Great news from BC, one of the last Canadian bastions of pay-per-view access to current legislation. The lobbying efforts of the Law Foundation and many other parties has paid off, and as of Jan. 1 2009 access will be available at www.bclaws.ca.

From the announcement, here are the features that will be offered:

bclaw-features (its a 2-page excerpt – scroll down to see more).

UPDATE:

An email to me kindly points out that I mis-read the document… we will get current BC laws, but all the features listed are those of QPLegaleze, NOT the new service. . . . [more]

Yesterday, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada tabled her annual report on the Privacy Act. While she came down hard on a number of federal bodies such as the passport office, one aspect of the report should be of interest to lawyers generally.

The Commissioner reports on a whole range of complaints against tribunals and quasi-judicial bodies for publishing sensitive personal information about parties and non-parties. Decisions and tribunal records have always contained such information, but now that more of these decisions are readily available online, complainants are not happy that searching for their names online will bring up . . . [more]

CanLII announced this evening that, together with LexUM, it has released Reflex, “a tool allowing you to hyperlink your documentation with CanLII’s material.”

The simple notion is that, on the Reflex page, you upload a document (or a case name or single citation) from your machine and Reflex, recognizing case names, citations and legislation data, will edit that document by supplying citations (where necessary) and hyperlinks to the appropriate text. You can save the final result as an HTML document (which, of course, you can then convert to other formats as needed). Reflex accepts material in the following formats: . . . [more]

Senator Goldstein has reintroduced his anti-spam bill in the Senate, as of last month. It is now Bill S-202. A similar bill (I have not compared them) was on the order paper before the last election. (It’s interesting that Senate bills die too when elections are called, considering that the Senate is not elected and the Senators all continue in office despite elections for the House of Commons. Yes, I understand the principle, but its application is not inevitable – though it is not going to change, either.)

You can read the Senator’s comments as he began second reading debate . . . [more]

Netlegal.ca is the latest legal service company to cross my radar. This Canadian company (headquartered in Charlottetown with servers inside our borders) offers several services through their site surrounding the premise of connecting people and paper electronically. The main components of their platform of services include:

NetService – firms, lawyers, and judges can choose to upload files that can then be served BY CONSENT through another Netlegal member or by fax. The fax service to the courts uses the correct forms for all Canadian jurisdictions. Judges may also set up e-filing on a case making an order that parties file . . . [more]

Starting today, the New York Times online edition is linking to stories from outside sources, including blogs. Sort of. Clearly nervous about sending you directly to news from outside sources — something that was verboten until now — the Times offers a link on its main web page to something called Times Extra. Clicking that gives you the same front page, but now each story has a suffix of links to other news sources’ take on the tale. So, for example, the opening paragraphs of the story on the cutting of rates by the central banks of Europe are followed . . . [more]

A recent WSL Blog posting on legal outsourcing to India (a topic covered quite extensively on SLAW), reminded me I was going to mention the panel that spoke on this topic a few weeks back at the Canadian Law and Technology Forum in Toronto. One speaker discussed offshore outsourcing and the other speaker discussed outsourcing domestically to Canadian lawyers.

The offshore outsourcing speaker was lawyer Gavin Birer of Legalwise Outsourcing Inc. (who wrote a good introductory article on the topic here on SLAW earlier this summer). Given good high-speed Internet, secure communications and a body of qualified lawyers in India, . . . [more]

Announcement today from the Library of Congress: here is the Press Release

The Global Legal Information Network Offers New Features . . . [more]

Librarians often debate the prices of law books, wondering why pricing soars beyond normal trade publishing prices. The suspicion is that editorial and marketing costs are not higher than trade costs. Of course one factor is the small size of print runs. Canadian publishers faced with demand for an out of print book (like Bill Estey’s Legal Opinions in Commercial Transactions) will often print just a couple of hundred copies.

Now we’ve actual evidence of a major legal publisher going for print on demand. The costs are, of course, high in relation to page count.

OUP have recently re-issued, . . . [more]

RIA Novosti sets up agency providing legal information. Here is the Press Release

MOSCOW, December 3 – The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti has established a law agency to cover new developments taking place in Russia’s legal system, a RIA Novosti deputy editor-in-chief said on Wednesday.

The Agency for Legal and Judicial Information (APSI), set up jointly with Russia’s Supreme Court, Constitutional Court and Supreme Court of Arbitration, is due to begin its work in the near future, Maxim Filimonov said.

The new agency aims to provide objective information on the activity of the courts in an effort to . . . [more]

Two of my favourite blogs, The Court and Michel-Adrien Sheppard (aka Library Boy) come together in this post, which went up today. Michel-Adrien is certainly no stranger to SLAWyers, as he is a frequent contributor to the discussions here. Thanks to Michel-Adrien and the intereviewer for this insight.

I’m sure I’m not alone in my fascination with career path stories – learning how someone else came to be where they are now. The steelworker who is now a systems architect, the former prison guard who is now a lawyer – these stories show just how powerful serendipity can . . . [more]

CommonLII has just announced that, thanks to Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby, it is now making the English Reports from 1220-1873 available online. (Well, from 1457, really; the 1220 cases, of which there are a great many, are nonetheless outliers: the dates leap from 1220 straight to 1457. The data were provided by Justis.

The cases are in PDF and not searchable, so far as I can tell. OCR of that old type would be a nightmare anyway.

I have to say it is an impressive sight to look at the four centuries of links to this great . . . [more]