The the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada and IP Osgoode have inaugurated an IP Writing Challenge. The winner in each of three categories — law student, graduate student, professional — will receive a $1000 prize and the publication of the work. Works in either English or French are eligible. The precise rules are set out on the IP Osgoode website, but a brief description of the scope of eligible essays is set out below:

Entries must develop a thesis of importance in an emerging area of intellectual property law from a Canadian, comparative or international perspective. Topics can be

Slaw’s own Ted Tjaden is quoted in this week’s Lawyers’ Weekly on whether the free access to the law movement has reached the point of such reliability and comprehensiveness that it can be considered as an adequate substitute for the commercial giants. Canlii’s Daniel Poulin comes to the defence of Canlii.

“I rarely use free resources,” Tjaden said.

“We have the luxury of having one of the better-equipped law libraries in a Canadian law firm with extensive print resources and online subscriptions.

“Although free search engines do supplement the legal research I do, we continue to rely on the value-added

From last week’s Publishers’ Weekly, a good overview of how the trade publishing industry is employing Indian coders to embed .xml into works. But a paragraph on Innodata Isogen, which I thought of as doing law firm outsourcing shows just how globally linked the outsourcing of the production of legal information has become.

No KPO (knowledge processing outsourcing) project is too complex for Innodata Isogen. Take a recent job that entailed producing marketable Dutch jurisprudence information within the guidelines of European laws, which prohibit the disclosure of any information that could identify the parties involved. “The anonymization

Some stories are beyond Twitter. The full text from Trinity Church on Wall Street, and reports from the Telegraph, Ma Jones and the NYT.

Someone can tell me whether this represents progress, or another sign of the apocalypse. . . . [more]

This is slightly off-topic, though I would argue it all goes back to the classic discussion of Wine and the Law. And here is some legal discussion on wine law from Fermentation.

My friend Charles Hodgson of Podictionary fame has just written:

Compare and contrast:

· First book, a year to write, three years to sell, a year and a half to bring to market
· This book, five months to write, eight days to bring to market

The blurbs on Amazon say: “A great read.” -Rod Phillips, author of A Short History of Wine, “Certain to find . . . [more]

Olivier Charbonneau and I will be engaging in a conversation in 13 days with the LegalIT audience on how Web 2.0 tools are being used by lawyers.

A retired lawyer friend in Chicago tells me that Twitter is being used by sophisticated lawyers and firms down there. There seems to have been a lot of buzz at TechShow too.

But can anyone tell me how exactly lawyers are using Twitter? In the delivery of legal services? Or as a networking, communications and marketing tool? Or in some other way? . . . [more]

Case citations exist primarily for the purpose of enabling a researcher to locate the full text of a judgment or the decision of an administrative tribunal. The primary purpose of a style guide for legal citation is to ensure that everyone can understand how various combinations of numbers, letters, brackets and punctuation make it possible for the reader to find the full text of a case referred to in a book, article or another case. There are other uses, such as case citators, but the main purpose of a case citation is to provide the means to easily locate a . . . [more]

My apologies for starting this post with a pic, but

A woman in a hotel room in Uganda is making judgments ready for the scanner.

It demonstrates graphically the challenges faced in making legal information publicly accessible through a Legal Information Institute. That’s the topic of an excellent blog posting by Kelly Anderson of Southern African Legal Information Institute – SAFLII – over at VoxPopuLII, which is a guest-blogging project sponsored by Tom Bruce and our friends across the lake at the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School.

We may be complacent in North America about our . . . [more]

The Podcasting Legal Guide for Canada by Kathleen Simmons and Andy Kaplan-Myrth was first officially released back in June 2007 by Creative Commons Canada (see my Slaw post from June 29, 2007). Now they have put out a call to translate the Guide in an open source style, via Traduwiki. Their goal is to have it translated into French, although Traduwiki has the infrastructure to allow for translation into a number of different languages.

If you can help in the translation, please make your contribution via the wiki.

Photo: by Connie Crosby, also available under Creative . . . [more]

As readers of beSpacific will know, the International Herald Tribune’s online presence has been merged with that of the New York Times. The result offers readers a choice between the NYT “Global Edition” and the NTY “US Edition.” I subscribe to the IHT on Twitter, and although that’s not mentioned in the announcement, it would seem that this source has been quietly terminated, because there hasn’t been a tweet in over 15 hours.

For me, this is a sad consequence of the ongoing collapse of the traditional newspaper business. I think the IHT is . . . [more]

The Toronto Association of Law Libraries (TALL) held an event on Thursday evening at the University of Toronto Law School called Charting Our Course: The TALL Publishers’ Forum.

The publishers panel was comprised of representatives from CCH, Irwin Law, Canada Law Book, Carswell, LexisNexis and SOQUIJ. TALL had provided them a series of questions in advance and those questions were posited at the session, covering such issues as open access, pricing, licensing, digital rights management, and customer support. To their credit, the publishers participated despite being potentially exposed to a crowd of law librarians who have been concerned over . . . [more]

In a recent post, Simon Chester drew attention to an article entitled “Electronically Manufactured Law – Why the shift to electronic research merits attention” that was published in the Fall Issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. In the article, the author discusses changes that may be expected in legal research resulting from the shift in legal research from print based case research to electronic sources.

The article is thought provoking with regard to the possible changes that may result from such a shift but incidentally highlights the significant differences that exist in legal research methodology and resources . . . [more]