How do you get started with Knowledge Management (KM) in the legal profession?

I get approached on a regular basis with this question by small law firms that want to have the advantages of the larger firms, by lawyers or librarians who want to become part of an existing KM team in a larger firm, or by individuals hired into firms to lead KM initiatives. There are programs specific to Knowledge Management that exist, but there is not a lot of introductory material specific to the legal industry.

I recently sat down with Garry Wise of Wise Law so he . . . [more]

Anyone following the possibilities of visualizing law will be interested in Robert Ambrogi‘s recent cover story in the ABA Journal, “Visual law services are worth a thousand words—and big money.” Ambrogi is a lawyer and consultant who has been writing about legal technology and social media for a couple of decades.

He provides a nice overview of the current players working in the visualization of legal research. He begin’s with Ravel, the “legal research alternative” developed by David Lewis and Nicholas Reed at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. When . . . [more]

This is a follow-up to last week’s Slaw.ca post Law Library of Congress Report on Restrictions on Genetically Modified Organisms.

The Law Library of Congress has recently released two other comparative law reports. They are:

• Child Restraint and Seat Belt Regulations: “This report contains citations to the laws on seat belt use in Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, China, Cyprus, Egypt, England and Wales, Fiji, Ghana, Indonesia, Kiribati, Malta, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Oman, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, and Vietnam, with information on provisions concerning children where available.”

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries List (CALL-L) is an e-mail discussion list fostering an interest in and discussion on law librarianship in Canada. A message went out today from CALL-L list owner/manager Susan Jones at the University of New Brunswick to all subscribers asking us to “opt in” to being on the list.

This measure is being taken to comply with Canada’s new anti-spam legislation coming into force on July 1st. While the list itself is not a commercial vehicle, some of the messages posted may be interpreted as such. From the message to subscribers:

CALL-L is used by

In a response to GitHub: Where Law Meets Technology? (The Sequel …) Ben let me know about a project developed in France that visualizes legislation called La Fabrique de la Loi. This is is a collaborative project launched in 2011 involving Regards Citizens, an association that promotes the liberation and reuse of parliamentary data for democratic purposes, and two research teams at Sciences Po Paris, the Centre for European Studies and médialab.

La Fabrique de la Loi provides visualizations that reveal the evolution of the law as it passes through the various stages of parliament. Here for . . . [more]

The Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. has published a new comparative law report on Restrictions on Genetically Modified Organisms.

The report analyzes legislation on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically modified (GM) plants and foods in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, England and Wales, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Russian Federation, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States.

There is also a bibliography.

Earlier comparative law reports from the Law Library of Congress have covered topics such as:

• Adjudication of Sexual Offenses in Military Justice

This year’s CALL/ACBD conference ended about two weeks ago, and we’ve seen a few posts on impressions of the conference and selected sessions.

A frequent highlight is the pre-conference workshop and the opportunity it offers to dive deeply into a topic in which colleagues specialize. This year, as noted previously on Slaw, F. Tim Knight of Osgoode’s library and Sarah Sutherland of CanLII offered a timely presentation on the semantic web and legal information.

I wasn’t able to attend it because of another commitment. However, thanks to the institutional repository at York, Creative Commons licensing, and—most notably—the generosity and . . . [more]

This week I am at the SLA (Special Libraries Association) conference being held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This morning at the Bloomberg BNA SLA Legal Division Breakfast & Business Meeting, the following awards were given:

•  The Bloomberg BNA Outstanding New Member Contribution award is presented to Christine DeLuca of Bennett Jones LLP in Toronto, ON, CA.
• The Wolters Kluwer Law & Business Innovations in Law Librarianship award is presented to Zena Applebaum of Bennett Jones LLP in Toronto, ON, CA.
• The Thomson Reuters Westlaw Award for Career Achievement award is presented to Tracy Maleeff of Duane Morris LLP in

I am still thinking about the messages that came out of last week’s Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference. So much of it revolved around the role of library professionals. Some of my key take-aways from my week in Winnipeg:

• Things continue to change. Business as we knew it has been permanently disrupted. Lawyers, law firms, legal organizations and law libraries need to change or they will be left behind.
• Lawyers do not hold all the answers; library staff (who are more familiar with process) could have many of the answers, and there is an opportunity to get involved at

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) announced earlier this week at its annual conference in Winnipeg that the JurisClasseur Québec encyclopedia (LexisNexis Canada) is the winner of the 2014 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It is available as a collection of loose-leafs and online on Quicklaw. There was a brief description of the encyclopedia on Slaw.ca back in December 2012.

The annual award honours a publisher that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

The other nominees this year were:

• The Queen’s

Last week I shared my new title with Slaw. Today, I was excited to be in a room of passionate people attending the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference where the session title was “Should We Still Be called Librarians?” The debate and various points of view were thought provoking.

As a panelist for this session, I was delighted to share “sage on the stage” duties with Allan Fineblit, CEO, Law Society of Manitoba, Ron Greasley, Senior Brand Strategist at Deschenes Regnier, Melanie Hodges Neufeld, Director of Legal Resources, Law Society of Saskatchewan, and Sonia Poulin, Director of Alberta Law . . . [more]

Thanks to Associate Professor of Law at the University of Saskatchewan Michael Plaxton for his discussion here on Slaw.ca earlier today. He alluded to some other discussion, so I thought it would be helpful to pull together some of those pieces for everyone.

Below is the letter from Annette Demers on behalf of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD) and John Papadopoulos and Jeanne Maddix on behalf of the Canadian Council of Academic Law Library Directors which was also endorsed by Robert Thomas on behalf of the Saskatchewan Library Association. This was published on the CALL/ACBD website:

Ken