Huge nod to Sarah Glassmeyer of Valparaiso for producing the elegant graphic below which charts the rise of the three mega legal publishers.

I find it odd that the commentators on this graphic haven’t pointed out the magic date late in the 1990s when the United States ceased to have its own legal publishing industry, all of the three majors having fallen to foreign ownership.

I might quibble about the inclusion of Brad Hildebrandt and David Baker’s businesses when acquired by Thomson. And what does Elite have to do with legal publishing. They are all businesses providing technology products and . . . [more]

In a story from Reuters, A Professor Ishikawa has created a scanner that can process hundreds of pages a minute. Using off-the shelf equipment, it takes 500 photos a second and calculates the curves of the pages, with the net effect that a book can be scanned as someone flips through it. Video here. As the story says,

While the technology has the potential to take paper books into the digital age, it remains to be how publishers will react to people scanning their books while just flipping through them.

On that note, it is worth mentioning that India . . . [more]

Happy Earth Day. Today is a good day to think about consumption.

The concept of the paperless office has been mentioned on Slaw in the past: How to Take Your Law Firm Paperless which links to a Lawyers Weekly article quoting our own Omar Ha-Redeye and Revisiting the Paperless Office to name just a few. There is also a great roundup on the Cyberlaw Central blog on “paperless” topics from the 2010 ABA Techshow.

A paperless office may not be universally achievable immediately in an organization but using less paper certainly is. Here are some easy things you can do: . . . [more]

Remember our discussions about tendering Wikipedia as evidence in court? Seems it’s been happening for some time, and judges are not amused.

The Globe reports today that Federal Court judges are taking issue with the practice of immigration officials who have entered Wikipedia entries in immigration proceedings,

“Wikipedia is an internet Encyclopedia which anyone with Internet access can edit,” wrote one exasperated Federal Court judge, criticizing Ottawa’s filings in a case to remove a family of Turkish asylum seekers.

“It is an open-source reference with no editorial control,” scoffed another judge, as he took federal agents to task for consulting

Last week, Ted Tjaden highlighted several great resources for Canadian tax filers and researchers. Another handy tax research tip: an online version of TaxFind will be available in May. TaxFind contains publications from the Canadian Tax Foundation, and it is currently available in CD-ROM format. An advantage of TaxFind moving online: more frequent updates to its content.

See the Canadian Tax Foundation website for more information. . . . [more]

The launch of a digital version of the Ontario Reports is a clear sign that the existing business model for the print publication that is truly the heart and soul of the legal profession in Ontario is beginning to falter. New thinking is required if the Ontario Reports are not to wither on the vine.

It is common knowledge that the Ontario Reports are funded by a combination of advertising revenue and sales of subscriptions to the hard bound volumes that are published six times a year.

With the downturn in the economy, advertising revenues have been flat at best, . . . [more]

That’s the motto (or slogan for those who prefer the Gaelic) of the University of Texas at Austin, which today announced a new three-year joint degree programme combining a Master of Science and Information Studies and Doctor of Jurisprudence (MSIS/JD).

The new programme “responds to an increased need for specialist trained to help address legal issues arising from the increasingly complex and changing world of information use, retrieval and storage in the 21st century.”

For those interested, eligibility is set out here.

For all the hype, the sample course selection here is fairly ho-hum, just plain vanilla . . . [more]

In responding to a query the other day on recommending resources for someone researching guarantees, I immediately thought of Kevin McGuinness’s The Law of Guarantee, 2d ed. (Toronto: Carswell, 1996) but had to stop and think if there were any more recent treatises. Although there are a number of more recent banking law treatises, I could not think of anything more recent specific to the Canadian law of guarantees that would have helped on the particulars of the question being researched (the British Sweet & Maxwell title from 2007 may of course be relevant). And although one might argue . . . [more]

Yes, it is that time of year in Canada. On or before April 30, 2010, to be specific, for most people.

As a known procrastinator, I vow to file on time this year.

I find the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) website surprisingly helpful on the special deductions this year for the home renovation tax credit and also in answering questions on RRSPs (although the CRA is an easy target for criticism, their website is one of the better websites having an effective online A to Z index).

And with the advent of online tax preparation software, the . . . [more]

Marilyn Johnson is a fan of libraries. And librarians. She came to this appreciation while researching The Dead Beat (a book about obituary writers). To her, it seemed that librarians had the most interesting obituaries! So when the time came for a second book, librarians seemed a natural focus. The result is This Book is Overdue : How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us.

“I wrote the book originally to teach myself how to get more technologically savvy, and I wrote it for my parents, who I know felt like the computer age had zoomed of and left them in . . . [more]

I didn’t realize that on January 27th the Government of Canada had ordered a review under the Investment Canada Act to determine if the investment by Amazon.com in a fulfillment centre for Amazon.ca would be of benefit to Canada. Today the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages announced this has been approved, based on the following commitments made by Amazon:

• new jobs for Canadians and improved service for Canadian consumers;
• increased visibility for Canadian books on the Amazon.ca Web page;
• an investment of over $20 million, including $1.5 million in cultural events and awards in Canada and the promotion

In law we’re used to structured data, although, like the oft-mentioned M. Jourdain, we may not know it by its fancy name. Very roughly, it’s data that’s been labelled in some useful way, so that it can be found or otherwise manipulated using that label. So, when we tell CanLII or our favourite commercial database that we’d like to see R. v. Molière, please, we’re wielding the label “case name,” for example. Like most professions and trades, we analyze our tools and products, naming the parts and their relationships, creating various “ontologies.” It starts simply in law school, . . . [more]