Twitter is a-buzz today with the announcement that Thomson Reuters is acquiring innovation darling of UK law, Practical Law Company.

According to the Thomson Reuters press release (Jan. 3, 2013):

Practical Law Company has more than 750 employees, with principal operations in London and New York, and will be part of the Legal business of Thomson Reuters. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2013. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

PLC has been making an impact over the last couple of years in North . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) is accepting nominations for the 2013 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It honours a publisher (whether for-profit or not-for profit, corporate or non-corporate) that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

Members as well as non-members of CALL can make nominations. Criteria are explained on the Award website (see link in first sentence).

The deadline for sending in nominations is February 15, 2013.

Members of the Award Selection Committee are:

• Justice Eric (Rick) Libman, Ontario

. . . [more]

A LinkedIn group pointed me to an article titled “10 Ways to Completely Ruin Your Intranet“. The article, a blog post by a company that offers a turnkey intranet solution, has some good tips about frustrating navigation, stale content and lack of collaboration.

My team is responsible for a significant amount of content on our Intranet, and skimming this vendor humour-based post got me thinking more about deep links. We have talked about deep links on CanLII and using CiteBite to link to quotes within in webpages here at Slaw. My team has been focusing on deep links, . . . [more]

Back in 2009 Ted Tjaden put together what I consider a seminal paper called “The 7 Faces of Legal Knowledge Management.” [PDF] Knowledge Management is still a young discipline, with thinking and the areas it encompasses in flux. At a couple of recent meetings, including Knowledge Workers Toronto (a KM-related meetup group I help to organize), we explored how KM is changing, how it is varying from these “7 Faces”. Here are a few of my notes co-mingled from those discussions.

KM as a place to develop new frameworks and models

As the place to develop new thinking, . . . [more]

One of the challenges with Twitter, especially once you start to accumulate a following and engage thousands of people, is that it appears as if the information is fleeting and quickly gone forever.

What happened to that interesting legal case in that other jurisdiction that we were discussing on Twitter last month? If only I had bookmarked the page…

Twitter announced earlier this summer that users would be able to download Tweets, a promise that was reiterated last month with a deadline of the end of 2012. Some users are sharing that the feature has already been rolled out on . . . [more]

No the Omni design has not been brought back for a new bus.

As disturbing as that may sound, the continuing debate over the “omnibus” has creepy characteristics itself.

In fairly recent times the Omnibus has been the subject of a few posts here at Slaw, The Unreasonable and Transgressive Nature of Omnibus Bills (Michael Posluns, June 24, 2011) , & Library of Parliament Paper on Omnibus Bills back in November by Michel-Adrien Sheppard. and myself when the storm of Bill-38 was occurring. Well I’m back with an update. In recent years all of us in Canada have been riding . . . [more]

Law students are in the midst of exams and, in law school, exams are often open-book. In theory, open-book exams allow students to refer to their thoughtfully-prepared outlines, summaries, CANs—whatever the local term for their study aids—during the exam. In reality, during what is often a stressful time, many students also appreciate the comfort of their coursebooks, required texts, and, for extra reassurance, recommended texts often borrowed from the library.

Those who studied law might remember arriving early at the library reserve desk to check out one of a few copies of a useful recommended text in the days leading . . . [more]

I straddle a number of very different work environments every day all of which give me a very different perspective on many things. Some readers find this refreshing, others find it annoying or threatening.

As a writer hanging out with many different types of writers, discussions often crop up about getting paid for services rendered. Of concern to many writers is that more and more writers are willing to write for free, which drives down the value of writing – which in turn, drives down the already low living standard for most writers.

Harlan Ellison, well-known for his rants on . . . [more]

Last year around this time I posted top 10 lists of the most consulted cases for 2011 – one for all cases consulted in 2011 and the other for consultations of cases decided in 2011. It was well received so I have been looking forward to continuing the tradition. And as with last year, I leave it to the readers to determine the significance of any case appearing on either list.

ILTA’s Peer to Peer magazine arrived yesterday – via Uberflip which I will happily explore in a future post.

Though the technology that Peer to Peer is available through is cool, this post is about its content, which is also cool. There are several articles in this issue about new hire orientation. Like Margaret McCaffery’s excellent post this week on new hire orientation and marketing, each article is from a different perspective.

• Law firm 101 from mystery to mastery – deals with orientation from the CIO perspective
• Law firm orientation know where you are to know where you are going

. . . [more]

My post Why Can’t You Just Make it Work Like Google? last week surprised me by going viral. Well, as viral as a blog post about information management can go. It certainly seems to have struck a nerve with people from all across the legal industry. It turns out that making search work effectively inside the organization is something a lot of people are attempting to tackle. After posting it, however, I realized there is also a reason why you would not even want to use Google as it functions out on the Internet for use inside the organization.

Allow . . . [more]

It’s the festive season, which seems to free things up a little from the routines that otherwise govern our lives. It certainly has done that at Oxford’s Bodleian Law Library blog, Law Bod. They’re already in day three of “Twelve (Legal) Days of Christmas.” If you know the carol, you’ll know that day three involves French hens. What fowl français could have to do with law only a law library can tell you. So go take a look. You’ll want to catch up, too, with the Partridge in a Pear Tree (distress damage feasant? Rylands and . . . [more]