Schedule L of Bill 114 in Ontario, if passed, will effectively over-rule the Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Hare v Hare. The Bill will amend the Limitations Act, 2002, by tying the limitation period to the date of default under a demand loan rather than the date of the loan. The Ontario Bar Association discusses this issue in its October 28th e-newsletter. . . . [more]

Two law professors are offering a book for sale at: http://www.semaphorepress.com/about.html, on a pay what you want basis. It is a casebook on intellectual property law. An interesting business model — will they succeed? Time will tell for these and other entrepreneurs. A comment from their Web site: “Be a part of the solution to $130 casebooks, by fostering the creation of $30 casebooks: Please pay the suggested price. If you can’t pay it, please at least pay something to help Semaphore Press succeed.” . . . [more]

In 2009, the Christian Science Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper in the United States to replace its daily print edition with its excellent website; the 100 year-old news organization will offer subscribers weekly print and daily e-mail editions.

It’s always been a thoughtful paper with excellent writing and probing journalists. The title has always been misleading. It’s a website worth putting on your bookmark list.

Agence France Presse draws the dots to Gannett job cuts – it remains to be seen who follows the CSM lead. . . . [more]

For a price-tag of $125 million ((Which must be small change for Google)) Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild resolved a challenge to the Google Books project.

The settlement agreement resolves a class-action suit filed on Sept. 20, 2005, by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed three years ago, by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster. It is subject to approval by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

For . . . [more]

I am attending the Ark Group conference entitled Knowledge Management in the Modern Law Firm (in Chicago – cold and windy but a great city).

On day 1 (Monday), there were a number of key points I took away, including:

1) Strategic planning: a number of presentations discussed the need to ensure that your knowledge management (KM) initiatives are aligned with the firm’s strategic goals and directly support those goals. Examples were given where user feedback (e.g., “What is it that makes your work more difficult?” and “What is it that can make your work more efficient?”) from firm . . . [more]

The significance of the offer by Maritime Law Book of free access to its collection of over 215,000 cases under the name “Raw Judgments” has not yet been given the attention it deserves in the world of Canadian legal information as a portent of things to come.

Eric Appleby, the founder of Maritime Law Book, has long been a leading innovator in Canadian legal publishing, from the launch of the New Brunswick Reports, to the creation of a national jurisdictional law reporter system in print and online, to the introduction of the MLB Key Number System. Based on his track . . . [more]

A good post from Howard Knopf bringing everyone up to speed on the lack of transparency at Access Copyright, brought to the fore by the recent action of the League of Canadian Poets. Universities licence with AC, even though it is arguable that a preponderance of the copying done on campus, and also in the K12 systems, falls within the fair dealing exceptions, especially as explicated in CCH v. LSUC. For a very good, accessible discussion see Murray and Trosow’s Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide. . . . [more]

I really enjoyed the lecture tonight by Dr. David Weinberger as part of the Bertha Bassam lecture at the University of Toronto’s i-school (Faculty of Information). The lecture was titled “Knowledge at the End of the Information Age.”

SLAW readers will know Weinberger as the author of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007), as discussed previously on SLAW ( ).

Weinberger continued his themes from Everything is Miscellaneous: By starting with the premise that the Internet is both extremely odd at the same as being quite familiar, he documented the transformation of information . . . [more]

The Nov. 2008 issue of the AALL Spectrum has an article entitled The Wise Researcher: One library’s experience implementing a federated search product.

The article, by Yumin Jiang and Georgia Briscoe of the University of Colorado, describes how the William A. Wise Law Library at that institution went about choosing a product that allows for searching across multiple specialty databases.

After comparing products on the market for things such as databases included, installation and maintenance, price, search options, and result sorting and display capabilities, the Wise Library opted for 360 Search, a product of Serials Solutions.

The authors caution . . . [more]

Tip of the Day: While preparing a paper on “Effective Litigation Knowledge Management” for the November 17-18, 2008 Canadian Law & Technology Forum in Toronto, I reminded myself of an extremely useful chart for any drafter of litigation pleadings, being Appendix A from Summary Judgments and Dispositions Before Trial (LexisNexis Butterworths) by Robert van Kessel. This chart sets out the legal elements for thirty-seven causes of action (ranging from abuse of process to unjust enrichment) and fifteen defences (including duress and novation). Citations to supporting case law are provided. UPDATE: The author let me know (23 October 2008) . . . [more]

The competition between LexisNexis Quicklaw and WestlaweCARSWELL in Canada can only benefit users. In a number of areas, the companies are responding to the other by announcing new or improved products (e.g., the introduction by LexisNexis of Halsbury’s Laws of Canada appears to have Carswell reinvigorating the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest).

Another area where this has happened is in online Words and Phrases services. Although Quicklaw was first to the mark with an online service, WestlaweCARSWELL has recently added an online equivalent of its print (blue-colored) multi-volume Words and Phrases services (and I think I like it better).

Likewise, since . . . [more]

It was with mixed feelings we have “retired” our All England Law Reports – Canadian Annotations to the Consolidated Tables and Index looseleaf but it just wasn’t being used.

It was a great product that provided a list of U.K. cases reported in the All England Law Reports showing which Canadian court decisions had considered those U.K. decisions. Its strength was quality of entries. However, its time has likely come given the ease by which one can search on the name of the U.K. case (e.g., jarvis /4 swan) in a Canadian full-text judgments database to get a more exhaustive . . . [more]