This is the first week for a couple of Field Law students. At my office we request that the students start on the same day and we have a formal week long student orientation program. Our program structure hasn’t changed much over the years, except that the librarian face time has doubled to a full half day.

Our students are invited to attend the Head Start program that is organized by the Edmonton Law Libraries Association so our orientation week library session is a half day refresher of our firm specific resources and writing protocols rather than a general research . . . [more]

The Public Legal Education and Information Service of New Brunswick (PLEIS-NB), celebrating more than 20 years of service, makes its information pamphlets available online. (Because New Brunswick is a constitutionally bilingual province, there’s a version of the site en français aussi.)

What drew my attention to the site now was the announcement that PLEIS-NB is “helping the public know the law — one tweet at a time!” Of course, advice in 140 characters might be a trifle curt, so they’ve adopted the interesting strategy of tweeting questions, the kind that non-lawyers might ask, and linking those tweets to their longer . . . [more]

I am standing at a terminal in the Alberta Law Libraries Legal Research and Training Centre in the Edmonton Courthouse, listening as 40 articling students are given a tour of the facility. They are fresh faced and eager to begin their legal career, even after sitting through lectures on legislation this morning.

The lesson from this year’s Head Start program is that it is good to have a contingency plan.

The first activated contingency plan took place yesterday when we were bumped from the courtroom that we traditionally use was scooped up by the trial coordinator. Imagine, using a courtroom . . . [more]

The Law Society of Upper Canada is having a teleseminar at noon today entitled “The New Guide to File Retention and File Destruction.”

I’m one of the speakers – talking about issues relating to electronic records.

One of the fundamental principles of electronic records from a records retention and destruction perspective, is that electronic records should be retained and destroyed on the same schedule as paper records.

As I was thinking about the issues, it occurred to me that if I had to hazard a guess, I suspect many law firms, and many businesses for that matter, have . . . [more]

This will certainly be the first time that I will speak in public in my pyjamas. I’m participating in a conference this weekend hosted by the World Institute for Research and Publication (WIRP) where I’m presenting a couple papers.

It’s not that all my suits are at the dry cleaner, but because the conference is being hosted online. The first time this was done was apparently by CONVIBRA in Brazil. Since 2004, WIRP has been hosting conferences on Finance, Accounting, Marketing, Business Administration, Education, and Law, primarily using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP).

This year they’re trying something different, with . . . [more]

Circle September 22 and 23, 2010 on your calendar to attend the inaugural Canadian Forum on Court Technology at the Brookstreet Hotel in Ottawa.

One of Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms is “There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about.” This is sometimes paraphrased as “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” The “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right” statement is apocryphally attributed to P.T. Barnum.

Writing for law and other professional magazines, and law tabloids such as The Lawyers Weekly or the Law Times, is a not-expensive (at least to the writer) way of getting publicity and, perhaps, of educating the readership. I have no . . . [more]

Convocation at the Schulich School of Law, Friday, May 28, 2010, webcast available.

The Canadian Centre for International Justice is hosting a conference next month focusing on international criminal law in Ottawa and Toronto, with further locations at a future date.

The website describes the program:

Over two days, participants will receive a comprehensive overview of legal processes through which individuals can be held criminally and civilly accountable in Canada and abroad for war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and torture. Lawyers, journalists, students, civil servants, NGO representatives and other professionals with an interest in international justice, human rights, international law, criminal law or torts are encouraged to attend.

Details below. . . . [more]

The title of this posting is the title of an article that just appeared on the Chronicle Review website of the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Call it a more temperate look (more temperate than that of a now retired Canadian law professor – already noted on this forum) at law school education, albeit in the United States rather than Canada.

The focus of the article is the education of the graduates from “elite” law schools in the U.S. “at a time when most of the more-radical members of the faculty had either already disappeared or were losing their . . . [more]

“Psychotic kindergartens.” According to this piece from guardian.co.uk, Robert Martin, professor of law, emeritus, at the University of Western Ontario used this term and the term “feminist seminary” to describe Canadian law faculties. Martin’s article, in the October 2009 edition of the scholarly journal Interchange, is behind a paywall. I have not read it, but thought it worth pointing to nonetheless. . . . [more]

This is a bit of a global pot-pourri drawn from what I’ve been reading from elsewhere.

Access to Justice in Australia
Another Thomson/West acquisition – this time a Brazilian publisher was acquired
Harvard Law Library joins the Chesapeake Project
The Guardian picks up on Rob Martin’s hyperbolic rant against Canadian Legal Education
An English law firm outsources all of its non-billable activities, including its law library, IT and knowledge management.

. . . [more]