Larry Bodine, former law firm marketing consultant known for his LawMarketing Blog, has been named the new editor-in-chief of Lawyers.com and Martindale.com. (If you are in Canada the Lawyers.com link may flip you to the Canadian site http://www.canadian-lawyers.ca/ unfortunately).

According to an article from the Law Technology News on September 16, Bodine has indicated he is going to overhaul the Lawyers.com site:

…the site could stand improvement, Bodine said. Currently its content is aggregated from other sites. “The switch that I want to make is generating our own material. You’re going to see a complete change

Looks like litbots and databases will soon be providing routine updates of structured information to human readers via newspapers and news websites in the form of machine written articles. Narrative Science is the company behind it.

Pretty soon, such litbots will be conversing with my own personal litbots, and negotiating the purchase of routine items I need and can afford, according to the budget I set and the priorities I identify. The prospect of the online grocery appears again: I need milk, eggs, and in-season fruit every Tuesday, for delivery Wed. afternoon. The grocery’s litbot can check my calendar . . . [more]

Mirela and her staff at NYU have kindly uploaded my updates to my Researching Canadian Law Guide on their GlobaLex website.

Updated guides have also been added for Bhutan, Latin America, Kenya and Sweden.

I regularly use these foreign law guides (along with the international law guides) when doing international and foreign legal research. . . . [more]

If you’ve done a CanLII search in the last few days, you’ll have noticed that they’ve introduced contextual snippets into the search results. The searched for term is highlighted and shown with some surrounding text, apparently in a number, if not all, of the instances in which the term appears in the relevant document. The graphic below illustrates: . . . [more]

Ted Tjaden’s post today on “Legal Research and Writing Skills in Law School” could not have been more timely for me and my colleagues at the Bora Laskin Law Library.

For the first time that anyone here can remember (*however, see comment 3 below), the UofT Faculty of Law is offering a stand-alone mandatory legal research and writing class for its incoming first year class. It is a 10 week programme of hour-long classes that attempt to address many of the challenges that Ted outlines. This programme was long in the making and was driven by the Law . . . [more]

Although I am reluctant to merely “re-post” a link to today’s “What’s New in Legal KM?” post from Above and Beyond KM – especially since many of you likely already follow Mary’s blog – she provides a great overview of the ILTA-KM sessions, especially for those of us who were not there. There is a lot to mull over in this post and likely hours of useful reading if one were to click through all of the links she has provided. . . . [more]

Next week I will have the opportunity to join with a number of colleagues on a panel to discuss with law school students the importance of legal research and writing, largely in anticipation of them becoming lawyers on graduation and needing to have certain skills in order to excel in their profession (and I think it is great that this law school is making this kind of session available to students).

One of the questions put to the panel in advance of the session was: “What kind of legal research skills should law school students be highly proficient in by . . . [more]

Oral cultures create knowledge, and some literate cultures produce many more publications than others. In our post-literate world, we have see the resurgence of oral communications on YouTube and elsewhere. Nonetheless, citations to the printed word remains a gold standard. Other forms of verification are needed, to address this imbalance. Enter Wikimedia’s Oral Citation Project. The project is outlined, and links are provided to a movie that looks at the problem.

For more interesting projects from the Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia), see here. . . . [more]

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke announced today that Bills will shortly be introduced in Parliament to overturn prohibitions on cameras in the courtroom.

The media will only be allowed to film judges’ summary remarks only – victims, witnesses, offenders and jurors cannot be filmed.

Filming and broadcasting in court is currently banned under two Acts of Parliament and new legislation will need to be passed to allow cameras into the courts.

The Guardian reports that Clarke had intended to consult with senior judges but in recent days Downing Street had moved to circumvent this consultation process and support the change, whatever . . . [more]

You know it is September when:

• The College and University crowd adds 15 minutes to your commute
• You hear yourself saying “put some protein in that lunch girls”
• Life suddenly resumes warp speed

September is proving to be interesting on the eBook front.

Sarah Glassmeyer posted to the Law Librarian Blog today about some free eBooks. These include Federal Rules of Evidence, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. The books were compiled by the Legal Information Institute and made available through CALI‘s eLangdell Press.

There are interesting questions on a CanLII survey . . . [more]

On September 15, two legislative research experts will help to uncover the hidden gems in Ontario and federal legislation.

Caroline Hyslop is no stranger to CALL – some of you may have already attended great presentations she has given in the past. And I may be a little biased because I work with him, but Rick Sage is both an engaging speaker and experienced e-Laws spelunker.

This is the second in CALL’s 2011-12 series of webinars. More information is available at the CALL website. (Online registration available!) . . . [more]

Courtney Minick has written a post on Universal Citation for State Codes over at VoxPopuLII, a blog published at the Cornell University Law School.

She discusses the spread of universal, or vendor-neutral, citation in the United States. The bulk of the article is devoted to developing neutral citation for state laws, but one detail attracted my attention. In contrast to Canada, where neutral citation has been widely adopted for caselaw, the practice is still not very widespread South of the border:

To date, 16 states assign universal citations to their highest court opinions. (To date, Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi,