Twitter is a major source for breaking international legal news. It is often the first place where you can find links to recent court cases, new legislation, and international documents. Many blogs have Twitterfeeds so you’re immediately alerted to new posts. Twitter can inform you about legal developments worldwide and upcoming conferences. You can use Twitter to find out about new books, and new law library acquisitions. You can also track news from foreign sources and in foreign languages. Twitter is not only a great source for law, library, and technology news, it also gives you a way to network . . . [more]

One of the most common mistakes that law firms make when they upgrade technology is that they don’t do their homework or pay the smartest kid in class to do it for them. We saw in one of my previous columns that it’s critical to understand the problem you’re solving, and it’s just as critical to make sure you understand how the technology you’re moving to is going to solve that problem.

The Map is Not the Territory

Part of the problem firms have in evaluating how well a particular bit of technology is going to solve their problem is . . . [more]

I recently migrated to Sydney, Australia with my Australian-born wife and our three children. Australia’s remote location seems to allow a freedom to experiment without the pressure to conform to U.S. or European norms that one experiences in a country like Canada. Or perhaps Australia is simply, as a friend calls it, a “nation of iconoclasts”. In any event, I have observed over the years that regulatory change related to the legal profession in the common law world begins in Australia and then moves around the globe, first to the UK, and finally to North America. As a newly . . . [more]

I believe that a book without an index is not as useful as a book with a good index. 

A case headnote can provide a complete index to a judicial decision.

Headnotes are at risk because the full text of legal decisions without headnotes are now available free on the Internet from multiple sources. This free access has resulted in a dramatic reduction of print subscriptions to law reports.

Is there a need for headnotes? Headnotes tend to save time for a searcher by providing an index to a decision and by providing index material for digests. When a judicial . . . [more]

As social media tools become easier and simpler to use, more of their value seems to be draining away. The last few years have seen an unmistakable trend towards social media tools and habits that push the absolute minimum of effort and commitment, with the result that the promise of social media — better communication, broader networks, stronger personal connections — is in danger of falling by the wayside.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

The new ReTweet (RTs): Time was, if you saw a tweet you liked, you copied-and-pasted it into your own screen, prefixed with an . . . [more]

Recently a male partner said to me that while practicing law in a firm has always been more challenging for women, he believes that today it is almost impossible. This bold statement surprised me – not because I am unaware of the many challenges that women lawyers face but because I look at how far we have come over the past 30 years and cling to the hopeful belief that progress is being made.

When I remember how challenging it was for women to obtain articles or be kept on as associates with the assumption that women would leave as . . . [more]

Over the last five years, electronic resources have become an increasingly more important part of the services provided by law libraries. Administering electronic database subscriptions can be a time-consuming process; managing an electronic subscription includes, but is not limited to, evaluating the resource, negotiating a contract, training users, dealing with passwords, and billing back costs (if necessary). This column discusses a specific aspect of managing database subscriptions: the advantages and disadvantages of using individual user IDs rather than organization-wide passwords.

One problem with the growing number of online database subscriptions is the associated increase in the number of passwords that . . . [more]

In this electronic age, many governments are trying to increase their capacity to use information and communication technology, and many citizens expect to deal with their governments electronically. It is natural that attention has turned to using these technologies for voting.

In the United States, in the wake of the problems with old-fashioned voting systems in the 2000 presidential election, many people have been tempted to push voting into the computer age. Congress voted large sums to help states do just this.

However, in its year-end review of 2003, Fortune magazine called electronic voting the “worst technology of the year”. . . . [more]

“When it comes to customer service,” James Surowiecki noted in an insightful New Yorker column last month, “it seems people are unhappy no matter what side of the counter they’re on.” Surowiecki’s article describes how the only ones more miserable than those who provide front-line customer service these days are those who receive it: neither the buyer nor the seller values or enjoys the post-transaction relationship. 

The reason is pretty simple: during the recession (and, Surowiecki points out, even more so during the boom that preceded it), companies slashed customer service because it was little more than a cost center . . . [more]

Whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah or another cause for celebration that triggers you to pause, over-eat, connect with loved ones, the winter holiday is a blessing. It also reminds us to stop and appreciate our clients, especially if we haven’t done so during the year. 

A few years back I was working on a project and my law firm client retained a well-known Vancouver design firm. On the eve of Thanksgiving, all of us on the project received pumpkin pies with a note of appreciation attached. Simple and sweet. It was their strategy to offer a memorable token of appreciation during . . . [more]

Having been a supporter of open access to research and scholarship for a dozen years now, I sometimes think that I have seen it all, from brilliant strategies to collegial indifference. Thus my surprise and delight, when I recently had the chance to meet Goldis Chami and Gordana Panic at the University of British Columbia to talk about their efforts, as students, to bring about open access to the work published by faculty and graduate students at UBC. Goldis, a second-year medical student, and Gordana, a recent graduate in Biology and Psychology, explained to me that they were determined to . . . [more]

Access to justice is a hot topic, having been discussed on Slaw in the past few months here and here. Here in Winnipeg, the catalyst was the release of the 2008 United Nations Report, Making the Law Work for Everyone. Our response to this report is the Legal Help Centre.

Executive Director Karen Dyck envisions the Legal Help Centre as a place “… to assist disadvantaged members of our community to access and exercise their legal and social rights.” This agency will help people determine their next course of action in solving a problem, which may not even . . . [more]