The Supreme Court has just released its judgment in the case of Galambos v. Perez, 2009 SCC 48 (CanLII). The opinion of the court was written by Cromwell J., his second[1. His first was R. v. Godin, 2009 SCC 26 (CanLII)], I believe, since his installation on the court, and concurred in by all eight other members of the court.

This judgment might be of special interest to the bar as it deals with relations between a bookkeeper for a small firm and the bankrupt firm. Essentially, the bookkeeper and de facto office manager loaned large sums . . . [more]

The business section of the Globe and Mail today was something of a bonanza for pieces on information technology, and I thought that I’d pass the links along for those of our readers too busy to digest the (or that) morning paper.

First off, of course, is the story about the launch of Windows 7 in Canada. Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, showed up in Toronto to give a talk to a bunch of IT professionals, hoping to help them forget about the Vista disaster. The Globe has a whole section online with a dozen or so articles about Windows . . . [more]

The newest version of the University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation, known as the Maroonbook, is available online in PDF. This brief — 77 page — competitor to the Bluebook is not directly applicable to us here in Canada, of course, but may assist with material filed in the United States. And it serves to remind us that we, too, ought to have available to us a free, online manual.

We’ve mooted this on Slaw a number of times, and, if some irons I’ve got in the fire at the moment get hot in the next few weeks, . . . [more]

I attended a great workshop on Wednesday looking at KM from novel perspectives, part of the ARK Group Knowledge Management for the Legal Profession 2009 Conference.

Workshop theme and goals:
For KM to continue to grow in law firms, we need to move beyond “traditional” projects and technology initiatives.
This full-day workshop will dive into those areas that lie at the innovative edge of KM. Our goal for the day is simple. We want each attendee to leave this workshop with tools they can apply to the expansion and improvement of KM’s reach within their respective firms.

I believe the . . . [more]

I will be speaking at LawTech Canada on November 16th in Toronto.

Although my talk may differ slightly from the paper I submitted, I ended up submitting a paper called “The 7 Faces of Legal Knowledge Management.” The paper reflects my current thinking on the topic of legal KM, influenced in part by discussions with colleagues in the industry. Many of us wear quite different hats as legal knowledge managers depending on the type of firm where we practice, our individual backgrounds and experiences, and staffing and resources.

The 7 “faces” of legal KM I identified are:

1. Document / . . . [more]

A couple of releases from Thomson-West and Reed Elsevier that may interest Slaw readers.

The first radical search innovation in a while from Dayton is the use of semantic search methodology to enrich searching for prior patent art. Here is a slide show advert – which sadly doesn’t explain how it all works. And Kindles are coming to West’s monograph series. . . . [more]

South of the border we’re seeing moves to go well beyond the traditional depository of government documents in how public information is presented.

Most immediately a new site called Data.gov which includes a complete redesign of the Federal Register attracted even the attention of the Washington Post.

The key feature for Slaw readers is that it is based on XML, so can be built into other applications. More detail below the fold.

The second development is the launch of Law.Gov which takes Carl Malamud’s bold pamphlet on public access to legal information We The People and makes it real. . . . [more]

At the request of VLC Chair Shaunna Mireau, who is boarding a plane to NYC, I’d like to relay the 2010 anticipated price increases from publishers in the Canadian market. These numbers are gathered by the Vendors Liaison Committee, and archived on the CALL website.

• Canada Law Book is advising a 3% to 6% price increase for print and electronic products.
• Carswell price increases will be in the 5-7% range for print products.
• CCH Legal/Business/Tax subscription products will increase approximately 3-9%. The price increase for Legal/Business books available in print should be in the 2-5% range and

Foreign ownership

In the early days of online legal research, when everything was uncertain, governments and law societies were legitimately concerned about the prospect of foreign ownership of Canadian legal information. The fear was that the legal heritage of Canada would fall into the hands of “non Canadians”, a prospect viewed with horror in many circles. While no one at that time really could foresee the future of online legal research in Canada, in retrospect, everyone should have expected that the natural “Canadian” predisposition to reconcile differences would produce a solution that would reflect everyone’s interest, offend almost no one, . . . [more]

This week in the world of biotech, things were opening up:

• GSK, the UK Government and The Wellcome Trust are opening a new science park, pitching “jobs, jobs, jobs” to constituents, and pitching “open innovation” to potential tenants. But “open innovation” probably doesn’t mean the same thing in biotech as it does in the rest of the world, so don’t hold your breath waiting to see a Creative Commons logo on your Tylenol bottle.
• mdBriefcase, which provides online education to physicians, is opening up a Canadian consumer health website called MedSchoolForYou.com, but it has some way to go

What is it about obituaries that so attracts some people? Perhaps it’s Schadenfreude, or maybe it’s a form of whistling past the graveyard, but some folks can’t wait to bring you the gleeful news that such-and-so is mortally ill — so keen, in fact, that as with Mark Twain, né Clemens[1. “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” This is the actual quote, as you can see from the image of the actual letter that Twain sent from London.], they wind up being previous.

So we have two imminent deaths reported recently that may be just a bit exaggerated. . . . [more]

In the most recent Weekly Checklist of federal government publications, the 2009 annual report by Justice Canada on applications for ministerial review in cases of possible miscarriages of justice is listed:

“Since 1892, the Minister of Justice has had the power, in one form or another, to review a criminal conviction under federal law to determine whether there may have been a miscarriage of justice.”

“Currently, the conviction review process begins when a person submits an application for ministerial review (miscarriages of justice), also known as a ‘conviction review application’.”

“The application for ministerial review must be supported by ‘new