A number of colleagues I respect remain excited about “wikis in law firms” (see Connie Crosby here and Doug Cornelius here as two examples).

I remain contrarian and cynical. Aren’t all major law firms with mature document management systems (DMSs) “wikified” to the max already? If everyone in the firm has online access to the “Smith file” or the “Jones file” and can edit documents, view calendars or other lists of information, access research memos, and post comments, isn’t this “wiki” personified?

This raises the question: what makes “wikis” different than DMSs? Is it simply ease-of-use and the fact that . . . [more]

One of the richest sources of podcasts is the iTunes Store and particularly its iTunes U, where universities can make their audio and video materials available generally. ((The user guide is available in PDF format here.)) Yale is here, MIT, Stanford and a couple of dozen more — and from Canada there’s Concordia and Queen’s, with at least York to follow, I believe. Until recently this was great for a history lesson or that shot of engineering you found yourself craving after a hard day in court. But now New York Law School is on the board. There are more . . . [more]

I have been talking wikis with Doug Cornelius, KM and law blogger, senior attorney at Goodwin Procter and also part of their knowledge management team. He has been asked to put together a panel about wikis inside the law firm for the ILTA conference in August. He is looking for examples as well as panelists.

Tomorrow night I will be talking to my regular group, Toronto Wiki Tuesdays, about the same topic–the use of wikis (and other social networking tools) by lawyers. I, too, would love to hear examples. Or better yet, if you are in Toronto . . . [more]

As some of you know, I have another life in which I occasionally crank out more words (spill ink and post pixels, if you will) than people who are formally academic lawyers. One aspect involves writing about what “cause” means in Canadian tort law. (OK, so I’ve weird hobbies, but then it beats allowing people to shoot hard rubber objects at your body, on the understanding that, more often than not, you’ll try to make the object hit you rather than getting out of the way.) 

Anyway, the point is that I knew, anecdotally and from coincidental serendipity when looking . . . [more]

The RCMP Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change has recently made its Final Report (pdf) available on the web. The Introduction to the report and other information can be found here. As part of its mandate the Task Force commissioned several other reports which can be found at the URL above. These include:

* Background paper prepared for the Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change in the RCMP
by: Gilles Paquet

* Report to the Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: Examination of Internal Management Structures of Police Forces
by: Police . . . [more]

Special Libraries Association Toronto Chapter’s recent newsletter has a summary of a great presentation held in November on knowledge management. Presented by Laura Knapp, Manager, Knowledge Services at the Ontario Securities Commission, Laura Purves from L. Purves Consulting, and Heather Ritchie, Knowledge Manager at McCarthy Tetrault, the discussion focused on the following:

• What is KM?
• Challenges to KM successes
• Key KM skills
• Importance of KM sponsors
• Suggestions to ensure success
• Knowledge managers vs. librarians
• Measuring the success of KM projects

Now this is useful: Google announced today that you can create forms using spreadsheets in Google Docs. You may find it easiest to open a new spreadsheet, save the blank document, and go immediately to “Share,” where you’ll find the share as a form option. Following that will offer you the chance to create a form using a wizard. All of which is cool. But the kicker is that you can then send this form out via email and your recipients can fill it in without having to log into Google or, indeed, have Google accounts. Their data, sent by . . . [more]

Back when it was sunny and warm, I posted about Google Labs’ experiment with displaying search results along a timeline. Now that experiment has moved one step further into the mainstream. A week or so ago Google announced that it was making three new search views available, still on an experimental basis, but now letting you join the trial (and presumably requiring you to have a Google account that you’re logged into).

If you opt to join the “alternate views for search results” experiment from the sign-up page your Google searches will thereafter display three new buttons at the top . . . [more]

Take a look at the fledgling blog law.librarians. Lacking an “about” page, it’s not entirely clear where it’s headed, but it would seem to be a legal librarian linkblog with some pretty familiar names as members. . . . [more]

The American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management magazine, January/February 2008 issue focuses on marketing technology trends. Heavy emphasis on social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and podcasting. This is a selection from the full roster of articles:

Marketing Technology Trends
Today’s marketing arsenal features a vast array of tools—as well as technology practices that range from the truly cutting-edge to the archaic. Where does your firm fall on the scale? Here’s a look at some technologies that can really boost your business development efforts.
By John D. Bowers

Tracking Law Firm Marketing Technology
What are the technology needs of

Thinking that the resource might be of some interest to our readers, I followed a link from an email list that promised the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Women’s Studies Section–Women’s History Sites [http://libraries.mit.edu/humanities/WomensStudies/history.html], with a section on Canada.

• That actually leads to an error message on MIT’s website, one annoying feature of which is that it wipes out the erring URL and replaces it with the totally unhelpful 404 URL. This means that as you attempt to reform the original URL, moving higher up the nested directories looking for a substantive hit, you have to paste the wrong

The Law Commissions of the UK and Scotland yesterday published their 18th in a series of proposed statute law repeals. A draft Bill containing the proposed repeals will be introduced soon into the House of Lords.

“In reforming the law, the Law Commission does not just propose new laws. It also proposes the repeal of laws that have become obsolete. The purpose of our statute law repeals work is to modernise and simplify the statute book, reduce its size and save the time of lawyers and others who use it. This in turn helps to avoid unnecessary costs. It