In my recent post “A Few Thoughts for Family Law Litigants: Why it Pays to Let Bygones Be Bygones,” I wrote about the foolishness of litigants who allow themselves to be guided by hurt feelings or desire for revenge when taking their family law dispute to court. I also gave a few examples of the typical sort of silliness I often saw in my practice when parents managed their conflict by exchanging allegations and counterallegations in affidavits, such as this gem from early in my career:

Her: “You drink all the time. You’re always drunk and there are

I just read Mark Phillips’s paper recently published by the Canadian Law Library Review: “Charting Law’s Cosmos: Toward a Crowdsourced Citator” (2015) 40:2 Can L Libr Rev 13. Phillips’s text is sufficiently refreshing to merit the deliberately provocative title of this short post. Immerging oneself in it is like being 40 again: abundant criticism of the slow moving incumbents, strong expressions of idealism peppered with some good ideas. Such a reading is good for the heart and the brain.

The thesis of Mark Phillips is that full-text searching alone is hazardous for legal research. Citators could be useful, but they . . . [more]

Hannah Furness, Arts Correspondent at the Telegraph, reports that the Director of the British Library Roly Keating thinks this could be the case. In a nice piece on the future of libraries Keating says the following:

“I was surprised, and continue to be, how many smart people ask me in all seriousness ‘do we really still need these library things in this age of smart phones, search engines’ and so on? … Our commercial partners in the information delivery space do wonderful things and we couldn’t live our lives without them. But the time frame we think

On Tuesday, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its findings after its multi-year investigation into over a century of physical, cultural and sexual abuses against Aboriginal children at Church-run Indian Residential Schools.

The Government Library & IM Professionals Network, part of the Canadian Library Association, has compiled the Commission’s many calls to action that focus on the information management community (museums, Library and Archives Canada, archivist associations, vital statistics agencies, etc.).

Library and Archives Canada has compiled a list of resources relating to residential school records.

  . . . [more]

A couple of posts ago I mentioned the Public Review of LegalDocML’s Akoma Ntoso v1.0. If you’re interested in legal XML and want to learn more about the Akoma Ntoso XML standard there are a couple of courses being offered at the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia this summer.

The first is the Basic Course offering an, “introduction to Akoma Ntoso XML standard and to basic XML technologies for drafting and managing standard-compliant legislative and legal documents.” The second part, an Advanced Course, will provide, “in-depth analysis of the higher levels of Semantic Web technologies . . . [more]

I probably won’t be making it to the Chicago Bar Association’s CLE on “How To… Get the Most Out of Twitter” tomorrow. But that’s not to say that I wouldn’t have been choked to miss Catherine Reach’s tweet mentioning it. Mostly that’s because there was something else she linked to which caught my attention: Kevin O’Keefe’s post from last Thursday heralding that “Twitter is teaming up with Google to bring Twitter’s real-time content to Google’s search results.”

So there it is. Google and Twitter are getting friendly (once more). And just when you thought Mobilegeddon was . . . [more]

As you may have heard, during the recent E-Laws website migration, the decision was taken to discontinue producing the Detailed Legislative History Tables.

In 2002, Ontario stopped publishing the Table of Public Statutes in the Statutes of Ontario. Instead the SO directed users to E-Laws for these tables moving forward.
The Table of Public Statutes has been published since 1877 as an important historical legal research tool.

Now the tables have been discontinued outright, however the E-Laws team has not yet devised a solution to take its place.

Accordingly, I have prepared a letter and petition to the Ontario Attorney . . . [more]

In 2013, the Library of Parliament, in collaboration with Canadiana.org, launched a new Canadian Historical Parliamentary Resources digital portal.

The portal initially offered free public access to digital versions of the debates of the Parliament of Canada in both official languages, starting with the first session of Parliament in 1867 until debate coverage on the parliamentary website parl.gc.ca begins (in the mid-1990s).

The portal has now added access to the Journals of the Senate and of the House of Commons, again going back to 1867. The Senate and House of Commons Journals are the notes and records kept . . . [more]

When it comes to technology, are we not always hearing about the breakneck speed of change? The inexorable pace and ubiquity of it? How technology is revolutionizing law and practice? Our magazines, CLEs and law bloggings are replete with calls to brace for one type of Lawmageddon or another—the imminent (or at least happening really, really, probably, rather soon) confluence of events that will change lawyers’ lives forever. Anything short of fully encrypted communication between lawyer and client will spell negligence. You will become or be devoured by an alternative business structure. Cybersecurity will become the mantra by which you . . . [more]

OASIS* is a “nonprofit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.” Under the OASIS umbrella is the LegalXML Member Section a group of “lawyers, developers, application vendors, government agencies and members of academia” working on the creation of “standards for the electronic exchange of legal data.”

The OASIS LegalDocumentML (LegalDocML) Technical Committee recently announced a month long review period to gather feedback for a number of standards they have development.

“The OASIS LegalDocML TC works to advance worldwide best practices for the use

Earlier this week at its annual conference in Moncton, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries announced that the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History book series was the winner of the 2015 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

Over the past 35 years, the Society has published books that cover the breadth of Canadian legal history, including the history of crime and punishment, women and the law, the legal treatment of minorities and much more.

The Award is named after the late Hugh Lawford, law professor at Queen’s in Kingston, Ontario and the founder of Quicklaw. . . . [more]

The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Law will take place at the University of San Diego next month. ICAIL has been held biennially since 1987 and provides a “forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest research results and practical applications and stimulates interdisciplinary and international collaboration.”

The proceedings are published by the Association for Computing Machinary (ACM) and the abstract from the proceedings of the 14th meeting has this to say about how research in this area has emerged and the complimentary nature of AI and law:

“It is not a coincidence that