One of the skills that legal researchers and authors quickly have to master does not have anything to do with substantive law, but with how to refer to legal materials. This is true in many other areas of specialized knowledge, but citation standards in the legal realm seem to be particularly cluttered with minute details and exceptions, especially in Canada and the United States. Some of us eventually become quite skilled at knowing how to use square brackets, abbreviations and acronyms of legal authorities. The rest of us rely on proofreaders to make sure that every rule in the . . . [more]

Imagine this: You are a busy lawyer with a multi-jurisdictional practice, and frequently find yourself in different courtrooms or offices in various counties, states, provinces, etc. At each one of these locations, you need access to relevant, location-specific information, such as local rules of the court. Now let’s assume you carry a networked mobile device that has one or more “apps” giving you access to primary and secondary source material. The portal, while very modern, is still dumb, and by that I mean it requires you to navigate—whether by search, facets, tables, or indicies—to the location where the relevant . . . [more]

Dear Dr. Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission:

I was recently a guest at your launch in Ghent of the European Commission’s OpenAIRE initiative. You spoke eloquently and forcefully about how OpenAIRE is providing infrastructure for “open access” across the European Union, and how it represents a strong stand for both mandating and supporting open access to research funded by the European Commission. You, indeed, made it seem the only sensible way for research to progress in this new century.

It was deeply stirring to see a continent-wide embrace of open access. The Open Access Infrastructure for Research . . . [more]

Many areas of publishing, to me, are bizarre. For example, visit the Frankfurt Book Fair and see tiny stand after stand, staffed by families, displaying delightful books, over which they have slaved, yet nobody’s making money. Publishing is often seen like that; resembling academic and religious endeavour, done for the greater good rather than profit. It’s not my view but neither, mostly, is it any of my business how others think and behave.

When it comes to legal and professional information publishing, you’d think it would be different. With customers such as fat, succulent lawyers, accountants, tax advisers, big corporates . . . [more]

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently considering the next generation of legal publication. Louis Mirando’s excellent column about the future of print reporters identified the future storage and delivery of primary law; in a nutshell, bound volumes of the law reports are soon to be just a memory. 

One comment in Mirando’s column that particularly caught my attention concerned the importance of headnotes and report collections generally. What this says to me is that even though there may be comprehensive databases of case law available to us, there is still value in providing summaries of lengthy decisions and . . . [more]

In the United Kingdom and in Canada the history of the language of law reports is as much about the influence of the French language as it is about the use of English. To a lessor extent such history is also about the influence of Latin.

Consider that the first English law reports were in the French language for over 300 years, specifically:

– the first English law reports are found in the Year Books that run from 1260 to 1535 and they were written 100% in the French language. See page 99, The Language of the Law by David . . . [more]

Acquisitions and mergers are expected to continue as the major legal publishers explore ways to increase their profitability, achieve growth and increase market share. When organic growth fails to achieve corporate expectations, acquisitions and mergers are the next best thing.

The acquisition of Canada Law Book by Carswell Thomson is simply the most recent acquisition of note in the Canadian market. There have been many others of far greater significance in recent years, including the acquisition of Yvon Blais by Carswell, the acquisition of Quicklaw by Lexis Nexis and the re-acquisition of Irwin Law from Quicklaw by its founders.

Long . . . [more]

In 1910, an Englishman by the name of Percy T. Carden ^{[Fn. 1]} published an interesting proposal arguing for the creation of loose leaf law reports, which, at the time, generated considerable debate concerning the merits of ditching bound volumes in favor of publishing cases as single-issue slip opinions to be filed away in drawers. See Carden, Loose Leaf Law Reports, 26 L. Q. Rev. 75 (1910); see also Loose Leaf Law Reports, 30 Can. L. Times 244 (1910) (doubting that debris of littered “loose leaves” would ever find their way back to their proper places); Hawley, Law . . . [more]

Last October, Les Publications du Québec — the official printer for Acts and regulations in that province — started to remove marginal notes from its newly updated consolidated legislation collection called “Compilation of Québec Laws and Regulations”. When an Act or regulation gets amended, all its marginal notes are now removed from the text. Marginal notes in Quebec legislation will therefore progressively fade out as consolidated texts are being updated.

Marginal notes are words and small phrases that were traditionally displayed in the margin of printed statutes, providing hints about the content of specific provisions. Modern typesetting conventions . . . [more]

China China China. 

It’s the mantra of global business & finance and following their lead comes the legal industry.

The flood of international law firms into the Asian region to service the new opportunities in an ever expanding legal market over the last decade has been phenomenal and in 2010 there’s a new gold rush for law firms with china connections for this year’s huge IPO boom

Where the law firms go, so go the feeders, all of them desperately hoping for a piece of the pie.

The region’s two leading locations with a rule of law based on the . . . [more]

Two very good columns were posted here recently on the topic of looseleaf legal publications—one by Susannah Tredwell; the other by Ruth Bird. Ruth in particular painted a very negative picture of the looseleaf—basically the care and feeding is too onerous—and predicted its demise within the next 10 years.

Susannah referred to an article in BoingBoing; the comments on the article are most entertaining—mostly cries of woe from people who had been forced as part of their job duties to file looseleafs. From the tone of some of the comments you would think that looseleaf filing is a . . . [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]