Plain language — the written kind — has been of interest here on Slaw recently, with John Gregory’s post “Enforcing Plain Language” and Simon Chester’s post announcing the (October) Educaloi conference, “Telling the Law to the Public. Are There Better Ways?“. I’ve got a couple of things to offer here.

First, I thought readers might like to be reminded of The Legal Writing Institute and, particularly, its open access journal. (You should also have a look at volume one of their Monograph Series: The Art of Critiquing Written Work, which comprises 15 articles.)

There’s . . . [more]

We haven’t seen an update on Carl Malamud’s Law.gov project in quite a while. There is much to report. To start, here’s a reminder of what the project is about:

Law.Gov is an idea, an idea that the primary legal materials of the United States should be readily available to all, and that governmental institutions should make these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data. To make this idea a reality, a series of workshops were held throughout the country, resulting in a consensus on 10 core principles.

In June the project completed its consultation phase, which included . . . [more]

I confess: I love law reform commission reports. I find they are wonderful 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.

In the past few days, by pure coincidence, I have come across a wealth of new reports by law commissions in New Zealand, Ireland and Australia:

• New Zealand Law Reform Commission Introductory Issues Paper on Law of Trusts : this is primarily a background paper. It traces the development of the trust from its origins in medieval England through to

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Some new stories from around the world:

Honey – I forgot to renew the domain name

That’s the story out of a free public website in Massachusetts: The site provides the public with online copies of opinions from both the Supreme Judicial Court and the Appeals Court. C. Clifford Allen head of the SJC’s Reporter of Decisions office woke up to find that his website was gone and that a notice — “massreports.com expired on 11/08/2010 and is pending renewal or deletion” – was substituted.

If they did send a (renewal) notice, it must have been caught in

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If you are a law firm starting from scratch looking to build an intranet, what would you do? Would you emulate many of the big US and Canadian firms and implement MS Sharepoint? Or look for a different solution? So often firms look over each others’ shoulder to see what the other is doing. But with intranets one size does not fit all.

I am currently in Washington, DC for KM World 2010 and was fortunate to have a good discussion with Gordon Ross, Vice President of Open Road Communications Ltd., web consultants and creators of the social intranet . . . [more]

A few days ago Google released a very interesting tool: Google Refine 2.0. For anyone who’s ever had to sort through messy data to try to turn up a meaningful treatment, and who hasn’t, this tool is a godsend. You may never need to utter another regular expression.

It offers a suite of functions that allow a person to clean up the data (detect and remove inconsistencies), to transform the data into formats suitable to the final destination (such as html), and even tools for finding and adding more data from disparate sources.

There are three 6+ minute videos . . . [more]

Inspired by Ted Tjaden’s custom search engine that principally queries Canadian law firms, I’ve put together a Google Custom Search Engine for Canadian law blogs. The engine queries only the 249 blogs which are currently on the Canadian law blogs list maintained by Steve Matthews at lawblogs.ca.

As I explain on the page, because Google doesn’t let you rank your CSE results by date, I’ve given you the option of looking at results from the past day, a week, a month, or year.

What would make this really useful, of course, would be an RSS feed for your . . . [more]

Google’s been speeding things up lately, as you’ll know if you’ve turned on Google Instant for your searches. (See Google’s Instant Search: An Alphabet Book.)

Now Google’s rolling out Instant Preview, which, as the name suggests, lets you get a preview of the site itself. I’m not one of the lucky rolloutees yet, but Google, ever solicitous, has a Google Labs site that will let you play with the new feature. You’ll know when it arrives in your neighbourhood, because a small magnifying glass icon will a appear beside each of your results.

A click on it brings up . . . [more]

Bills that have introduced in Canada and Nova Scotia

It’s difficult to tell how much of a step forward this is, but the next edition off Amazon’s Kindle is set to have a lending function built into it:

“The online retailer announced the upcoming feature in a discussion forum for the Kindle on its website Friday, saying that later in the year it will start letting Kindle users and people who use its free Kindle apps loan books to others for a two-week period. During the loan, the book’s owner will not be able to read the book, Amazon said.”

This improvement could be seen in a couple different . . . [more]

A number of new titles have caught my eye as useful additions or updates to Canadian legal literature.

In no particular order:

• Bullen & Leake & Jacob’s Canadian Precedents of Pleadings + CD (Carswell): This new title is a Canadian version of the UK classic litigation precedent service, now in its 16th edition from Sweet & Maxwell. In the absence of a Canadian edition, many lawyers here would consult the UK title. However, over time, the UK title increasingly referenced UK legislation, which made the UK service less useful. I have not seen the new Canadian version yet but

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On Friday 5000 people across Canada attended the LEAF Persons Day Breakfast