The CBA’s Legal Health Checks, which has been previously mentioned by Yves Faguy here, just released two new checklists in employment law.

One is for hiring for small businesses, and covers contentious issues such as employee/contractor distinctions and employment standards. The other is geared towards workers, and covers the law for non-unionized employees, and covers employment contracts, discrimination and harassment and wrongful dismissal.

Obtaining accurate legal information remains a challenge for the public, and efforts by our legal organizations to make this information more readily accessible is part of our professional mandate.

These checklists are also . . . [more]

iManage, a significant player in the work product managment software space for professional services firms, has announced a management buyout of their business from Hewlett-Packard. From the press release:

The iManage leadership team today announced that it has completed a buyout from Hewlett-Packard (HP) for the purchase of the complete iManage business, including its brand, products and services. iManage co-founder and current General Manager Neil Araujo is the CEO of the management-owned company, now one of the largest independent software companies focused on work product management solutions for professional services firms and their clients. Rafiq Mohammadi, also a co-founder

CanLII has a new friend. Its name is Lexbox.

It’s a product from Lexum — the Montreal-based company responsible for the undergirding technology of CanLII — which first emailed me and a clutch of other legal research types back in late March with an invite to help test the experimental tool when it was still in a closed beta phase.

We were told then that the aim of Lexbox (and you can read a lot more about it here) is to simplify how lawyers store, monitor and share online legal information. Having kicked the tires over the past . . . [more]

The third issue of the IFLA* Law Libraries Section** Newsletter came out last month. It includes a nice report on last summer’s IFLA conference in Lyon, France, which is worth reviewing to get a sense of what’s front of mind in international law libraries. However, what I wanted to draw your attention to is the Lyon Declaration on Access to Information and Development drafted by IFLA and “a number of strategic partners in the library and development communities” and launched at the conference.

“The declaration calls upon the members of the United Nations to make an international commitment to

Click here to try the new search engine!

I recently reviewed the growing list of open access law journals, and re-read Louis Mirando’s series on this topic:

Open Access, Free Access to Law and Access to Canadian Legal Scholarship (Part 2)
Published February 20th, 2014
Open Access, Free Access to Law and Access to Canadian Legal Scholarship (Part 1)
Published October 25th, 2013

He had provided a good list of open access law journal projects. We had snagged a few others as well.

In revamping our University of Windsor Paul Martin Law Library website, I realized that the list . . . [more]

Reading Susan Munro’s post about some of the interesting products and services she learned of at the CALL conference got me thinking. Susan noted:

Countervailing forces (for example, the common use of Google as a first stop for all kinds of research) pull us away from deep-dive research. I keep hearing about the legal research habits of law students and newer lawyers: they start with Google and often go no further.

It is interesting to step back and think about what patterns exist for legal research. If most often a legal research need is fulfilled by a surface scrape, what . . . [more]

There’s an interesting article in the recent issue of AI Magazine called “Truth Is a Lie: Crowd Truth and the Seven Myths of Human Annotation.” AI Magazine is considered the “journal of record for the AI community” and is a product of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a “delayed open access” journal which is nice because that means the articles are openly available 15 months after they’ve been published.*

One reason this article caught my attention is because I’ve been thinking about Kevin Lee’s comment on my post a couple of weeks . . . [more]

Friends and colleagues of Michael Silverstein recently gathered at MacLean House in Toronto to share reminiscences and a musical tribute in his memory. Michael passed away on May 6, 2015, at age 63.

Michael was best known to the legal research community as the “interpreter” of the Canadian Abridgment. Beginning with the co-authoring in 1989 of the Guide to Research Using the Canadian Abridgment, Michael became known as the expert on the structure and content of one of the most byzantine publications that ever saw the light of day. Over the following decades he guided its restructuring and and . . . [more]

National Aboriginal Day was on June 21. The Library of Congress celebrated this event by providing access to Canadian aboriginal law on the Indigenous Law Portal. This is the first time the Indigenous Law Portal has provided coverage that extends beyond the United States.

The Indigenous Law Portal: Canada is organized in three regions: Northern Canada and Arctic, Eastern Canada and Western Canada. The information can also be searched alphabetically or by province. Jennifer Gonzalez has written a nice introductory blog post including information about the origins of Canada’s National Aboriginal Day.

For more information . . . [more]

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) many calls to action that focus on the information management community (museums, Library and Archives Canada, archivist associations, vital statistics agencies, etc.).

Earlier this month, the TRC released its findings after its years-long investigation into the many abuses against Aboriginal children at Church-run Indian Residential Schools in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This week, the ActiveHistory.ca website published an article by Krista McCracken, Archives Supervisor at Algoma University’s Shingwauk Residential School and Wishart A. Library.

It is called The Role of Canada’s Museums and Archives in Reconciliation: . . . [more]

Last June 5^th, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) issued its findings (Complaints against Globe24h.com, 2015 CanLII 33260 (PCC), the “Findings”) in relation with the activities of a Romanian entrepreneur who illegally downloaded a large number of Canadian decisions in order to commercially exploit the desire of the individuals named in these decisions to maintain some degree of privacy. The story of Sebastian Radulescu, the operator of the Globe24h.com website, has been reported by news organizations such as the Financial Post, the CBC and the Globe and Mail. See our summary . . . [more]

Three things are converging for me today on the theme of law librarian visibility. The first: On Firmer Ground – a blog promoting the value of law firm librarians – has revived; the second: I am preparing to attend the Canadian Bar Association Legal Conference in Calgary on behalf of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries in August; the third: a look forward in my calendar to Thursday when I will be at the Edmonton Law Libraries Association HeadStart program.

At their core, a reason behind all of these activities is to raise the profile of law librarians with . . . [more]