Congratulations to the folks at LawyerLocate.ca Inc., Natalie Waddell and Mark C. Robins, for launching their new Canadian law video distribution site LegalTube.ca.

The website is aimed at the public, giving easy video access on a wide range of law-related topics. The site is made up of video content from lawyers listed on LawyerLocate.ca, with videos originally housed on YouTube or Vimeo, pulling everything together by topic as well as by participant profiles (lawyers and law firms). I found the site very easy to navigate with major law topics across the top. There is also a category . . . [more]

This month’s Canadian Lawyer has its annual Top 25 Most Influential in the justice system and legal profession ranking, and I’m delighted to announce that three members of the Slaw community, Malcolm Mercer, Colin Lachance and Adam Dodek have been honoured. Congratulations. Here’s what the magazine says:

Adam Dodek
Vice dean, University of Ottawa
Faculty of Law, Ottawa

Dodek is emerging as a Canadian champion for legal professionalism and legal ethics. He writes and speaks widely on the subject and has been very involved in issues surrounding professional regulation and legal education. Dodek has published several legal books, with his

The legal profession has many noble archetypes: dedicated advocates pro bono publico, champions of significant (not always popular) causes, and unswerving guardians of the court whose instincts shine bright as a sword against much larger opponents.

John-Paul Boyd broke the mould he was casted in quite early on. He’s not so much a noble archetype as a force of unnatural origins who continues to drop jaws with his superhuman ability to drop knowledge.

To say he is one of a kind, is not enough. The best I can do is describe him like this: 

Hawaiian creation myth relates that

British legal publisher Justis is offering a free download of a document entitled Court Structures of the Common Law World(free registration required):

“Understanding how and why different courts operate can be a time-consuming, headache-inducing task.”

“It doesn’t have to be, though. We’ve done the legal legwork for you and crammed it all into an easy-to-read 59-page eBook, Court Structures of the Common Law World.”

“Download your free copy and discover:

• The judicial hierarchy of 20 jurisdictions, including the UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada and Jamaica – all illustrated in handy diagrams
• The historical and political backgrounds to these case

Quoting from the notification:

Today, Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory announced the sale of the Canadian Legal Products in Canada to LexisNexis, a part of the Reed Elsevier organization. This includes all English and French Legal products except Municipal Law and our Aliform product in Quebec. This in no way affects our Tax & Accounting Division nor any Tax publishing products, software, or Tax assets of any kind. Our Tax law products remain with Wolters Kluwer CCH in Canada.

Why was this divestiture made?

Wolters Kluwer continuously examines its global portfolio of products to ensure that corporate investments are aligned

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) announced earlier this week at its annual conference in Winnipeg that the JurisClasseur Québec encyclopedia (LexisNexis Canada) is the winner of the 2014 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It is available as a collection of loose-leafs and online on Quicklaw. There was a brief description of the encyclopedia on Slaw.ca back in December 2012.

The annual award honours a publisher that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

The other nominees this year were:

• The Queen’s

As those who’ve read Slaw for a while might know, I’ve been critical in the past about the way the news media treat law. Simply put, law does not figure in their analysis of things that make the world go round. This is easy — and distressing — to see by looking at the way in which news media categorize their content. The Globe and Mail, for example, doesn’t include “Law” or “Justice” in any of its major menu headings, and only by looking at the website’s site map can we find “Law” among the 175 possibilities as a third . . . [more]

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) announced this week that Fastcase and William S. Hein & Co. were the joint winners of its 2014 New Product of the Year Award.

According to AALL:

“This award honors new commercial information products that enhance or improve existing law library services or procedures or innovative products which improve access to legal information, the legal research process, or procedures for technical processing of library materials. A “new” product is one which has been in the library-related marketplace for two years or less.”

Under the partnership with Fastcase announced last July, HeinOnline . . . [more]

The world of legal publishing – be it software or content – has finally tipped over into the Long awaited v3.0. Thomson (C-Track) have beaten a host of other enterprise and legal software specialists to deliver the new English Royal Courts case management system by the end of 2015.

V1.0 was the Word.

And the Word was Law. But frankly, it’s been some time since trudging around with a volume of Halsbury has given you the leading edge in legal information services. The Word was strong. Now? Not so much.

V2.0 was The Code. Not some Star Trek Fibonacci sequence . . . [more]

April launched an exciting development for BC legal researchers and for the open law and open data movements. QP LegalEze, the BC Queen’s Printer’s deep and highly functional subscription service for current and some historical legislative information, is no more. Or, more accurately, it is by subscription no more.

All of its content and functionality now is available through BC Laws, the free site also offered by the Queen’s Printer:

BC Laws has been upgraded to provide enhanced searching and more content including historical legislation and related publications such as BC Gazette, full text Orders-in-Council, and Tables of Legislative

The current issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society (volume 29, issue 1) is free until the end of May 2014 according to a tweet at the beginning of April from Cambridge Journals:

New issue of the Canadian Journal of #Law and Society is now free for 2 months: http://t.co/wlce03EhNI #slsa14 @Legal_Editions @slsa_uk

— Cambridge Journals (@CambridgeJnls) April 2, 2014

From the website:

 [CJLS] is a bilingual periodical publishing cutting edge research in the broad field of law and society scholarship. Rooted in the innovative Canadian Law and Society movement, CJLS features international scholarship concerning the intersection of

Every year, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) hands out the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It honours a publisher (whether for-profit or not-for profit, corporate or non-corporate) that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

The nominees for this year are:

• The Queen’s Bench Rules of Saskatchewan: Annotated, 4^th ed. (Law Society of Saskatchewan Libraries)
• Juris Classeur Québec (LexisNexis Canada)
• Copyright Law, Fourth Edition (John Wiley and Sons, Inc.)
• GALLOP: Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal (Association