Does your law library have a strategic plan? Is the plan available, aligned, and has it been shared? Is process measured against the plan? Is your plan in a document, embedded in your budget report, unwritten?

I have some work to do this January to assemble the strategy of my firm library into a working document that can be referenced by my team and by other members of the firm. While we have a strategy and we are executing it, it is less available than it should be.

Confidence in our library team is high, we had excellent response to . . . [more]

David Mao this week became the 23rd Law Librarian of Congress. The Law Library of Congress was established in Washington in 1832 by the United States Congress and is the world’s largest law library.

Before joining the library, Mao worked for the Congressional Research Service. He also held positions at Georgetown University and the law firm Covington & Burling.

The Law Library of Congress blog In Custodia Legis published an interview Mr. Mao earlier this week:

The Law Library issued its Strategic Plan for 2011–16, and, in the short term, I aim to continue the progress toward achieving the

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Colleague and fellow law librarian Sarah Sutherland let me know of her article “On Hiring Library Staff in Rural Areas” in Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

The article of course is good and worth mentioning for that reason alone but Sarah’s email made me realize I had forgotten about this online journal, which was mentioned a number of years ago on SLAW. As such, I thought I would also remind SLAW readers since many of the articles would be relevant to most of you. In the current edition, for . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada announced today that judgment in the National Securities Regulator Reference will be delivered at 9:45 a.m. EDT on Thursday, December 22, 2011. That’s In the Matter of Section 53 of the Supreme Court Act, R.S.C. 1985, C. S-26 and in the Matter of a Reference by the Governor General in Council concerning the proposed Canadian Securities Act, as set out in Order in Council P.C. 2010-667, dated May 26, 2010 (33718)

We’ll link to it and commentary when it comes down.

Perhaps the word “Judgment” implies that it will be the decision of the Court, . . . [more]

tips for improving law firm blog content

Words have meaning. The context, tone, and interplay give rise to nuances that is the basis for statutory and case law interpretation. But sometimes the iteration of words have meaning too. The frequency and repetitiveness of certain words can at times given insight into a culture or society.

At Jurix: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems in Vienna, Austria earlier this week, Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Julie Seaman, Adam Candeub & Eugene Agichtei proposed the idea of Legal N-Grams in conjunction with a beta pre-release of Legal Language Explorer, a new web . . . [more]

On December 15, 2011, Quebec's Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jean-Marc Fournier announced the filing of a draft regulation aimed at making the Gazette officielle du Québec available free of charge on the Internet.

I have always loved law reform commission reports. They are great sources for legal research. Many of the reports provide historical background on an issue and you can often find comparative information about how other jurisdictions have responded to a legal problem.

My highlights from the fall of 2011:

• Of course, the great news is that all of the reports of the former Ontario Law Reform Commission have been digitized (as reported December 12 right here on Slaw)
• The British Columbia Law Institute (BCLI) is launching a two-year project to consider reforms to judge-made rules governing when a person is

. . . [more]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of my favourite print bibliographies. Most academic law library and law society websites include some research guides or bibliographies – here are some of the ones I use the most:

Queen’s Law Library Select Bibliographies. Very comprehensive lists of Canadian materials for all of the core law school subjects. These bibliographies also lists materials from other jurisdictions.

Osgoode Hall Law Library’s Research Guides also cover many of the core subjects but tend to be more selective in their coverage which is useful to the student looking for just the key . . . [more]

Lexpert Magazine has just launched a blog. It’s early days yet—the blog only launched last week—so it’s hard to say how it will fare. The editorial staff (Jean Cumming, Tim Wilbur, David Dias, and Gena Smith) will do the blogging, likely filling in the “blanks” and doing follow-ups between issues of the magazine. One to follow, in any event.

Welcome to the blogosphere Lexpert. . . . [more]

I had an opportunity to download the new Irwin Law iPad app recently along with a copy of Ted Tjaden’s Legal Research and Writing text. We have a copy of this excellent title in our firm library in print or course, but for testing purposes, I thought it would be a good choice for an eBook.

First I want to congratulate Jeff Miller and his team at Irwin Law. They made an excellent choice of partners in Nubook. The Irwin Law app was easy to find in the Apple App Store, the download process was simple. It was also . . . [more]

The English media came back this weekend to re-examine the health of Thomson-Reuters and reached wildly different conclusions. The BBC talks of Thomson moving to establish hegemony over business data, whereas the Guardian focuses on the weaknesses of post-merger integration and the long-term challenge that Bloomberg presents.

The doyenne of the DC law library community, Jean O’Grady has a fascinating piece suggesting that Thomson may well acquire Wolters-Kluwer

Her analysis is:

Factors Favoring Such a Merger

1. Thomson Reuters Leadership Changes.Exane BNP suggests that TR appears to be “in restructuring

and crisis mode” since they failed to achieve top

. . . [more]