Hat tip to the Law Librarian Blog for the note that all the sessions at the CALI Conference for Law School Computing, June 18 to 20, will be webcast live. The webcasts will use the open source web meeting software Dimdim and each session will have a live video feed and chat room.

The conference program looks great, and the webcasts are free. . . . [more]

Last September, Melanie Bueckert, Legal Research Counsel at the Manitoba Court of Appeal, (and occasional Slaw contributor), saw a reference to the Head-Start Program offered by the Edmonton Law Libraries Association (ELLA). As a law librarian in a small market, I was both aware and envious of the program and the association that presented it. While I fantasized about the possibility of offering a similar program here in Winnipeg, Melanie took a bolder step and asked if it were possible to put on a similar program here, by collaborating with law librarians. Since Melanie was also co-chair of . . . [more]

Take the opportunity to read Dennis Kennedy’s May piece in the ABA’s Law Practice Today, Legal Technology Trends for 2009, this year’s version of his annual predictions and advice. I’m stealing none of his thunder if I tell you that his eight trends are:

1. Technology budgets get decimated
2. Making do with what you have or doing more with less
3. The mobile phone as platform
4. Looking to the cloud
5. Using tech to get the word out and the money in
6. Focus on client-focused technology
7. E-Discovery in still waters
8. The perfect storm for collaboration

For one thing you’re going to want . . . [more]

Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef has launched the University of the People. Under the auspices of the U.N.’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People offers tuition-free education to anyone able to connect via the internet in two programs, Business Administration and Computer Science. At the moment the institution does not grant degrees, although it is seeking accreditation.

The somewhat tenuous connection to law — and thus to Slaw — lies in the fact that a number of the University’s advisors are lawyers: Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law . . . [more]

Legal researchers, what has your bar association done for you lately? What should it be doing? Are you content to join the substantive sections dealing with legal issues you research, or would you prefer to have a special section dedicated to legal research generally? I know that legal research sections have been established in British Columbia, Alberta (North and South), Manitoba and Quebec. Are there any others? In provinces where there is no separate legal research section, why is that? Is there any movement to create legal research sections in those jurisdictions? What about a national . . . [more]

Western Law has a new student paper, Amicus Curiae.

On page 7 of their second issue, released earlier this week, they profile some of the student bloggers in our school.

We have Legally Blogged, by Chris Crighton, who also maintains a site at Esse Quam Videri.

There’s also Dany Horovitz’s, Business Blogged, of the Financial Post Executive Blog. Dany is in the 3-year joint J.D./M.B.A. program with Ivey, the only one of its kind in Canada, and focuses more on business law. He also cross-posts to Law Is Cool.

And there’s a piece by Lawrence . . . [more]

In a comment to the recent post by Patricia Hughes, Justice B. T. Granger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice referred to a set of slides for a presentation he had given at the 2008 CBA Canadian Legal Conference in Quebec City entitled “The Future is Now: Improving Access to Justice: The Need for Lawyers and the Judiciary to Go Electronic.” I thought that this was a presentation that might interest more than a few Slaw readers and got in touch with Justice Granger, who kindly agreed to let Slaw publish the slides.

Of course because this was about . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association‘s Young Lawyers interest group has released a podcast episode “Taking the Nightmare out of Networking“, a half hour interview with Pippa Blakemore, Strategic Business Partner at The PEP Partnership LLP, in Reading, UK by Sarah Klinger, Chair, Young Lawyers-CBA on how to get over awkward face-to-face networking. She gives suggestions on how to conduct conversation to draw people in. Well worth a listen! . . . [more]

Today I am at the second day of the mesh conference. mesh is arguably Toronto’s premier social media/business conference, now in its fourth year. These notes have been “liveblogged” during Rob Hyndman’s session “Legal Bootcamp for Web Startups”. Rob Hyndman is principal of Hyndman Law, and one of the five founders of the mesh conference. Any inaccuracies or omissions in the notes below are purely my mistake and not Rob’s. Note this is not legal advice, but general discussion only. The main audience for this talk is start-up owners/those in the market to start up a tech company. . . . [more]

A number of great things are emerging from “library land” following last week’s Computers in Libraries conference in D.C.. As a pre-conference event to the upcoming Canadian Library Association conference in Montreal May 29-June 1, 2009, the CLA Emerging Technologies Interest Group has organized some workshop sessions with prominent emerging technologies librarian Jessamyn West for the morning of Friday, May 29th. In the afternoon they will be holding a “Library Camp” of unconference sessions. This will be a fantastic opportunity to bring some of our brightest minds together to nudge Canadian libraries into the future. Cost is $100 . . . [more]

Case citations exist primarily for the purpose of enabling a researcher to locate the full text of a judgment or the decision of an administrative tribunal. The primary purpose of a style guide for legal citation is to ensure that everyone can understand how various combinations of numbers, letters, brackets and punctuation make it possible for the reader to find the full text of a case referred to in a book, article or another case. There are other uses, such as case citators, but the main purpose of a case citation is to provide the means to easily locate a . . . [more]

What Matters is an outstanding new website from McKinsey & Company. From the site:

We began last summer by asking researchers, academics, journalists, policy makers and executives to address ten big questions, whose answers will shape our collective future. In each case, we asked our essayists to take a long view and tackle tomorrow’s trends rather than today’s headlines.

We published those essays in a print collection, also titled What Matters. But our goal was always to translate that vision to the Web, to create a place where we could continue to frame the important questions and gather a