The UK has faced a barrage of information-related news recently, from how it is obtained, to how it is restricted, and how it affects individual rights of privacy and freedom of expression. When you come from a country such as Australia, with robust defamation laws, the intense media coverage by the British tabloid press of anyone in the public eye can be quite a shock. It is the scurrilous nature of much this information, the level of detail revealed, and the distortion of facts in salacious headlines that still surprises me, despite living here for more than seven years.

Recently . . . [more]

Maritime Law Book has been re-designing its website. As of the date of writing, I hadn’t seen an announcement. It was just something I happened to notice on May 3, 2011.

The change I’m going to talk about isn’t the most obvious one to a casual observer, but it is a very welcome one. The change I particularly want to notice is that people can now create links like this one to cases reported by Maritime Law Book:

http://search.mlb.nb.ca/?IW_BATCHSIZE=20&IW_SORT=-11&IW_DATABASE=OAC&IW_FIELD_TEXT=271+O.A.C.+135+\\+MLB

The best way to cite a case is to provide a hyperlink. Because of that, the people who report cases on . . . [more]

The Law via the Internet 2011 International Conference will be held at the University of Hong Kong on June 9 and 10. This will be the eleventh international gathering of promoters of free access and innovation in legal publishing.

This year’s meeting will give a new opportunity to assess if Free Access to Law is here to stay? The published program seems to reveal expansion. No one can say for sure about the long term sustainability of free access, but after 20 years the number of countries where the approach is used continues to increase. The growth is especially important . . . [more]

Regular readers of my SLAW column will know that, while I’m an ardent supporter of initiatives that enhance the efficiency of our criminal justice system, I am also a regular critic of how that same system deals with the deluge of domestic-related charges that clog our courts on a daily basis. For these very reasons, a promising new pilot project has recently caught my attention.

The Integrated Domestic Violence Court (IDV) has ambitious plans to combine cases from two of Toronto’s busiest courthouses: the criminal courts of The Old City Hall and the family courts housed at 311 Jarvis Street. . . . [more]

[This is the fifth in a series of columns about the trends, theories, principles and realities that have influenced the redesign of the new library of Osgoode Hall Law School – part of the renovation and rebuilding of the School currently underway.]

The topic of this column was suggested to me when I read Karen Sawatzky’s interesting column on “Future Ready Libraries”. In her column, Karen refers to The ARL 2030 Scenarios (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, October 2010), which imagines four possible futures for our research libraries. I find such exercises interesting and a good catalyst . . . [more]

Several weeks ago I spoke at the Sinch Online Legal Services Conference in Sydney. My topic was the state of play in legal innovation and I covered what I thought were the most significant events of the past year (and of the near future). This column addresses some of those events. Special thanks goes to Jordan Furlong and Stephanie Kimbro for their input and, as always, to Simon Lewis for organizing the conference.

Disruptive Business Models

In November, 2010, Thomson Reuters acquired legal process outsourcing company Pangea3 and at the same time put bar examination preparation course provider BAR-BRI up . . . [more]

“How do we know if our website is delivering value?” More law firm partners are asking this question these days, especially when the website commands a noticeable chunk of the IT or marketing budgets (or both). However, unlike many IT projects (usually marked as depreciating capital assets) or marketing efforts (often difficult to link to new business), law firm websites can be measured in a variety of ways, with each metric weighted differently depending on the view of the lawyer or firm involved. Consider some of the following methods:

1. Website traffic. It’s hard to argue with the ongoing count . . . [more]

With the globalization of world markets, competition is consequently rampant. The emergence of the new global village means that nations around the world are looking for ways to be more competitive and more open to foreign investments. It creates a denationalisation of economic conflicts. Alternative dispute resolution and supranational organizations became the two legal solutions to the new economic needs. Nations began coupling the two and many trade treaties have been signed. The most well-known system is the European Union, which promotes a unified continent. As in Europa, several African countries, most of them being former French colonies, joined forces . . . [more]

Law firm technology is experiencing pressure brought about by the success of consumer-oriented products. As the wave of iPad-toting lawyers begins to wash into the larger law firms, we’re seeing the logical result of the first law students arriving with their personal laptops at schools at the turn of the century. Some law schools initially identified a specific hardware for the students to purchase but that eventually gave way to the creation of systems that could be adapted to whatever technology the students presented.

Now law firms are beginning to adapt to these same consumerization challenges. They are not new . . . [more]

I’ve been staring at the horizon again. It’s not hard to see that change to our legal system is on the way. Everywhere we turn we encounter reports of things broken or in disarray. 

For instance, access to justice is a pressing concern. Chief Justice McLachlin speaks about it frequently, as does British Columbia’s Chief Justice Finch (see here). They do important work identifying that access to justice has become a privilege of the wealthy. They applaud the pro bono work of the legal profession, and encourage us to work towards innovative solutions.

Meanwhile, legal aid coverage is shown . . . [more]

Users sometimes want to find law journal articles on a particular subject. Other users know the title of the article they need, but they don’t know what law journal published the article. And sometimes users want to find all the articles an author has published, when the author has published articles in many journals and even in a variety of languages. They can consult standard journal indexes, but other, nontraditional indexes such as the OPACs and databases described below can be useful for more comprehensive and/or up-to-date searches.

The Peace Palace Library at the Hague, the Netherlands, has made its . . . [more]

“Trainwreck!”

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are four bars – about eight seconds – into a song during a concert when The Boss yells out, “Trainwreck!”

It’s a song they haven’t played often, perhaps never even played at all. (They do that at times.) They’re close, but something’s off. It’s obvious to Springsteen and probably to the other band members as well – and he wants to fix it before it becomes obvious to the audience.

So he yells out “Trainwreck!” You can hear the smile in his voice; if he weren’t playing in front of 20,000 people, . . . [more]