On Nov. 27, 2008, I attended a session hosted by the Toronto chapter of the Legal Marketers Association (LMA) on Social Media Success.

The event was moderated by Max Valiquette of Youthography, and featured a panel with Parker Mason of CNW Group, Michael Rabinovici of AR Communications Inc., and Stuart Wood of Torys LLP.

Wood claimed his firm didn’t know he was there. But the event was promoted on the LMA website, and as he soon found out, he was part of an impromptu podcast when Mason revealed he was recording the session.

Full audio . . . [more]

Slaw is pleased to announce that the Toronto Opinions Group (TOROG) has agreed to make public on Slaw memos and precedents that may prove to be helpful to others. The Toronto Opinions Group consists of a group of lawyers, primarily practising with the Toronto offices of the larger Canadian law firms, with an interest in third party (or transaction) opinion practice. TOROG meets regularly to review current opinion issues with a view, where appropriate, to discussing problems, assessing best practices and developing common approaches to opinion issues and opinion language. It does not involve itself in specific transactions or opinion . . . [more]

Links to a lengthy interview with Richard Susskind (parts 1 and 2) who continues to provoke with his explanations of how the English market for legal services is dramatically different from that in the United States, and how the Legal Services Act presages the future on this side of the Atlantic too.

One of the unplanned advantages of federal systems appears to be the way in which they militate against reforms of professional monopolies.

Good plugs for The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services , Richard’s book which will be imminently published by OUP.

The most . . . [more]

I attended an American Association of Law Libraries webinar on screencasting and podcasting this week. I heard about this session via Slaw and decided to attend to see if this tech would fit in nicely with our current Intranet offerings.

Kerry Fitz-Gerald, Reference Librarian, Seattle University School of Law Library and Rita Kaiser, Reference Services Librarian, King County Law Library educated and inspired me. The session was just over an hour, and due to my longitunal location ran from 11 a.m. to 12ish.

I was so inspired, I bought a headset with a mic at lunch, and proceeded to avoid . . . [more]

The Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation was created by the editors of the McGill Law Journal and published by Carswell Thomson. The Guide is unique in that it is truly national in scope. It covers both civil law and common law and is published in English and in French. It has been adopted as the official standard for citation by both French language and English language law reviews and by a number of courts. These are significant accomplishments.

However, unlike the inclusive nature of the content, the Guide takes a restrictive approach to access. Originally published in 1986 and . . . [more]

The Amsterdam Law Forum, an online law journal from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has just released its first volume, which focuses on the theme, “Inclusion and Exclusion in Western Immigration.”

The A.L.F. strives to offer an online platform for legal and policy commentary articles, with an academic character, yet accessible to a broader public , and furthermore serve as a forum for academic publications by young legal scholars…

The student-managed journal is not peer-reviewed at the moment, though they plan to become so in the future.

Not only is the ALF open access, but it’s also published using open source . . . [more]

I noticed this webinar from the American Association of Law Libraries and thought others might be interested:

How to Train Without Showing Up

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 – register by November 5th.
Time: 12:00 – 1:15 p.m. Central Time

Find out how screencasts and podcasts can be created and used for educational purposes. Our speakers will share how they use screencasts and podcasts in their libraries and will offer you suggestions on how you can use them for training purposes in your own library.

In this webinar you will:

• Get introduced to how screencasts and podcasts are created
• Receive

I’ve been away for a bit, but I’ve been busy studenting (a new word in honour of the impending replacement of W). I expected somewhat of a challenge from the shift to being a full-time student but I will freely admit that it has been a bigger challenge than I first anticipated. It has been more of a mindset question more than any other factor (and perhaps this has been exacerbated by the fact that I am accustomed to being at the front of the room standing and doling out information rather than sitting down and absorbing). But I have . . . [more]

A recent article in Library Journal caught my eye: “Living Library” Debuts in Santa Monica ((Library Journal, 10/20/2008)) As the article explains the living library movement invites library users to ‘book’ meetings with individuals with special interests, beliefs or experiences.

Though I can’t find proof of this in her written work, Connie Crosby once said that she pays attention to trends in public libraries that could apply to law library services. This memory glimer (hopefully I am attributing the credit correctly) says to me: how would the construct of a living library help my firm? What would that look . . . [more]

Two law professors are offering a book for sale at: http://www.semaphorepress.com/about.html, on a pay what you want basis. It is a casebook on intellectual property law. An interesting business model — will they succeed? Time will tell for these and other entrepreneurs. A comment from their Web site: “Be a part of the solution to $130 casebooks, by fostering the creation of $30 casebooks: Please pay the suggested price. If you can’t pay it, please at least pay something to help Semaphore Press succeed.” . . . [more]

Dean Mayo Moran today presided over a webcast to launch UofT Law’s participation in Georgetown’s Center for Transnational Legal Studies which brings together in London faculty and students from ten nations and five continents to study international, transnational and comparative law. Georgetown Law Professors David Cole and Nina Pillard are the Academic Directors for the Center’s first year.

Georgetown’s initial partners in the Center include the Free University of Berlin, University of Fribourg (Switzerland), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, King’s College London, University of Melbourne, National University of Singapore, University of Sao Paulo, University of . . . [more]

I am currently at the Internet Librarian 2008 conference in Monterey, CA. Under the category of “I wish you were here” is the presentation by Michael Sauers, Technology Innovation Librarian from the Nebraska Library Commission. I caught the tail end of his presentation and unfortunately didn’t take notes, but here are his Lessig-esque slides. Michael knows a lot about Creative Commons through practical use as well as trial-and-error.