A sign of the times: for those who have been let go at work but feel too intimidated by the potential cost of a lawyer to seek legal assistance, comes the new service FiredWithoutCause to fill the gap. Have a read through the description below. I’m curious to hear from lawyers in the audience whether you see this type of service complementing or competing with your work?

From FWC’s social media press release (SMPR) from July 10, 2009:

FiredWithoutCause.com is a confidential online service that helps people understand their legal rights and maximize their severance package. The service provides:

• a 

Today, Sunday, turned out to be a day where I felt newspaper deprivation acutely, so I remedied it by buying the Sunday NY Times, as I sometimes do — though not since its price in Canada got hiked to a startling sum just under $9, evidently. The Magazine contains an interesting interview with US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“The Place of Women on the Court” by Emily Bazelon), which prompted one of those chains of associations that can entrain you when you’ve the Times to draw upon. Herewith, the highlights in something of a ramble, starting . . . [more]

The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s confirmation hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to be associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court begin Monday morning. She will be on Capitol Hill undergoing questioning by the senators during the next week.

Of all the news outlets planning coverage, perhaps the most interesting is Associated Press. Their plan is to have live coverage via Twitter feed @AP_Courtside. They will be taking it a step further by taking questions and directions on coverage for their blog from their readers via Twitter, according to their blog post yesterday at Yahoo! . . . [more]

I am in the lovely City of Calgary today celebrating Stampede, well, working AND celebrating. My office mates are wearing hats and boots and western dress. I crossed a street in downtown cowtown behind a horse at lunch. There are parties, parties, and more parties. It is very cool! Even though I am an Albertan from birth, I didn’t realize what a big deal Stampede is.

Stampede often serves as an excellent analogy for our Alberta politicians. Evidence of this can be found in the Alberta Hansard from March 5, speaking about the budget and the economy:

This is

A working paper on the digitization of Canadian parliamentary publications was produced in the spring and posted recently to the Parliamentary Internet site:

The aim of the Working Paper (begun in September 2008) is to provide an overview of:

• which published papers relating to the operations of Parliament have been digitized;
• by which organization;
• where the digitized works are housed;
• who is permitted access &
• plans for future digitization.

(…) The goal is to help inform the development of a coherent strategy amongst the various stakeholders to digitize, make available and preserve over the long term, the corpus of Canadian

Yahoo Search has just launched a notepad that’s aimed at helping you do research on the web. It is, in effect, a replacement for the Notebook that Google killed a few weeks ago, and Yahoo hopes it will draw searchers into using their engine.

It’s a fairly simple but smart application: when Yahoo senses from your queries that you’re doing research, it will make Search Pad available in the upper right hand corner of your Yahoo Search window, along with some suggestions as to how your searches might be glossed. Search Pad will automatically capture the bones of your searches, . . . [more]

The venture capital press have announced that

Thomson Reuters, the leading financial news and business information company, has acquired Indlaw Communications Pvt. Ltd., a Delhi-based legal information company, for an undisclosed amount. Indlaw runs a legal, tax and regulatory information database website called www.Indlaw.com.

Earlier in the week e-discovery diva and twitterer Peg Duncan sent out a request for “an ‘official’ French translation for ‘redaction’…” (She’d come up with épuration, caviardage and expurgation thus far.) Then, as synchronicity will have it, shortly afterwards I came across the University of Ottawa’s CLTD (Centre for Legal Translation and Documentation) lexicons, which I believe we’ve not pointed to on Slaw before.

The Federal Lexicon / lexique fédéral presents you with a word list in either English or French, each word linked to a collection of uses (word plus context) drawn from federal legislation in the other language, . . . [more]

A rant / proposal on Canadian legal journal indexes:

As many SLAW readers will know, there are two main products that index Canadian legal journal literature:

– the Index to Canadian Legal Literature (ICLL), available in print from Carswell and online on each of Westlaw Canada and LexisNexis Canada (early 1980’s to current but I believe the print purports to include some pre-1980 content).

– the Index to Canadian Legal Periodical Literature (ICLPL) (print only, from 1960 to current but with a large publishing lag/delay (i.e., I believe the 2005 annual volume was published circa 2008).

[I am intentionally not . . . [more]

A small Canadian legal venture announced itself recently, going public in its very early stages. LexPublica, using the .ca domain so that the URL is lexpubli.ca, aims to be both a business and an online source for free legal instruments and information. At the moment LexPublica is only a blog, where the two founders, Martin Ertl (a McGill grad who has worked at Davis LLP) and Zak Greant, a techie, explain what they hope to do, which seems to be akin to what JD Supra is doing in having lawyers post their material for display and use by . . . [more]

The British Library, together with partners, has put on line the Codex Sinaticus, the earliest known surviving version of the Christian Bible, including the Old Testament, dating to somewhere in the middle of the fourth century. The website enables you to peruse certain pages of the document with varying magnification and, in some cases, with different kinds of lighting. The image you see here is a portion of Leviticus — Chapter 21, Verse 5 — chosen more or less randomly from among the many regulations and statutes found in the Septuagint.

  . . . [more]

These news items likely aren’t worthwhile putting as separate posts, so this is a silly season round-up of odd notes from the legal media.

We’re Staying in Dayton

Despite what we speculated last year about the outsourcing of jobs from Dayton, Lexis told the local paper last week that it has no plans to move and that 3,000 jobs in town are safe.

Amazing ROI in Legal Publishing

Want to quadruple your money in 55 months? Sounds like a Madoff line.

Well, in 2004, a London fund put £750,000 of fund money into a Lexis spin-off, a MBO . . . [more]