One of the big themes running through many of the workshops at this week’s CALL conference in Montreal was the redesign of products, platforms and processes. The conference ended yesterday.

The Monday session entitled “Please Don’t Make Me Think: User Testing a Faceted Search Engine” was about how the Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (CAIJ), Quebec’s Courthouse Library Network, conducts user testing sessions to validate the ergonomic and design aspects of many of its tools, including its new faceted search engine JuriBistro UNIK.

I served as a guinea pig at the session. I volunteered to go up on stage . . . [more]

Back in 2009, I did a quick check on link rot in Canadian decisions on CanLII. Today I repeated my quick investigation of link rot in Canadian judicial decisions. To gather decisions with URLs I simply searched for the text “http://” in CanLII. I limited my results for 2012 decisions, and sorted by date.

There were 156 court decisions in 2012 that referenced websites by specific URL. I looked at 10 decisions – all of which were decided between December 19 and 31, 2012. There were 4 broken hyperlinks. One reference was missing the colon in “http://”, and once that . . . [more]

I had to visit the Provincial Archives of Alberta today. I was looking for an Order of the Planning Board from 1981. Why? Because there was a reference to the document on the title for some land.

This is not the first trip I have made to the Archives. I have visted the archives to find information for clients a number of times. Water records, repair costs for infrastructure, lists of names, my great grandfather’s homestead record (wait, that was for me, not my law firm), copies of Alberta Orders in Council (with the appendices), copies of Ministerial Orders, and . . . [more]

In the April 20123 issue of Spectrum, the American Association of Law Libraries’ monthly magazine, I read the article “Law Firm Changes Offer Opportunities for Libraries” by Sarah Sutherland with great interest. Sutherland is Manager of Library Services at McMillan LLP in Vancouver and currently Vice-President of the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries.

In this article, Sutherland closes the loop on a couple of key legal industry ideas:

1. “Certain aspects of the practice of law are changing”
   

   …the movement toward KM, alternative billing, and initiatives to automate some aspects of legal practice is a movement away

. . . [more]

There’s not much that the large law firms have as an advantage over mid-size and small firms. Their bloated overhead, high-priced rent, and unnecessary bureaucracy, all translates into higher operating costs passed on to clients.

There is one thing which does hold large law firms apart from the rest, and that’s the decades of institutional knowledge which is internally accumulated. As much as the law is constantly changing and evolving, much of it still remains the same, or is easily updated from precedents that have recently become obsolete. This realm, of internal legal memos and precedents, is the area where . . . [more]

Chris Dale, a lawyer-turned-eDisclosure-consultant based in the UK, has taken my two-post series from December on search inside the legal organization (see here and here) and applied the thinking specifically to eDiscovery. In his post Why Don’t We Just Use Google for eDiscovery? he suggests that the complexity of using litigation support tools–with concept searching, de-duplication, e-mail threading, clustering and predictive coding–has lawyers asking why not just use Google, or something like Google?

He gets to to the crux of the problem in this notion:

If the primary point is that Google does not purport to give you everything

. . . [more]

Don Tapscott, author, speaker and advisor on new technologies and media, was interviewed by McKinsey Quarterly back in September 2012, and a video excerpt plus transcript of the interview was released last month. See: Making internal collaboration work: An interview with Don Tapscott. This interview has been raising questions around the web, and thought it would be useful to look at it here on SLAW.

Nick Holmes over at Binary Law has posted an interesting review of the new GOV.UK universal website. The UK government’s attempt to make web surfing for government information “simpler, clearer, faster.”

The website is only partially finished at the moment, with all departments expected to be integrated by April, 2013. Like any large portal, the arrangement of information — along with a dysfunctional site-search functionality, which Holmes touches on a few times — are going to be major hurdles to overcome.

The interesting issue for me, however, is whether they are trying to accomplish too much on a singular . . . [more]

A LinkedIn group pointed me to an article titled “10 Ways to Completely Ruin Your Intranet“. The article, a blog post by a company that offers a turnkey intranet solution, has some good tips about frustrating navigation, stale content and lack of collaboration.

My team is responsible for a significant amount of content on our Intranet, and skimming this vendor humour-based post got me thinking more about deep links. We have talked about deep links on CanLII and using CiteBite to link to quotes within in webpages here at Slaw. My team has been focusing on deep links, . . . [more]

Back in 2009 Ted Tjaden put together what I consider a seminal paper called “The 7 Faces of Legal Knowledge Management.” [PDF] Knowledge Management is still a young discipline, with thinking and the areas it encompasses in flux. At a couple of recent meetings, including Knowledge Workers Toronto (a KM-related meetup group I help to organize), we explored how KM is changing, how it is varying from these “7 Faces”. Here are a few of my notes co-mingled from those discussions.

KM as a place to develop new frameworks and models

As the place to develop new thinking, . . . [more]

My post Why Can’t You Just Make it Work Like Google? last week surprised me by going viral. Well, as viral as a blog post about information management can go. It certainly seems to have struck a nerve with people from all across the legal industry. It turns out that making search work effectively inside the organization is something a lot of people are attempting to tackle. After posting it, however, I realized there is also a reason why you would not even want to use Google as it functions out on the Internet for use inside the organization.

Allow . . . [more]

How many knowledge management and IT professionals have heard this refrain? Why can’t we just use Google (or something like Google) to find documents inside our organization? Why do we need to spend time and money organizing documents and adding indexing or classification or a taxonomy?

The problem lies with a significant difference between web pages on the Internet and internal documents: Google uses links from other websites as recommendations as to what is good content. It uses links plus a number of other things together in its secret algorithm–which gets changed periodically–to help its system figure out which web . . . [more]