There are plenty of fabulous continuing professional development offerings available for law librarians. MOOCs and webinars, local meetings and seminars, national and international conferences. For me, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries annual conference is a must attend event. Every time I select an ‘instead’ option (as opposed to and ‘in addition’ option) for my annual major professional development, I have regrets for several reasons:

1. I miss hearing about the enhancements that Canadian legal publishers are undertaking
2. I miss keeping up with the adjustments to my professional network – who is where
3. I miss the extraordinary information sharing that inspires

It wasn’t so long ago that would-be lawyers didn’t go to law school. Instead, they were apprenticed to experienced lawyers and learned their skills on the job.

It wasn’t until the 1950s and 60s in Canada that law degrees became de rigeur and apprenticeships were compressed into an articling year to be completed before writing the bar exam.

Flash forward to an age of soaring law school tuition rates and declining job openings, when students complain of heavy debts and a lack of practical training, and suddenly the age-old apprenticeship seems like a suitable tool for modern times.

“Adding apprenticeship . . . [more]

I just couldn’t make a call on which REM song title is best for a post about law school exams…… Let’s knock out “It’s the End of the World as we Know it”, because it isn’t. The ironic part of me likes “Shiny Happy People” but I have to acknowledge “Everybody Hurts” and “Losing my Religion” are pretty good too. Why the song catalogue for a band from Georgia? You know this, the tip I want to give this week on the verge of exam period is to wear sunscreen …. wait that’s not it….get enough REM sleep whilst . . . [more]

In one of our later advanced legal research and writing class of the term, we turned our attention from traditional primary and secondary material to alternative or less-expected legal research resources. I posted earlier on the portion of the class in which we learned strategies to mine Twitter for legal research. The other broad angle we looked at addressed strategies and tools to assist in finding helpful secondary resources in legal blogs and other open web information sources.

Legal research in blogs

I think it’s fair to suggest legal blogs are so widespread and well-known that they may be . . . [more]

All of the student societies at Ontario’s seven law schools have agreed to participate in a newly formed Law Students Society of Ontario. At the moment the LSSO website contains only the following press release:

In the US, Lexis has a “Think Like a Lawyer” campaign aimed at law students with the social media element #BeUnprecedented. There are some interesting terms with student use of academic passwords that are not found in Canada.

For 1Ls and 2Ls, your law school Lexis Advance® ID continues to provide access to our legal research tools all summer long. Use it to look good inside a firm, or prep for the classes to come.

The LexisNexis Canada online products terms of use at section 2.5.5 limits academic use to “that directly related to academic coursework required by the academic . . . [more]

Registration is now open for the 2014 edition of the New Law Librarians’ Institute. This is an intensive, week-long program aimed at developing skills in the key competencies of law librarianship developed and presented by the Canadian Association of Law Libraries.

The program will feature expert instruction from leading law librarians and law professors, small class size, a mix of lectures and practical sessions, hands on sessions, and valuable take-home materials. This year the Institute will be held at the Brian Dickson Law Library, University of Ottawa with accommodation in the university’s residences.

Despite the name, this program . . . [more]

The next Canadian Corporate Counsel Association National Conference will be taking place in Calgary from April 6 to 8th. The conference theme this year is “Energy matters” explained below (from the website):

ENERGY MATTERS

Energy as resource, as catalyst, as inspiration. The energy of in-house counsel, ignited.

The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (CCCA) is the official voice and forum of Canada’s in-house counsel community; a community that is passionate, energetic, and always evolving.

Join us at The Westin Calgary in Calgary, April 6-8, 2014 for our National Conference, the largest gathering of in-house counsel in Canada. Featuring a program

From Legal Sourcery:

CBA Legal Research Section

CBA Saskatchewan is considering expanding its sections and providing a Legal Research forum for lawyers that are interested in maintaining and honing their research skills. This section will be geared towards those who conduct legal research, including lawyers with firms, the courts, government, corporations and law reform and other legal institutions, contract research lawyers, and law librarians in the private and public sectors. If you are interested in being part of the section, please contact the Branch. Based on the level of interest, the Branch will consider introducing this section during the 2014-2015

By this point in the term, our advanced legal research and writing class has covered all the favourite usual suspects: research plans, research records and journals, secondary research using legal and library databases, federal legislative research, provincial legislative research, primary research using the big three, UK research, US research, and so on. We’re saving EU legal research for next week.

But this week we took a small detour and looked at the use of social media as a resource for legal research. For instance, we examined the strategic use of Twitter as a legal research source, mainly for secondary information . . . [more]

Yesterday we concluded the Third Annual UCLA Cyber Crime Moot Court Competition in Los Angeles. This year the moot problem dealt with access of a public website through a scraper program to collect e-mail addresses for the purposes of illustrating security vulnerabilities.

The first issue in the case was roughly modelled after United States v. Auernheimer, 2012 WL 5389142 (D.N.J. 2012), which is expected to appear before the Third Circuit in the near future. In this case, a data breach at AT&T resulted in the theft of personal information of approximately 120,000 AT&T customers through the use of a . . . [more]

I came across a new research paper today via SSRN titled, “What Makes Lawyers Happy? Transcending the Anecdotes with Data from 6200 Lawyers“.

The legal profession has done a much better job of addressing (or at least discussing) the issue of lawyer well-being in recent years. And thank-goodness for that! We are all very aware of the unfavourable statistics regarding mental health, substance abuse, and the general unhappiness that can show on some faces. So the idea of quantifying these factors — both positive and negative — cited by practitioners seems like a practical piece of work. . . . [more]