCCA announced they are partnering with the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto to launch a new certification program for Canadian in-house counsel, Business Leadership Program for In-house Counsel. The announcement was made by CCCA Chair Grant Borbridge, Q.C., of Calgary, and Roger Martin, Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

The focus of the program is not substantive law, but rather helping lawyers make the leap from firm-focussed practice of law . . . [more]

In an effort to better understand sole and small-firm involvement in providing pro-bono legal services, the Ontario Bar Association is conducting a very short survey. Completing the survey should take no longer than two or three minutes and the information will be used in assisting the OBA’s Pro-Bono Task Force to determine what role the OB Amight play in the provision and delivery of such services.

Click here to take the survey. . . . [more]

I love this time of year: many companies traditionally announce some of their more “out of the box” improvements right at the end of the first quarter or beginning of the second quarter. Here are just a few I noticed in my mailbox; you will see Google is the real leader in 2nd quarter upgrades:

Google Fiber to the Pole

Making the Internet more accessible when you are on the road. . . . [more]

Google giveth and Google taketh away. The most recent taking was, of course, the wildly popular Google Reader. And the new gift today is Google Keep, a kind of reprise of the older (and discontinued) Google Notebook.

Keep was announced today on the Official Blog. If you’ve got an Android device you can give it a whirl — let us know what you think. The rest of us will have to wait until Google fulfils its promise to make it accessible via Google Drive.

The woods are full of notetaking apps, the most prominent perhaps being Evernote. It’s going . . . [more]

We’re proud to announce that Sandra Petersson is joining Slaw as a regular blogger.

Sandra is research manager at the Alberta Law Reform Institute, a writer and a former Supreme Court of Canada clerk. She travelled to New Zealand as a Commonwealth Scholar to earn a Masters Degree in legislative drafting and gender equality, and stayed on in New Zealand as a senior lecturer in law at Victoria University of Wellington, teaching courses in legal theory, legislation and torts.

Please welcome Sandra to Slaw. . . . [more]

First Peoples Law, a BC law firm that’s just over a year old now, has launched a new blog that essentially forms the main page of their website.

According to the firm’s principal, Bruce McIvor, they’re aiming to inform First Nations readers directly, and not just other lawyers. Bruce is unusual, perhaps, among lawyers in that he has a doctorate in history, something particularly useful in his chosen field, where so much depends on understanding how to approach the past.

It’s a well designed site, and if they can continue to post with some regularity — the big difficulty . . . [more]

The Brits have launched a new quarterly magazine, “Legal IT Today.” From the editor, Joanna Goodman:

Our community is everyone interested and involved in legal IT: CIOs, IT managers and decision makers, vendors who develop IT products and services for the legal sector, strategic and technical consultants, educators, authors, speakers and bloggers and of course the end users – lawyers, managers and business support professionals in law firms and other legal services providers. We will feature contributions from across these groups in every issue as well as collaborating with relevant publications worldwide.

Here’s the table of contents for . . . [more]

All Evernote users should immediately change their passwords.

The following text appeared in a post on the Evernote blog this morning (March 2, 1013) and is also being sent to all Evernote users as an email communication:

Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service.

As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset. Please read below for details and instructions.

In our security investigation, we have found no evidence that . . . [more]

The Canadian Legal Information Institute, CanLII, has just announced that it will be introducing an API (application programming interface) in mid-March. This will allow developers and others to obtain direct access to the CanLII database in order to use the resulting data within their applications or web pages.

This is very good news indeed — and a very smart move by CanLII. If you’re in the “business” of giving data away, as CanLII is, you want to make the transfer as easy and enticing as possible. As the announcement says:

We hope law schools, legal information and legal aid resources,

I’m delighted to announce that Karen Dyck has joined Slaw as a regular blogger. Karen is a freelance lawyer based in Manitoba with a keen interest in enhancing access to justice and equality. For the first five years after her call, she carried on a litigation practice in small firms focusing on family law. She has since drawn upon her legal background to work with a number of governmental and non-governmental organizations in a wide range of roles, from investigations and research to program development and writing to management and administration.

Karen tweets as @karendyck and can be found on . . . [more]

Statistics Canada launched a blog today called—what else?—StatCan Blog (Blogue de StatCan, en français). As the first post explains,

Like most endeavours at the agency, the blog’s topics will have a certain statistical gravitas: the Framework for Environment Statistics, the System of National Accounts, the Consumer Price Index Enhancement Initiative, the Survey of Financial Security, as well as some broader topics, such as the use of microdata or the new model for publishing data online.

The Chief Statistician believes in the importance of linking these sometimes arcane-sounding initiatives to people’s own backyards.

This is tangential to law, . . . [more]