Today’s important for a couple of reasons. First, because it’s election day here in Canada. Second, because it’s the first global Open Access Day, a day to spread the word about the benefits of open access to online information and knowledge. Law is one of the areas where free and open access to data is of the highest importance to the health of a society, and fortunately for us here in Canada we have CanLII, which steadily improves in coverage and utility. Now we need law faculties to decide to make their scholarship freely available to all, in . . . [more]

The International Development Law Organization (IDLO) is an intergovernmental organization of 18 states aimed at helping developing countries establish the rule of law and good governance practices. Canada, though CIDA, has been working with IDLO in Afghanistan since 2002.

Readers interested in issues of law in developing countries might consult IDLO’s publications, where you will also find a library of links to relevant online resources (journals, newsletters, newspapers and news agencies). . . . [more]

You can now stay abreast of what Osgoode Hall Law School’s law library is buying thanks to a new blog that lists purchases catalogued within the last week. Happily, each item is hyperlinked to its page in the catalogue. And, of course, there’s an RSS feed. . . . [more]

Robert Ambrogi has a post over on Legal Blog Watch about a conference at Seattle University School of Law on the digital future of legal casebooks. It seems that the situation in the U.S. is no different from that here: publishers and academics are unclear about what they want in a casebook, though both (some academics, certainly) perceive that electronic casebooks are the way to go.

One upshot appears to be that CALI and Gene Koo will organize a group to build and use an e-casebook on cyberlaw. There is, of course, a certain “rightness” about a course in . . . [more]

Bill Ives has a couple of posts on the use of wikis for knowledge management at law firms on his blog, Portals and KM.

In Wikis in Knowledge Management at Law Firms – Part One: ThoughtFarmer Example he reports on a discussion at a recent event in Boston, where two examples were discussed. The first was of a Canadian firm (unnamed) where the KM and IT people had set up Domino wikis (i.e. inside the firewall) for the various practice groups. The result was that they created silos of information. As a solution they turned to ThoughtFarmer. After . . . [more]

From the earliest days of online legal research, the death of the traditional law report in print was predicted. Online access to cases would make print unnecessary. In the paperless world that was imminent, there would be no need for the traditional law report. Storage problems for sets of law report series would be eliminated and the cost of searching cases would be greatly reduced.

That was the vision for online legal research in 1973 when Lexis Nexis and Quicklaw pioneered in offering commercial online access to case law. It was going to be just a matter of time before . . . [more]

Here’s an article by Dorothea Salo, an experienced and outspoken Institutional Repositories manager, on the state of IRs, open access, and academic libraries: Innkeeper at the Roach Motel. Its a real blast of industrial cleanser where we usually get soft soap. Here is her blog: Caveat Lector. Also see this interesting interview with her. . . . [more]

The chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, warned law students in a speech last Thursday about relying too unthinkingly on internet sources for legal research. Delivering Drake University‘s Dwight D. Opperman Lecture, he pointed to what he described as the growing practice of using simple word searches to uncover precedents, when the cases recovered in this manner may have little doctrinal connection to the issues at hand. Thinking “outside the box” is fine, he said, but “…You cannot think effectively outside the box if you don’t know where the box is.” And that requires the . . . [more]

The Global Legal Monitor, a publication of the Law Library of Congress, has been posted about on Slaw here and here and other posts as well. Today, the Law Librarian Blog reports that this useful service is no longer a monthly pdf, but rather a continually updated website with an RSS feed. Thanks Law Library of Congress! Hat tip to Ron Jones. . . . [more]

Has the Internet changed our practices on the proof of foreign law?

Canadian lawyers and judges are, almost by definition, comparativists. We take for granted from the start of our careers that we may have to look to English law, or American or Australian. Civilistes look at French doctrine, to Planiol, Tunc or the Encyclopedie Galloz.

One doesn’t need to spend much time in Michel-Adrien Sheppard’s wonderful collection at the Supreme Court of Canada to recognize the importance of comparative law to that court. Homage to Claire L’Heureux-Dube.

Our judges would regard as odd the debate between Justices Tony Kennedy . . . [more]

Some updates on the progress of Zotero: positive reactions here and here, and a big fat corporate ‘welcome to the big leagues’ here.

I’ve been wrestling with XML to try to get a Canadian legal style in place for Zotero. Caron Rollins and others at the Diana M. Priestly Law Library at UVic already devoted considerable energies to creating such a style for Endnote gratis. Zotero’s import feature for Endnote styles (currently disabled in the beta download) would save me considerable time and trouble. I wonder where the user-generated contributions to Endnote are in this dispute. Any thoughts . . . [more]

Ron Friedmann of Prism Legal Consulting Inc. has surveyed the current state of legal outsourcing in his fantastic article Why and What Lawyers Should Consider Outsourcing on LLRX.com (September 1, 2008).

In the article, he discusses the evolution of outsourcing in law firms and talks about outsourcing in terms of overall law firm management and cost efficiency. He summarizes the benefits, and has put together an excellent table outlining administrative and legal functions that might be outsourced by a firm. He discusses challenges HR departments face, especially with regard to maintaining the right amount of secretarial staffing, and he also . . . [more]