Among the many things altered by the Internet is the sense of what it means to make things public. The world is simply a much more public place, in the sense of what is made visible and accessible, whether image or text, whether from your neighbour or an organization on the other side of the globe. For my part, I have been fascinated by and involved in what this means for the research and scholarship that universities produce. One element of this new public quality involves the publishing of data on new scale. The fifteenth-century emergence of the printing . . . [more]

When recruiting new people into legal and professional publishing, while, obviously, scrupulously complying with and respecting the requirements of the law, both in letter and spirit, it has always been of interest to observe the motivation of applicants.

Among those who present themselves with specific academic or professional backgrounds, such as a law degree, an accountancy or tax qualification or who are legally qualified, occasionally one hears that the reason that they have applied is that things haven’t worked out well in the pursuit of some other career path. Perhaps the professional examination results have not been successful. Perhaps family . . . [more]

Recently the Law Society of Upper Canada announced a dramatic change in the admission requirements for law students.

The current 10 month articling requirement remains an option. But for students unable to find an articling position they will be able to qualify for admission by taking an eight month program composed of four months of classroom study plus four months of unpaid “co-op work” at a law firm or sole practitioner – see The Globe and Mail article, November 30, 2012, by Kirk Makin.

From the Law Society Gazette:

On November 22, 2012, Convocation approved a three-year pilot project

The Great Encyclopedias of Legal Research

This is the fourth of a series of posts on the major encyclopedias of legal research in Canada that were prepared following a presentation to a seminar on legal information at the University of Montreal.

THE JURIS CLASSEUR MODEL

Joining the list of Great Encyclopedias of Legal Research in Canada is the new Juris Classeur Quebec, a series of encyclopedias modelled on those in France and Monaco. By way of an explanation to the uninitiated, it can be said that a Juris Classeur encyclopedia serves much the same purpose for a legal practitioner . . . [more]

If you are a publisher and your e-book strategy is called EPUB or any of the likes, you are still stuck in the print era.

E-book formats and reader devices came with the promise to transform the way we consume books. However, those formats did not reinvent the book but they rather reinvented paper. They do not necessarily offer the possibility for a use case that is radically different from the use cases that we know from the world of print. True, it is cool and practical to take many more books than we can actually read while on vacation. . . . [more]

I was sorry to miss the 2012 Law via the Internet conference held earlier this month at Cornell. Happily, many sessions are available for viewing on the conference website. I was particularly interested to watch Clay Shirky’s keynote address.

Shirky is the author of the recent popular titles Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus. At LVI, he questioned why there is so little shared annotation of the law. He reported on a couple of examples that have popped up on social media. For instance, the State Code of Utah has been included on Github, a site for . . . [more]

There have been times, as a legal and professional publisher, when I have mused on a life without troublesome and quirky authors who take holidays, have families and sometimes put their professional work before their writing commitments. I speculated as to how it would be in an entirely automated world in which the nature of the problem was entered into one end of the over-sized computer and out the other emerged the single correct answer, as was seen in films of a bygone era. Expressed in books, perhaps each chapter or topic would end with “the answer, therefore, is . . . [more]

Young Canadian lawyers will have trouble understanding a time when only a few judicial decisions were published and access to decisions was difficult.

In 1965 Maritime Law Book was founded in response to a need, namely, access to judicial decisions.

In 1965 the Maritime Provinces Reports (a Carswell publication) published one volume per year and the volume contained 40 to 50 cases from the four Atlantic provinces. The Dominion Law Reports (a Canada Law Book publication) was very selective and contained very few cases from the Atlantic provinces.

A New Brunswick lawyer might find less than five New Brunswick cases . . . [more]

This year’s Open Access Week (Oct 22-28, 2012) offers much to celebrate, whether with Directory of Open Access Journals, surpassing 8,000 journals or ROARMAP now listing close to 250 open access mandates among universities, departments and institutes. The mega-journals, from Public Library of Science, with PLoS One, the Nature Publishing Group, with Scientific Reports, or the Royal Society, with Open Biology, link open access to the first new principle of digital scholarly communication, namely, that there is room in any given journal for all of its peer-reviewed-and-approved articles, and the world is richer by the appearance . . . [more]

Probably not the rhetorical question that most of you want to hear

In my publication Law Librarians News I do try and source as many legal information related jobs as i can find and note them in the newsletter.

Recruiters don’t pay LLN to do so. Rather I like to keep an informal ongoing record of what jobs are available in the legal information / management / publishing sphere as a way of highlighting the way roles are perceived, advertised and change over time.

August 2012 like any other August of the last decade was dead as the proverbial dodo . . . [more]

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been concerned about, and relatively unforgiving in my dislike of, the idea of law blogs, specifically lawyer-generated blogs, as a bellwether for legal publishing. Some have taken me to task, at least partially, for it. Nevertheless, I’ve remain annoyed by the chorus of social media marketers exalting the virtues of blog content (and social media streams) as a means of differentiating one from the herd. And no one has been more vocal about this than Kevin O’Keefe, the founder of the LexBlog network, which “partners with clients to develop custom social media . . . [more]

I’m always surprised when people or businesses delude themselves into thinking they can be the best at everything, that they can excel at whatever they do and don’t need help from others, even if others are the experts. Perhaps it’s part of the “believe in yourself” culture that focuses exclusively on self rather than on teamwork or, more likely on greed, the idea being that profits can never be shared. More generously, maybe, in part, it’s because of human nature, fear and the practical experience that it’s difficult to make money when having to share the pot among too many . . . [more]