Now in an era in which it is uncommon to find much discussion and newly written commentary on aspects of law publishing, as distinct from artificial intelligence technology, it was a pleasant surprise to encounter New Perspectives on the Legal Treatise. The content of the book was edited by Femi Cadmus, who, at the time, was law librarian and Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Nicholas Mignanelli, Assistant Dean and Director of the Mabee Legal Information Center [sic] and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa College of Law. Its contributions are based . . . [more]

Research libraries are integral to scholarship, scientific discovery and economic innovation. A foundational element of this support is providing access to extensive collections of scholarly content — peer-reviewed journals and monographs, databases, archives and primary source materials — that enable current research methodologies. Of increasing concern is how libraries can fulfill these obligations when access to much of the essential research corpus is through digital access and governed by contracts that often explicitly or implicitly prohibit certain uses, including AI-driven research methodologies.

AI, cloud computing and increased processing power have accelerated the growth of computational research methodologies and scholars from . . . [more]

Take a moment to thank Eric Appleby, founder of Maritime Law Book, because the Canadian legal AI future announced today by Clio is only possible because Eric was sufficiently frustrated by the lack of access to New Brunswick case law in the 1960s that he decided to start a legal publishing company. No Eric, no MLB. No MLB, no Canadian case law in Clio and no next wave of Canadian legal AI.

You know the saying attributed to Nelson Mandela that begins “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago?” Well, the tree now bearing fruit is . . . [more]

I find it at the same time strange and reassuring that, looking primarily at law publishing within the jurisdictions which make up the British Isles, I seem to note the extent to which law book and periodical publishing, linked to electronic delivery and integration with electronic tools, appears to be still thriving, or certainly surviving. It is understandable that the smaller law and related professional and academic publishers are primarily engaged in producing traditional publications, but the surprise is at the top end, notably from Thomson Reuters and Lexis Nexis, which are the main objects of . . . [more]

On March 6th, a prominent group of publishers including the 5 biggest global book publishers (Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster) filed a lawsuit in NY federal court to try and shut down the shadow library “Anna’s Archive”. A decade ago, John Willinsky described scholarly publishing as having its “Napster moment” with the emergence of pirate sites like LibGen and Sci-Hub. The race to train large language models using sites like Anna’s Archive (which is the successor site of Libgen/Sci-Hub) feels like a second act, where these sites are not just channels for . . . [more]

2026 is already shaping up to be another big year for the Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide – Guide canadien de la référence juridique en accès libre. Read on for recent milestones, new instruction materials, requests for feedback, and ways to get involved.

RJAL Launches

RJAL, the French version of COAL, was released in February 2026! It is now possible to use COAL-RJAL to cite legal materials when writing in both English and French, an important step in serving the legal community in both official languages. Read more on CanLII and Slaw.

Celebrating Our Early Adopters

There has been a dramatic shift in our personal lives, schools, and workplaces from buying and owning cultural materials like books, music, movies, and television, to licensing (i.e., subscribing to) these materials. Digital materials should be easier to access and use, however in this new environment activities like copying, sharing, and reusing cultural materials are governed by contracts rather than by the Copyright Act and its users’ rights like fair dealing. Additionally, in the digital age we can no longer separate the object (e.g., a book) from its content (the copyright-protected text) – actions such as lending or reselling a . . . [more]

My perception, supported by a good deal of evidence, is that some people and businesses favour, and indeed boast of those assets and competences which they already have and from which they are trying to profit; they sometimes play down the worth of products, services and content which they do not have and through which they cannot trade for potential profit. Therefore, to take an example, they might trumpet the significance of blogging in legal markets, while referencing, to little or no extent, the infinitely more dynamic sources of added value legal authority, viz. the authoritative . . . [more]

Given the high value placed on research excellence by legal professionals and consultants, I am surprised that stories continue to be reported about the lack of rigour exercised in the creation of work product by these professional groups. In addition to the ongoing stories of professional sanctions placed on lawyers for including incorrect citations and other issues associated with the use of generative AI, there have been regular stories about the high values for government report contracts and the use of AI to create them. Here are some articles on a report prepared by Deloitte for the Province of Newfoundland . . . [more]

Canadians with disabilities are sure to have improved access to copyrighted works with the release of Accessible Content: A Guide to the Canadian Copyright Act on Searching for Accessible Formats and Producing and Distributing Alternate Formats by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA). Written by Victoria Owen, Alexandra Kohn and Laurie Davidson, and released on September 15, 2025, this comprehensive guide marks a significant milestone in Canada’s pursuit of practical, lawful, and equitable access to copyrighted works for people with perceptual disabilities.

The Accessible Content guide provides a clear . . . [more]

Although it is a continuing rather than a new story, I was nevertheless interested to read the recent listing by Publishers Weekly, entitled The World’s Largest Publishers, 2025. For clarity, this is a top 25 of the largest, by revenue, of all publishers in the world and not just those which publish legal information. Nevertheless, first and second on the hierarchy are Thomson Reuters and RELX. The key aspect of the latest report is that after a seven-year run, RELX has been overtaken by Thomson Reuters as the new front-runner in the grouping. In 2024, Thomson Reuters’ revenues . . . [more]

The recent barrage of copyright lawsuits involving AI companies has revealed the staggering scale of copying undertaken to train large language models (LLMs). In the recently decided Bartz v. Anthropic case, for example, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California notes that the AI firm downloaded millions of books in order to “amass a central library of ‘all the books in the world’” that it could use to develop its AI models and services.

As with the Anthropic case, the majority of these high-profile AI copyright lawsuits are being brought forward by authors . . . [more]