When evaluating print law-related books for purchase, librarians will consider a number of factors: the author’s expertise, the reliability of the publisher, whether the book is heavily foot-noted, and whether it contains good finding tools, such as a detailed table of contents, table of cases or legislation or an index.

Unfortunately, in the Canadian legal publishing market – which is relatively small – the quality of indexes in print law-related books is variable since most publishers put the onus on the author to create their own index (which makes sense, since the author is the subject expert and knows his . . . [more]

I see from this week’s Ontario Reports that there is an advertisement from LexisNexis Quicklaw for their new free app in the iTunes store for the iPhone (but it also works on the iPad).

LexisNexis should be applauded for being first to the market in Canada with a case law database app.

However, in testing it just now on my iPad I think in most cases I would simply launch a Quicklaw session on my iPad’s web browser.

The app is fairly simple. I find the iPhone “size” too small but there was a feature, as is common for iPhone . . . [more]

WIPO celebrates World Intellectual Property Day on 26 April 2011. It’s a great day and “excuse” to educate those around you about intellectual property issues including copyright and licensing matters within libraries and organizations. This year’s theme is “Designing the Future”. A poster, postcard and bookmark may be downloaded from the WIPO site and used to help educate and raise copyright and intellectual property awareness. Of course, you are encourage to create your own educational materials which WIPO will showcase on its site. . . . [more]

Earlier in the month (the other) Simon alerted us to IBM’s development of a natural language savvy (and trivia stuffed) machine that ran rings around the human competitors in Jeopardy.

But no sooner had the victory occurred when lawyers started thinking … what if.

What if they hadn’t cleared copyright on the encyclopedias they stuffed Watson with?

But the best analysis is contained in a provocative and imaginative piece by IBM GC Robert Weber in the National Law Journal, summarized in the ABA Journal.

“Imagine a new kind of legal research system that can gather much of

. . . [more]

Zotero, that great note-taking research tool from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, has just been released in a standalone version for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Until this point, Zotero had been a plugin for the Firefox browser. The standalone version has “connectors” available to link it to Chrome and Safari browsers (IE is coming); and plugins for MSWord and OpenOffice are bundled with it.

If you’ve been hesitating to try out Zotero because of the necessary linkage to Firefox, you should give it a whirl now. There’s an online Quick Start Guide to get . . . [more]

Simon Fodden previously mentioned that CanLii recently enacted deep linking on their site to allow referencing of specific paragraphs. Frédéric Pelletier of CanLii provided their own update on this on Friday here.

They add that the anchors are not currently visible, which is why the process is still a manual one. But this suggests that in the future this might change. Another important consideration is that not all cases will have this function,

Please note that many older decisions do not have numbered paragraphs. Also, since this feature is the result of automated processing, there will always remain a

. . . [more]

Here is a link to a Press Release from Los Angeles this afternoon, announcing that Richard Susskind, the controversial (in some circles anyway) author of The End of Lawyers?

Note the importance of the final question-mark.

Integreon’s Client Advisory Board will be composed of managing partners at law firms and general counsel at organizations that Integreon serves. The board will provide Integreon’s clients with an opportunity to share ideas about legal service trends, specify future requirements for Integreon’s services, and identify opportunities for collaboration.

Integreon (according to its website) “applies technology intelligently to legal solutions to automate processes and . . . [more]

IBM's Watson and Wolfram/Alpha are different approaches to getting information out of data.

Linkedin Labs lets you map your various connections on that service. You can see mine in the image below, as an example of what you’ll get.

Click on image to enlarge

The map on the Linkedin site is dynamic, in that clicking on or hovering over various points reveal the people behind the dots and their links to the people in your circles. The program attempts to group your connections, and you can then label these groups however you please. The brief video below explains:

. . . [more]

The latest issue of the Yale Law Journal contains a supremely sane and caustic attack by Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on the tendency of the Blue Book (Uniform System of Citation) to proliferate increasing thickets of rules and increasingly trivial sub-rules.

In an earlier essay, Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 University of Chicago Law Review 1343 (1986), Judge Posner suggested four principles to guide the design of such a system:

“to spare the writer or editor from having to think about citation form,”

“to economize on space and the reader’s time,”

“to

. . . [more]

I read with great interest a recent article by Chris Anderson in Wired Features how video on YouTube is having the unexpected effect of allowing people to learn–and innovate–at an accelerated rate. He gives the example of people learning from one another how to dance, developing skills previously unheard of. Take for example the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers:

According to Anderson, many of these dancers were self-taught through Internet video, bringing together tricks and moves previously unknown in dance. Part of this is accelerated learning and innovation, he says, comes from people sharing what they know, so that others who . . . [more]

Those who get Slaw’s entries by RSS or email may not regularly read comments to our posts and so might have missed a rather important, laconic comment to my entry yesterday on the New York Times’s deep linking feature. Lexum’s Ivan Mokanov wrote in to say that CanLII now has anchors at the paragraph level in judgments. They’d just not got around to announcing it. And they’re planning to build further functionality around it.

The illustration Ivan gave makes the point clearly and simply. This link
http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2010/2010scc63/2010scc63.html#par14
will take you to directly to paragraph 14 of the judgment in question . . . [more]