Many law firms appear to have implemented or will be implementing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) for online network collaboration and search.

A Google Blog Search on: *sharepoint law firm* has any number of interesting and relevant posts on its applicability to a law firm environment.

From a recent post (sorry, can’t remember where from) I saw mention of a fairly recent “pedia” (or is that “wiki”?) for SharePoint called SharePointPedia that I don’t think has yet been mentioned on SLAW. They describe themselves in these terms:

SharePointPedia.com is a web site where people discover and

Speaking of visualizing legal information, as I was just a post ago, here’s the Brazilian 1988 Constitution done as a “tag” cloud. It’s one of the Visualizations on Many Eyes, an IBM experimental particpatory sandbox. The graphic is linked to the site, and you’ll need Java on to see it. You can search for terms (in Portuguese, naturally) and the cloud display will give results that reflect your search term as it changes letter by letter.

I can’t say that this is ideally what I’d do to a legal document but it does at least give a different perspective. . . . [more]

The Alberta Supreme Court at 100: History & Authority, ed. Jonathan Swainger (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press / Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2007) arrived in my mailbox today. I haven’t read the whole book, but my superficial impression is that it is, in substance, an interesting and useful contribution to the literature.

What caught my eye, though, were the case citations. Here are some examples:
Page 24, note 41: R. v. Cyr, Alberta Law Reports 12, (1917-18):336
Page 62, note 16: R. v. Nan-E-Quis-A-Ka, NWT, Territories Law Reports [cited hereafter TLR] 1(1889):211
Page 92, note . . . [more]

Westlaw has taken its WebPlus search engine out from behind the paywall and made it available freely on the web. Through a combination, it seems, of editorial selection of sites or domains and an algorithm the engine offers to fetch you from the web a better selection of legally interesting results than a simple Google search might do.

Slow typing in the search box brings up a list of suggested “issues.” Results can be filtered by a simple set of facets.

There’s a promo video that was used within Westlaw proper for law students — who seem to me, alas, . . . [more]

Just learned that Israel is the latest destination for legal services outsourcing.

Green Point’s Legal Services Division has engaged with one of the world’s largest legal publishers to provide a full range of editing and editorial services, as well as original content creation services. This client joins the growing roster of prestigious legal information providers who have discovered the benefits of Green Point’s dual shore model – legal resources in India, working under the supervision of bar-admitted US attorneys working in Israel. Green Point’s value added legal services, which make US legal talent in Israel available to US law firms

As I take a moment from battening down the hatches here on the East Coast today, I simply want to ask a question of Slaw-ers out there. What is the Quota of your institutional or company email account?

Not your gmail, hotmail, yahoo or whatever interweb service, but the email account supplied to you by your employer or institution. Here at Dalhousie I have a 97.66mb limit and after being on a little hiatus recently, I had to fight to get my inbox under control but also to stay under the quota. So I’m just curious as to what the . . . [more]

The current issue of the New Yorker has an article by Anthony Grafton called “Digitization and Its Discontents” that discusses the ongoing “tension” between the traditional print library model versus the Google Book projects of the world. The article is well written and provides an excellent general overview of the issues. . . . [more]

Joel Alleyne’s Extreme KM column this past week on Everything is Miscellaneous – A Must-Read Book enouraged me to move forward my plan to read the book. I read it last night and agree with Joel that it is “must reading.”

As Joel mentions, David Weinberger’s central premise in the book is that the “power of the miscellaneous comes directly from the fact that in the third order [note: what the author of the book means as our current era of digital information], everything is connected and therefore everything is metadata” (p. 105).

My initial cynical reaction to the book . . . [more]

The NY Times Technology section has been revamped, principally by bringing the Blogrunner technology stories into the page and giving it central place — literally in the middle. Blogrunner is the aggregator that the Times bought last year and that culls material from various blogs on a wide range of topics. This is the first time that the Times has incorporated stories from outside sources directly into its publication.

The Times Technology section cum Blogrunner, unlike TechMeme, doesn’t rely soley on an algorithm to choose pieces automatically, but rather on a combination of machine and human decision-making.

Relevant links are: . . . [more]

Steve Matthews, Slawyer and the person behind Stem Legal Web Enterprises, has once again shown his technical chops. Now that the Canadian legal publishers have finally come into this decade by putting out RSS feeds, thanks in large measure to his and Connie Crosby’s chivvying and chiding, ((See, e.g., Canadian Legal Publishers – RSS Feed Update)), there’s some interesting publisher data to work with.

Steve has taken advantage of the various tools that are out there now on the web to mix and to gather the feeds into one place, LegalPubs.ca.

There you’ll find an aggregation of . . . [more]

Today’s Bar Talk in The Globe & Mail suggests that the Canadian Lawyer Magazine is soon to formally launch its new magazine aimed at Associates (and to be called by the same name?). So far, there only appears to be “blog-like” postings on the website and it is not clear to me when the formal magazine launch will take place. Since most of the large Toronto law firms are doing student recruitment interviews next week, I thought the posting on the “Google Effect” by Donalee Moulton was timely – as per one of the persons quoted in that . . . [more]

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is pleased to announce the creation of the Humanities Research Network (HRN). HRN will provide a world-wide, online community for research in all areas of Humanities, following the model of the other subject matter networks within SSRN (http://www.ssrn.com).

We expect HRN to become a comprehensive online resource for research in humanities, providing scholars with access to current work in their field and facilitating research and scholarship.

At the outset HRN will have networks for classics, English & American literature, and philosophy. Naturally, in each of these subnets there’s a place for law:

• Classics