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

The announcement that Louis Mirando has been appointed as Osgoode’s new Chief Law Librarian was made today by Dean Patrick Monahan:

I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Louis Mirando as
Osgoode’s Chief Law Librarian, effective March 1.

Mr. Mirando, who has a Master of Library Science degree from the University
of Toronto and has also done post-graduate studies at the University of
Cologne in Germany and at U of T, has provided outstanding leadership as
Director, Library Services at Torys LLP in Toronto for the past 15 years.
Prior to that, he held a variety of

Perhaps the only consolation for going to the dentist is the chance to read a magazine of the sort you wouldn’t normally see. Buried behind sadly outdated copies of Flare and Chatelaine, Sports Illustrated and People, I found MIT’s Technology Review. It’s great. If you’re interested generally in technology, and not just in the information technology that powers much of your legal work, this is the mag for you. But don’t take my word for it — I’m not selling subscriptions. Check it out online.

Three or four fresh stories get posted each day [feed]; there are . . . [more]

Last week Agnese Caruso reported that the Library of Congress is running a pilot project with Flickr to make its photographic collections available over the web. According to the Library of Congress Blog, the response has been tremendous:

The response to the Library’s pilot project with Flickr has been nothing short of astounding. You always hope for a positive reaction to something like this, but it has been utterly off the charts—from the Flickr community, from the blogosphere, from the news media—it is nothing short of amazing.

Let’s start out with a few statistics, as of last night (thanks,

New on LLRX.com is an article by Debbie Ginsberg and Meg Kribble called Social Networks for Law Librarians and Law Libraries, or How We Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Friending. Great title, and a great article to go with it!

I enjoyed their discussion of how law librarians are using social networks to connect with communities and each other. My personal interest is how law firms are using social networks, so I found this little tidbit interesting: . . . [more]

The most recent issue of the Canadian government’s Weekly Checklist features the 2006 annual report on electronic surveillance from Public Safety Canada.

The report outlines the use of electronic surveillance of private communications by law enforcement agencies to assist in criminal investigations.

Under the Criminal Code, agencies must obtain judicial authorization before conducting the surveillance.The government is required to prepare and present to Parliament an annual report on the use of electronic surveillance.

The 2006 Annual Report covers a five-year period from 2002 to 2006. The Report includes new statistics for the period of January 1, 2006 to December . . . [more]

We’re getting ready to launch our SharePoint 2007 portal. At launch, our goal is to have features and functions that will appeal to both searchers and browsers. The portal will be the new desktop and will be the access point for legal, non-legal, business, administrative, client and financial information in the firm.

Some of the content on the portal is organized by practice area. Content for a practice area will include relevant precedents, commonly used research resources, practice area materials (such as meetings agendas and minutes), and relevant business development material.

Of particular interest to me is the ability to . . . [more]

An announcement that’s appropriate, given that this weeks Column is on e-discovery:

The Sedona Canada E-discovery Principles [PDF] in English are now up on the Canadian E-discovery Portal, which is hosted by Lexum. The French version will be posted soon.

You will also be able to find Canadian e-discovery related precedents (common law, civil law) on the Portal.

Congratulations to everyone involved, particularly the “content managers” Peg Duncan, Dan Pinnington, Frédéric Pelletier and (Slawyer) Dominic Jaar. . . . [more]

We learn yet again, from a recent N.Y. Times piece that book titles can’t be copyrighted: there are now two books in print (one 30 years old, mind you) called The Saucier’s Apprentice.

Apart from the fact that Raymond Sokolov, the author of the older book, has done a brilliant job of promoting his work through this piece — it’s the work that comes up when you search for “the saucier’s apprentice” — what interests me is the question of why. Why can’t you copyright a book’s title? Or, to put it more broadly, why can’t you protect . . . [more]

A letter has gone out to Canada’s law deans from the Director General of Legal Affairs Bureau of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) stating that the Bureau wishes to “enhance Canada’s current engagement with the work of the [International Law] Commission, including its studies and recommendations.” The Bureau would like

to hear of Canadian legal academics who are following the Commission’s work, whether in total or with respect to a specific topic. …We would welcome receiving an email providing us with the name, contact details, and areas of specific interest with respect to the Commission’s work