Let me introduce you to Document Cloud (DC), an online service funded by a very substantial grant from the Knight Foundation.

Document Cloud directly addresses a concern that I’ve expressed a number of times here, that online news stories often refer to, or depend on, documents that are themselves not made available to the reader. Occasionally, of course, a link to an outside source would suffice. But at other times it would be most sensible to lodge the document in a secure place, and, better, a place that would help the referencing news organ to embed it in the . . . [more]

At a session at the Fourth International Legal Ethics Conference at Stanford Law School this morning Laurel Terry pointed us to a very elegant model for organizing legal information. It was developed a decade ago by the Project on International Courts and Tribunals. Simon noticed the link in the post here, but didn’t drill down.

The PICT Research Matrix is the first comprehensive, systematic and holistic mapping of the international judicial system. It encompasses 18 international judicial bodies, grouped in six clusters according to their geographical scope and/or subject-matter jurisdiction. For each institution, 29 issues, grouped in five . . . [more]

For those who aren’t on the Federal Courts or other mailing list that provided the information, 

The Federal Courts Reports are pleased to announce that in an effort to meet the changing needs of its users, full volumes of the Federal Courts Reports are now available on its Web site at: http://reports.fja-cmf.gc.ca/eng/. The Federal Courts Reports continue to be available in print, but you can now access the same content online beginning with [2007], Volume 4, Part 1, including numerous value-added features such as a side by side (French and English) layout, the contents of the volume, and lists

To date, LinkedIn has only offered a handful of sidebar applications that users can install. They’ve been very picky, and only a few are aligned with vertical industries. Even then, it’s obvious that industry apps must have a broader application and be applicable to the general business community. Late last night, the rollout began for Legal Updates on LinkedIn and it’s a huge win for my friends at JD Supra.

We’ve written about JD Supra before here at Slaw, so I won’t spell out their core offering for law firms. They are, however, a company that’s been built around . . . [more]

Earlier today I stumbled across an excellent, free Investment Treaty Arbitration website at UVic Law that has so far appears to have gone unnoticed by SLAW.ca commentators.

According to the site, it provides access to all publicly available investment treaty awards along with information and resources relating to investment treaties and investment treaty arbitration and links to further resources.

Readers of the site are encouraged to send investment treaty materials and awards to Professor Andrew Newcombe for posting.

You can access awards chronologically or alphabetically by claimaint or by respondent state. Information is also provided for expert opinions and ICSID . . . [more]

I received a sad note today from Courthouse Libraries BC. It was not unexpected, but I am still sorry to report that the two wonderful loose-leaf print publications that this venerable organization has laboured over for many years will cease June 30th, 2010. Farewell to BC Legislative Digest and the Canada Legislative Index.

These publications began in 1979 and 1980 respectively and have been wonderful sources. As the letter states “they grew out of a need for a timely method of tracking BC and federal legislative changes”. The CLI in particular (given my firm’s jurisdiction is not in BC) . . . [more]

On my new legal research and writing website, I decided to include an updated version of information I had on law-related movies from an old law school course page for international law students and legal research that I had developed a number of years ago.

The new pages are at:

Law-Related Movies
http://www.legalresearchandwriting.ca/movies/movies.htm

There are 90 law-related movies listed, along with short reviews by me and a link to an external movie review (usually Roger Ebert or the New York Times).

Topics covered include:

“A to Z” List of Law-Related Movies
Movies Organized by Substantive Law Subject
Comedies . . . [more]

In conjunction with the launch last week by Irwin Law of the new, third edition of my book with them called Legal Research and Writing, I am pleased to announce the launch of a companion website called:

http://www.legalresearchandwriting.ca

The site contains links to all of the major URLs listed in the book (and more) as well as providing basic information about legal research and writing.

I hope to continue to develop the site over time and to possibly include an “updates” section on the site containing any major updates on new cases or other information contained in the book. . . . [more]

The new year comes early in Canadian legal publishing circles – as early as July in fact. Even now, legal publishers are preparing to roll out new editions of their popular annotated statutes and consolidations of statutes with the year 2011 in their titles.

How did this come to be? And just what is the point of it all? It is the summer of 2010! In the eyes of a lay person, it looks as if the legal publisher has made a mistake. Not so.

The advent of annuals

Not all that long ago, with a few exceptions, annotated and . . . [more]

This is an internal Heenan Blaikie piece which my colleagues Michel Gamache and Chantal Belanger (Technicienne en documentation) wrote to help those of us who have problems finding Québec official proclamations and the like. I think the tips are well worth noting for all Canadian legal researchers.

Some history

The Gazette officielle du Québec is the means by which the Quebec Government makes its decisions official. Published continuously since 1869, it makes public, on a weekly basis, all texts whose publication is required: statutes, regulations and other statutory instruments. . . . [more]

I have in the past hoped for good (or better) interfaces to the massive amounts of older Canadian legal materials being digitized on the Internet Archive.

While that hope still remains (since I think there is a need for it), I was pleasantly surprised this morning that by simply searching the words “ontario AND regulations AND 1979” in the “Canadian Libraries” database, the result came first and it was relatively easy to get to the particular regulation I was looking for by choosing the PDF format of the document (although the PDF file was a bit large at over . . . [more]

At lunch today, I got a look at the Westbusinesslaw.com platform which offers a sophisticated set of templates to get at corporate documentation, both Edgar and Sedar filings, but also a massive storehouse of global corporate documentation, precedents and models. It got me thinking about the power of an installed base. West had started moving from the purely legal market and document databases into financial information back in the Eighties. That trend accelerated after the Thomson acquisition and in turn the merger with Reuters.

But of course, there were installed bases on the finance side: Dow Jones, of course, which . . . [more]