I see that LexisNexis Canada has announced a new court docket service in Canada for dockets at the Federal Court, Federal Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada:

From one intuitive online interface, LexisNexis CaseConnection Dockets enables fast access to key case information for ongoing and new proceedings filed with the Federal Court, Federal Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada. This information helps law firm, government and corporate professionals stay on top of emerging legal issues and cases quickly, cost-effectively and securely.

The press release was not clear on cost of the service, although registration here was . . . [more]

Courtney Minick has written a post on Universal Citation for State Codes over at VoxPopuLII, a blog published at the Cornell University Law School.

She discusses the spread of universal, or vendor-neutral, citation in the United States. The bulk of the article is devoted to developing neutral citation for state laws, but one detail attracted my attention. In contrast to Canada, where neutral citation has been widely adopted for caselaw, the practice is still not very widespread South of the border:

To date, 16 states assign universal citations to their highest court opinions. (To date, Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi,

Jureeka! is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome built by Michael Poulshock now in collaboration with Cornell’s Legal Information Institute that turns legal citations into hyperlinks to open access versions of the material cited.

Somewhat surprisingly, it works with some citations to British materials and to Canadian materials, principally federal statutes and Supreme Court of Canada cases on CanLII, so far as I can judge. This is no substitute for the high-end commercial products and neither for CanLII material. But if you find yourself working with US material in HTML outside either of the biggies, you might find this . . . [more]

For the last few months, I have been tracking new issues of Canadian law journals for Bora Laskin Law Library’s Recent Law Journals Tables of Contents service (July issue here) . This was as part of a bigger project, that will hopefully see the light of day someday. One of my collaborators on that project Andrea Davidson (a lawyer who is currently a masters student at the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies) thought it was worth noting that a number of the journals we were looking at were not available on either Lexis . . . [more]

First to BC where a committee of the Law Society of British Columbia, under the chairmanship of Gavin Hume, has produced the best and most thoughtful piece on how to practice ethically and effectively using cloud computing. We’ve referred in the past to helpful work done by the Bar Association in North Carolina and the ABA’s 20/20 Commission – see Jack Newton’s posts from May and July, as well as Connie’s and Omar’s take on last week’s ABA discussion.

At the Canadian Lawyer, David Paul has a good tip sheet of practical advice on the intelligent use . . . [more]

Fastcase has just announced the Fastcase 50, the “fifty most interesting, provocative, and courageous leaders in the world of law, scholarship, and legal technology”. The entire list is interesting but let’s mention 5 friends who may be familiar to Slaw readers.

Congratulations to each of them:

David Whelan
David Whelan is a lawyer, librarian, and technologist who has truly seen it all. He currently serves as the Manager of Legal Information for the Law Society of Upper Canada (as head librarian of the Great Library, the job is often referred to as “the Great Librarian”). David previously served as . . . [more]

Luigi Benetton has published a nice article called “Knowledge Management Know-How” in the current edition of The Lawyers Weekly.

The article quotes me and fellow SLAW contributor Dominic Jaar, but what I like about the article are the viewpoints from others in the industry and the wide range of tips and advice on best practices.

What I find with knowledge management is that there is usually never a single approach or method and varies a fair bit depending on the type of organization, its culture and staffing.

In fact, there has been lots of discussion in the . . . [more]

In addition to the blog posts I put together from selected sessions at the PLL Summit on Saturday, I have also liveblogged a few of the other conference sessions I have attended:

• Barbara Tillett and John Mark Ockerbloom on Authority Control Vocabularies and the Semantic Web
  These are notes are from talk by Dr. Barbara B. Tillett of theLibrary of Congress and John Mark Ockerboom of the University of Pennsylvania.
• To Recover or Not to Recover: Trends, Solutions, and Alternatives for Taming Online Research Costs
  These are notes are from a panel discussion session with Joan Axelroth

I am currently in Philadelphia for the American Association of Law Libraries 2011 conference. Today is the PLL Summit put on by the Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section (PLL-SIS). I have live-blogging the sessions I attended:

• James Jones on Understanding Law Firm Trends
• Esther Dyson on Technology Changes in Business and Libraries
• Steven Lastres, Julie Bozzell and Toby Brown – Moving Beyond the Library Walls to Support Strategic Knowledge Management
• Joan Axelroth – What Law Firm Administrators Want Librarians to Know
• Greg Castanias – How librarians add value to their law firms
• David Curle on transformations in the

Law library consultant Nina Platt is the editor of the new PinHawk News free daily email alert service for law librarians, the Librarian News Digest.

From the inaugural issue:

Welcome to the first issue of the daily Librarian News Digest, a free digest of news from publications and blogs on the internet that focus on topics of importance to librarians. As editor of Librarian News Digest, my goal is to track pertinent news and select what’s most important to you as a librarian. Expect to see news and ideas that help you manage, acquire, organize, research, and market your

Thank you for the kind welcome Simon. I’ve just returned fresh from a research leave where amongst other things I investigated the challenges and possibilities around creating a Canadian subject based research tool that does for Canadian Journals what the wonderful Current Index to Legal Periodicals does for US journals. I hope to talk a bit more about this project in a future entry.

In the meantime, along with many SLAW readers and contributors I have been missing the excellent Current Law Journal Content service offered by the Washington and Lee Law Lbrary. Simon has recently written about CLJC here . . . [more]

Some of you may know that I am celebrating the unboxing of the Mireau family treasures onto library shelving that travels most of the length of my new house. My husband and I are getting up extra early these days to enjoy our reading time before the work day begins. The alarm ringing at 5 is obnoxious but the extra minutes spent with a novel is lovely. I am secretly hoping that it continues to rain so that I can read novels for my vacation next week rather than landscape.

A few of the novels read in the past couple . . . [more]