Back in July I promised to post about the results of my Summer Writing List project. I determined that there has long been a need, based on reference questions, for an annotation to the Alberta Insurance Act. Proving that all things happen when they are meant to, a recent major revamp of Part 5 of our act dealing with Insurance Contracts was finally proclaimed in force as of July 2, 2012. I say finally because these amendments were published as S.A. 2008, c.19. This post is the story of the process of creating an Annotated Alberta Insurance Act.

First, I . . . [more]

I got to tell you. It’s tough being on the same posting day as Mitch and Yosie these days. The bar can sit pretty high when my coastal time zone mind wakes up to see what they’ve posted each Thursday. Such is the evolving quality of Slaw, I suppose — which, of course, makes for great reading.

Case in point, Mitch’s post below shares a wonderful vision for how KM can evolve to be more effective, more business-centric and drive new innovation. Simply fantastic. Please don’t take the rest of this post as a critique of Mitch’s ideas.

One difference . . . [more]

I missed the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference, which wraps up today in Washington D.C. So my thoughts are turning not only to envy, but also to some of my own KM thoughts mixed with those emanating from conference tweets.

Too often Canadian law firms see KM as nothing more than a repository of documents and clauses: Matthew Parson’s so-called “information landfill.” And because KM is seen as nothing more than a landfill site, firms see KM as nothing more than a software solution to assist lawyers sift through the debris.

What a terrible waste!

But, what if . . . [more]

Although I suspect someone on SLAW has likely already commented on what follows, I couldn’t easily find a post (although Simon Fodden’s post here in 2008 discusses CanLII’s Database Search).

I realized yesterday that if one selects a number of databases on CanLII from the Database Search screen (e.g., all decisions from labour and employment tribunals or all decisions from human rights tribunals), the resulting URL when clicking on “Search” with a “blank” search is a stable URL that can be sent to a user or linked on an intranet to, in essence, create a customized “global” database search . . . [more]

Law reform commission reports can be great sources for legal research. Many of the reports provide historical background and you can often find comparative information about how other jurisdictions have responded to an issue.

And August 2012 has been a very busy month for law reform commissions, with many of them bringing out publications on a range of topics. Here are a few examples:

• English Law Commission Consultation on Scandalising the Court (part of a larger project on contempt of court)
• English Law Commission Consultation Paper on Wildlife Law
• Law Commission of Ontario Interim Report on Vulnerable Workers
• New Zealand

Via a post on the Legal Writing Prof blog, I’m reading an interesting paper, “Say Goodbye to the Books: Information Literacy as the New Legal Research Paradigm,” by Professors Ellie Margolis and Kristen Murray of Temple University. The paper is available for download in the SSRN Working Paper Series.

Purely coincidentally, a similar thought arose this morning in an internal planning meeting about our legal research and writing instruction this fall. It was expressed that to introduce online research resources by reference to or comparison with their print counterparts is likely no longer a suitable approach. The argument is not . . . [more]

I’ve set up a new site to collect commentary on judicial opinions: commentary.slaw.ca

At the moment — and for the near future, certainly — it contains only commentary on Supreme Court of Canada cases, starting with 2011. (It goes only a small way into 2012 in order to give commentary time to appear and me time to collect it; generally it’ll run somewhere between four and six months behind the present date.) The commentary is that which is available free online, essentially from Canadian law blogs and law firm web publications. And by “commentary” I mean material that offers some . . . [more]

We renewed the family public library card on the weekend. This morning I used my public library membership to search for news articles using a database that the library makes available. I love public libraries.

Consider, I can walk into any of the more than 300 libraries in Alberta, I can consult with a search expert, access services and a vast collection of material, including newspaper databases. All for $20.00 a year for my entire family – a fantastic value. Some of the P. Mireaus have eReaders, so we are also able to borrow eBooks from our library without even . . . [more]

A small item on the CBC Books website caught my attention the other day. Entitled The life of a prison librarian, it describes the unique experience of Québec-born writer Jean Charbonneau who has been working as a prison librarian in Maryland:

It would be a strange experience for most, but Charbonneau found a calling right away.

“I had the feeling that what was I doing there as a librarian was important,” he said in The Current’s [a CBC radio show] documentary “Shelf Life,” adding, “I don’t how many inmates have told me that they have never read a book

Now when you search Google Patents you’ll be querying a database that includes European patents. Even more useful perhaps is Google’s just-introduced attempt to find “prior art”. Here’s a description of the process from the Google Inside Search blog:

The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web. You’ll start to see the blue “Find prior art” button on individual patent pages starting today.

A prior art search produces Google’s pick of the . . . [more]

Over one year ago, Canada Post and its largest union, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), were involved in a disruptive labour dispute that put employees out of work, disrupted the flow of mail and lost Canada Post money (brief background here). In an effort to stop the bleeding, the Conservative Government passed back-to-work legislation that provided for set wage increases and mandatory interest arbitration to impose a new collective agreement – with an arbitrator appointed by the Federal Government (unless the parties settled). Some months later, the Government appointed Colter Osborne, a well-respected former Ontario judge to . . . [more]

One of the many highlights for me at last month’s American Association of Law Libraries 2012 Conference was the opportunity to meet Priya Rai of the National Law University in Delhi and to observe her presentation, Access to Legal Information in the Digital Age: A Comparative Study of Electronic Commercial Databases and Public Domain Resources in Law.

Ms Rai is an accomplished law librarian and legal research instructor trained in law. One of her accomplishments is participation in the Information Institute of India Project. She attended and presented at AALL 2012 as the recipient of the FCIL Schaffer Grant . . . [more]