I am interested to see what comes out of the CanLII hackathon that took place this weekend. F. Tim Knight kindly shared slides and notes from his presentation on Friday, Linked Data and Canadian Legal Resources.

Don’t know what linked data is? Tim walks us step-by-step through what it is, some of the theoretical background of this concept, how linked data could be used, and how it might apply to Canadian legal resources (such as case law), especially using CanLII.

I especially recommend his slides with notes. In them, he encourages more open contributions of legal data:

If

At the CanLII Hackfest in Ottawa this weekend I learned, among a great many other things, about a simple, neat tool that’s already been built with the CanLII API: Common Cases. It enables you to insert up to ten URLs of cases and kicks out citations that your cases have in common. I can see how this might be a useful shortcut for researchers at some points, enabling them to zero in on a core cluster of decisions with rapidity.

The bonus feature is that on the Common Cases page you’re reminded by links of a couple of other, . . . [more]

Law reform bodies can be a great source for legal research. They often conduct widespread consultation with stakeholders, may compare how other jurisdictions deal with the same problem and they frequently dig into the history of an issue.

Here are a few examples from the past few weeks:

• Law Reform Commission of Ireland Issues Paper on Consolidation of evidence legislation: “As part of its forthcoming Report on Evidence (the ‘Report’) the Commission is considering recommending the consolidation of existing legislation concerning the law of evidence , together with reform of three areas of the law of evidence : hearsay,

Lately CanLII has been shaking things up. The new search interface, in beta for four more days, is due to replace the current one on September 17. Then there’s the hackathon coming up this weekend in Ottawa, where you’re invited to learn how to become developers of apps that make use of CanLII’s API. And we learn from the recent blog post on CanLII that there’s a new forum for CanLII users, where they can share tips and give CanLII feedback. (At the moment it’s gathering spam, so that has to be cleaned out and blocked, if it’s . . . [more]

The major strategic shift of the past two decades in professional publishing is the decline of the historical duopoly. Lawyers never really wanted to deal with more than a few reliable tradesmen (typically Butterworth and Sweets as was in the UK) and the owners of the primary sources certainly didn’t want just anyone playing with their gems of wisdom. This supply-side duopoly propped up Lexis and Thomson/West in the UK for many decades. It coincidentally conferred on them financial supremacy: deeper pockets than the rest. Pockets they used to ramp up acquisition prices, R&D, front list development, etc in ways . . . [more]

For a week now, users of the social media tool and Twitter data reseller Topsy have been able to search Twitter content from its 2006 beginnings; i.e., “every tweet ever”. (Direct messages not included in Topsy or other data.)

It has been widely noted that this extent of indexed data offers a more practically useful and more comprehensive reach than Twitter itself—and any other reseller—offers. Until last week, Topsy’s reach was to 2010, the middle of the brief period once covered by Google’s real-time search. That Google feature offered some historical research capability beyond the week or so . . . [more]

The most recent issue of the Weekly Checklist of Canadian Government Publications refers to a number of publications from the Canadian Judicial Council relating to court management and the management of case information.

They include papers on systems to manage digital court documents, the determination of costs in civil litigation involving digital information and e-discovery, as well as a comparative analysis of court administrative systems in Australia, Canada, England and Wales, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Scotland:

• Court Information Management: “Traditionally, courts have relied on the availability of filed documents – both paper based or

The disease that afflicted legal and professional publishing for the last two decades was corrosive on many levels.

The first symptom of the Digital obsession or Digitisis disease was the overspending on document structure definitions and an obsession with rescuing whole ‘limbs’ of content that were probably going to be amputated in due course anyway. No-one in Lexis, Thomson, Bloomberg-BNA or Wolters-Kluwer-CCH could agree on what future content should look like so they had no idea what to keep or discard. This indecision led to the lowest common denominator strategy of ‘digitise and it will be worth it . . . [more]

I have the pleasure of presenting some information to University of Alberta Law students today who are taking a seminar course titled “Low income individuals and the law”. To prepare, I gathered some free legal research/legal content resources for a handout.

Free law links (PDF)

What would you add to this list? . . . [more]

According to a study commissioned by CanLII and released today reported cases have varying “life spans” and cease to be important — as measured by their citation in other judgments — somewhere between three and fifteen years. The exception to this are judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada, the average “time to failure” of which is a whopping fifty years.

Citation Analysis of Canadian Case Law by Thom Neale is a full-on informatics study that:

uses simple statistical and functional analysis in conjunction with network analysis algorithms to examine the network of Canadian caselaw using data supplied by the

The larger legal publishers’ 2013 half-year and interim results season was quietly revolutionary. At 80% the issue is done and dusted. The issue that has been plaguing the legal and professional publishing world for decades now can be consigned to history. With a palpable flop over the finish line, you can hear the words ‘largely complete’ panted in an exhausted and rasping whisper. The digital transition is finally finished; honest; no really; trust me – finished.

Looking back over the 15 years it has taken to get here 2 lessons are clear:

1. Readers buy confidence not content; formats are secondary;

I don’t think we’ve yet talked about the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) here on Slaw. A structure of the University of Bielefeld in Germany, BASE boasts that it indexes the metadata of 50,072,862 documents from 2,699 content sources (and keeps adding data at a great rate). Of course, the database ranges across all fields of academic endeavour — but that includes law and law-related material, which might be of use in certain situations. Much of the material referenced in BASE is open access and identified as such by the search engine.

You can either browse the database or use . . . [more]