Congratulations to Melissa Kruger, Publisher and Editor of the magazine Precedent: The new rules of law and style. Precedent magazine recently celebrated its second anniversary in real style with the invitation-only party Dressed to Bill, featuring a fashion show with new looks modeled by ten stylish lawyers. Precedent is an independent magazine aimed at young lawyers (aged 25-40) and distributed for free to over 20,000 lawyers and law students across Ontario.

You may recall Precedent started life over three years ago as a blog. The website has maintained its “bloggy” roots with additional blog posts and columns. . . . [more]

If you’re reading this, you’re on the internet. And it’s probably a good bet that you’re on the internet a lot — continuously, indeed, if you’re like me. This is by now unavoidable at the office and, it seems, unavoidable at the “office in your pocket,” whether BlackBerry or iPhone or some other portal to the work world.

But I’ve got a winking modem at home and a honking great (and beautiful) desktop computer sitting on my desk that glows like a persistent fire in the hearth, ready to answer my every question in millions upon millions of vibrant colours. . . . [more]

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