In 2011 the Education Advisory Board released a report, Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services, which looked at trends in academic libraries and the direction in which they were going. Although I work in a private law library while the report deals with academic libraries, I found the report very interesting; a number of challenges that it identifies are also faced by private law libraries.

The usual suspects are here: rising journal costs, the challenge of being a library in the age of Google and Amazon, and trying to do more with less. The . . . [more]

Relationships and a strong word of mouth reputation are how lawyers get their work. Always has been. Always will be.

Ask the best lawyers in your firm. Ask the lawyers in your community who have the best business. Ask the managing partners leading successful law firms. Ask the chief marketing officers of major firms.

All of them will tell you that a lawyer’s best work comes from relationships and a strong word of mouth reputation. All of them will tell also tell you that relationships and a strong word of mouth reputation are the result of networking.

The Internet doesn’t . . . [more]

Sponsorships. They’re one of the many ways to get your name in front of a special interest group and they are often ripe with possibilities and over-flowing with potential. Some of you, though, merely send off your cheque along with your logo and forget to investigate, request and reap additional opportunities for your firm.

Every part of your marketing spend should punch above its weight and with sponsorships — unlike many other marketing expenses — it often only requires a bit of thought, planning and perhaps a healthy dose of chutzpah to get more for your buck.

With some large . . . [more]

Everyone is playing Words With Friends on their smartphones these days.

When even my 11-year old son and my 16-year-old daughter (and my no-way-will-I-reveal-her-age wife) became addicted, I thought it time to look into the phenomenon – that, and the fact that my son whispered to his Scrabble-loving father that he needed help in a game against his mom.

Let me lay out a fact pattern:

1. Words With Friends is similar to Scrabble – seven tiles at a time, points assigned to letters in inverse relation to their frequency in English words, a board with double- and triple-letter and double-

. . . [more]

 

No one lives in cyberspace, they say. A lot of people spend a lot of time visiting, though. They leave a lot of traces there, and they interact with the non-cyberspace (some prefer the term ‘real’) world from there. The border is more porous than most national borders, these days.

What happens when people with a presence in cyberspace (really) die? Does the presence continue indefinitely, but unrefreshed? What do their survivors do about their activities in cyberspace? How do they deal with online assets, or even discover real-world assets that may be locatable only online? How do estate . . . [more]

 Matt Ridley wrote a book titled The Rational Optimist that was published in 2010.

Ridley is an English journalist with an education in science. In his book he is concerned with the origins of the prosperity that exists in the world, arguing that the road to prosperity began with exchanges that resulted in a benefit to both parties, including barter, a method of exchange that can be done without money. In many exchanges both parties may feel that the other is overpaying. Over time increases in exchanges resulted in specialization followed by innovation. Ridley states that the ever-increasing exchange of . . . [more]

Artists are cutting, burning, and hanging books to create “shaped prose”, landscapes, and faces. University of Iowa professor, Garrett Stewart, sees these book sculptures as symbols of “renewable intellectual energy.” The resulting art is pretty incredible, albeit bittersweet,and sometimes strangely beautiful (such as the Edinburgh paper sculptures). This “book tree” from a gallery in the Netherlands is a good example:

Give Law Books to Art

Law libraries in the Netherlands have also gotten into the act. Here is a sculpture created out of law books that have been written in, torn, or defaced in some way. Now, they . . . [more]

A senior commercial litigator who had just completed five days of civil mediation training in BC commented: “That didn’t look at all like what I have experienced in mediation!”

With a little probing, he expanded on the disconnect that he experienced as follows:

Attribute Training Model Commercial Mediation Model Mediator selection Process expertise Subject matter expertise Pre-mediation preparation Detailed separate meetings between mediator and each party and counsel, if any, to discuss underlying interests, goals Little or no interaction with the mediator prior to mediation. Possibly some exchange of mediation briefs (similar to court submissions) Mediation Emphasis on joint meetings . . . [more]

One thing has become clear in the last few months: Hollywood has declared war on the Internet. Rupert Murdoch and his colleagues, not content with grossing billions of dollars on their blockbuster movies have decided to spent some of those billions to lobby congress to try and get legislation passed that would give them the ability to more quickly (and with minimal due process) shut down file sharing sites that they think are hosting pirated content. Of course, Mr. Murdoch has demonstrated that he has a fairly fuzzy understanding of how links and such work so if it’s up to . . . [more]

The 2012 Conference in Toronto will mark the 50th annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries and provide an occasion to highlight many of the accomplishments of the association and its members over the decades since its creation. One of many accomplishment worthy of note is the Index to Canadian Legal Literature for which CALL provided both the inspiration and the support required to create a Canadian publication that met international indexing standards.

The Proposal for a New Index

In December 1983, The Canadian Law Information Council and The Canadian Association of Law Libraries developed a proposal to . . . [more]

[ français / English ]

Comme vous le savez peut-être, Éducaloi est un site d’information juridique grand public qui explique le droit en vigueur dans la province du Québec au Canada. Cette phrase peut sembler anodine, mais chacun de ces mots compte. Dans cette chronique, je vous expose un problème lié à cette première affirmation, auquel nous avons récemment fait face.

La partie « site d’information juridique grand public », vous comprenez. Nous informons le public sur leurs droits et leurs obligations, et ce, dans un langage simple et accessible. Là où ça se corse, c’est dans la seconde partie . . . [more]

A few weeks ago, Connie Crosby wrote about the challenge for law librarians in earning a law degree, especially if they’re already working in a law library and don’t want to attend law school full time. Around the same time, John Papadopoulos wrote about how the Legal Literature and Librarianship class at the University of Toronto’s Information School is always oversubscribed. It appears there is an opportunity here to fill.

After many years of planning, last June, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit presented a week long program called the New Law Librarians’ Institute. . . . [more]