Tina Gheen, Emerging Technologies Librarian at the Library of Congress, blogged about the Indigenous Law Portal introduced as part of the “A Dialog for Catalogers and Reference Librarians: Class K from Alpha to Omega” program at the recent American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in San Antonio. Gheen, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Jolande Goldberg spoke about this new online resource “created to make tribal law more accessible and findable by providing a comprehensive listing of tribes, tribal websites, and online primary source materials.”

The Portal uses the structure of the new Library of Congress Classification . . . [more]

A post on the Strategic Librarians LinkedIn Group led me to the Cooperative Intelligence blog where Ellen Naylor (CEO of The Business Intelligence Source, Inc.) posted about templates for win loss analysis.

As more and more legal work filters to law firms through procurement groups, RFPs, and RFIs, I wonder about the use of sales methods in law firms. As a librarian, I worked with legal information suppliers selling information to my organization. I also sold the services of the library department to my internal clients. In my new role of process improvement, I will likely use techniques . . . [more]

This month’s Canadian Lawyer has its annual Top 25 Most Influential in the justice system and legal profession ranking, and I’m delighted to announce that three members of the Slaw community, Malcolm Mercer, Colin Lachance and Adam Dodek have been honoured. Congratulations. Here’s what the magazine says:

Adam Dodek
Vice dean, University of Ottawa
Faculty of Law, Ottawa

Dodek is emerging as a Canadian champion for legal professionalism and legal ethics. He writes and speaks widely on the subject and has been very involved in issues surrounding professional regulation and legal education. Dodek has published several legal books, with his

The legal profession has many noble archetypes: dedicated advocates pro bono publico, champions of significant (not always popular) causes, and unswerving guardians of the court whose instincts shine bright as a sword against much larger opponents.

John-Paul Boyd broke the mould he was casted in quite early on. He’s not so much a noble archetype as a force of unnatural origins who continues to drop jaws with his superhuman ability to drop knowledge.

To say he is one of a kind, is not enough. The best I can do is describe him like this: 

Hawaiian creation myth relates that

British legal publisher Justis is offering a free download of a document entitled Court Structures of the Common Law World(free registration required):

“Understanding how and why different courts operate can be a time-consuming, headache-inducing task.”

“It doesn’t have to be, though. We’ve done the legal legwork for you and crammed it all into an easy-to-read 59-page eBook, Court Structures of the Common Law World.”

“Download your free copy and discover:

• The judicial hierarchy of 20 jurisdictions, including the UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada and Jamaica – all illustrated in handy diagrams
• The historical and political backgrounds to these case

The World’s Columbian Exposition was an influential social and cultural event (“The Devil in the White City” from Erik Larson brilliantly communicates the vibrancy of the preparation of the Exposition). On October 9, 1893, the day designated as Chicago Day, the fair set a world record for outdoor event attendance, drawing 716,881 people to the fair. Electricity occupied a very special place in the White City. An entire building was devoted to electrical exhibits. Electricity powered everything: fountains, a moveable sidewalk, elevators, automatic door openers, and even electric cigar lighters. GE, Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, Brush, Western Electric were showcasing various . . . [more]

A news article quotes Chief Justice Joseph Kennedy of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court and how impressed he was about the use of Twitter by reporters during a recent trial.

“I couldn’t get over how well it had worked,” Kennedy said in an interview, describing it as the closest thing to gavel-to-gavel coverage he has seen.

I didn’t think it was going to be as accurate as it turned out to be. I have to say that I was very impressed.

The Crown attorney Darcy MacPherson is quoted as saying he used printouts of a reporter’s tweets to augment his . . . [more]

It’s not hard to light up a debate over the digital legal information revolution and its impact on law. There’s plenty of kindling. What’s hard is to pick an issue and keep the blaze contained. And the sources of fuel keep adding up.

Dutch financial giant ING might have struck a new spark with a report last month on social media and how it impacts news reportage. The full title of the ING report is “An International Study into the Impact of Social Media on the Activities of PR Professionals & Journalists, News & News Dissemination.” It has . . . [more]

Quoting from the notification:

Today, Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory announced the sale of the Canadian Legal Products in Canada to LexisNexis, a part of the Reed Elsevier organization. This includes all English and French Legal products except Municipal Law and our Aliform product in Quebec. This in no way affects our Tax & Accounting Division nor any Tax publishing products, software, or Tax assets of any kind. Our Tax law products remain with Wolters Kluwer CCH in Canada.

Why was this divestiture made?

Wolters Kluwer continuously examines its global portfolio of products to ensure that corporate investments are aligned

Every once in a while a lawyer will ask a law librarian to find the source that establishes that a point of law is well established. Personally, I hate getting these questions. It is frequently time consuming and difficult to find a reputable, cite-able source for something everybody knows.

Sometimes the best method to answer these question is searching cases for the phrase “trite law” in proximity with keywords for an issue. There is a new website in development that does just that. Check out WellSettled.com. Thanks to Bob Ambrogi at his LawSites blog for sharing this service. . . . [more]

From Saturday’s Guardian – here is the complete transcript.

The NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.

No matter how careful you are from that point on, no matter how sophisticated your source, journalists have to be sure that they make no mistakes at all in the very beginning to the

Today I’m daydreaming of Italy …

“The district of Ravenna lies in the north east of Italy, some 80 km (50 miles) from Bologna, the regional capital of Emilia Romagna. Ravenna is the second largest commune as per land area in Italy.”

If you need a good excuse to travel to Italy this may be the perfect opportunity.

The Summer School LEX programme is taking place in Ravena the first week of September. This is “an intensive 6-day, 8-hour-a-day program, that requires participants’ total dedication and intellectual commitment.”

• September 1-2: Basic Module (an introduction to XML web technologies