The English legal / publishing press are taking Reed Elsevier’s current travails to speculate whether the RoI of legal publishers is sustainable.

In previous economic downturns, the London firms have not responded by making cuts to legal information budgets. This time, perhaps with the transformations that have come with with the rise of free public legal information and increased client scrutiny of disbursements, it appears to be happening.

I recall one indiscreet Canadian legal publisher tell me that their company had been profitable since inception, including the Great Depression.

Here is the English take on the issues, from the Guardian . . . [more]

One of the quotes I go back to often is a quote from a 1945 paper by the economist Hayek where he says:

The economic problem of society … is not merely a problem of how to allocate ‘given’ resources – if ‘given’ is taken to mean given to a single mind … It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society … a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. (Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society

The Law Commission of Ontario (LCO/CDO) has an ongoing project on the possible reform of the law of crossborder litigation, particularly the matter of judicial jurisdiction. A consultation paper has been prepared by Professor Janet Walker, a scholar in residence with the LCO/CDO, and comments were invited from members of the profession.

The Ontario Bar Association submitted its response to the consultation paper this spring, and has made its work available online in PDF. . . . [more]

Congratulations to Slaw and The Court founder Simon Fodden for being featured in the article “The Paperless Chase” by Emily White in the July/August 2009 edition of National, the Canadian Bar Association magazine (see pages 38 & 39). Simon talks at length about Slaw, law blogging, and technological change.

In the article, Simon explains:

I think there are a good many lawyers who would like to write much more than they do…Of course, they write memos and opinions, but I think they’d like to expand on a topic. And blogs give them that opportunity to do that.

White also . . . [more]

The excellent Stéphane Cottin has launched a collaborative bibliography on researching French legal information, using Zotero as the collaborative tool. The project is described in an associated website (in French); and the bibliography can be found at the Zotero Groups site Recherche doc juridique. At present there are over 300 entries in the bibliography/library.

Stéphane was until recently Chef de service du Greffe-Informatique et de service Bibliothèque – Documentation at the Conseil constitutionnel, France’s high constitutional council whose principal duty is to rule on the constitutionality of proposed legislation. He is currently working in the Prime Minister’s office, . . . [more]

Every now and then you may wish to use a feature in your browser to check out which of the sites you visit have set cookies on you machine — those tiny morsels of text that get sent back and forth between your browser and the machine serving up web pages so that your site-specific preferences are known and respected. They are by and large benign, but, given that they track some of your progress through the web, they can be used to inform advertisers of your interests. And, because cookies can carry personal information, they represent a privacy risk, . . . [more]

One doesn’t normally expect a Blog quite as focused as the Huffington Post to spend much time on the legal publishing industry but Peter Schwartz’s post on the Reinvention of Legal Research is worth a bit of attention.

A couple of extracts:

When online legal research platforms were proprietary, online publishers imposed per-minute and per-use pricing structures. This pricing model facilitated client cost-recovery and allowed publishers to use law firms as information wholesalers. Because information is now a commodity, law firm clients will no longer pay for online legal research. New flat-rate pricing models for online research products reflect this

I’ve pushed a few of CanLII’s RSS feeds to Twitter, thinking that some folks might find it handy to learn when new judgments are available. Specifically, I’ve created Twitter accounts for announcements about new Court of Appeal judgments from British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. I’ll likely add accounts for other courts of appeal in due course. (I’ve checked with CanLII and they’re comfortable with this.)

I’ve gathered these under the rubric CanCourts and have put up a simple website explaining what I’ve done.

Please let me know if you experience any difficulties using these Twitter feeds. . . . [more]

I like to look for patterns. Not for handicrafts like one of my knitting pals, but rather patterns in data.

I recently had the ~opportunity~ to look for patterns in lobbyist registrations. Unfortunately for me, there are almost as many registries as jurisdictions. The Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada is the federal government registry. It has an excellent database with great search functionality and many options for accessing this information:

* Recent Registrations
* Search the Registry of Lobbyists
* Search Monthly Communications Reports
* Statistical Reports
* Multimedia Tutorials
* Login
* Guides to registration . . . [more]

The front page of today’s Globe and Mail sports a big photo of Ontario MPP Lisa MacLeod attached to the article “Can a busy female politician give reliable evidence? A judge says no” by Jane Taber. The lead paragraph runs as follows:

Lisa MacLeod is a young female politician who commutes to her job at Queen’s Park from Ottawa and leaves her husband, Joe, and four-year-old daughter, Victoria, at home. Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham of Ontario Superior Court said this is a big distraction for the 34-year-old woman and as a result he felt he could not accept

The Register reports that a California lawyer has written to the Chief Justice of that state to object to the state Supreme Court’s practice of passing lawyers’ briefs on to the commercial publishers, LexisNexis and Westlaw, who then sell access to them. It seems from Edmond Connor’s letter to the court that he is principally concerned about the profit-making aspect of the situation as a violation of copyright, rather than about the simple public availability of documents prepared for litigation.

At an earlier time all briefs filed with the California Supreme Court had been copied four times and placed in . . . [more]

Yet another search engine has been launched. Spezify from Sweden is essentially a meta-search tool that presents combined results from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and other sources in a pictorial fashion, thanks to its use of Flash technology. Results are spread across a window that is meant to be larger than your open viewing port, so that to see more results you scroll (or drag) up, down, left or right. The image slice below — the results of a search for Canada and courthouse will give you some idea; click on it to see a full window screenshot.

Clicking on any . . . [more]