PACER fees will be going up 25% effective November 1st.

A a press release on the U.S. Courts website explains:

The increase in the electronic public access (EPA) fee, from $.08 to $.10 per page, is needed to continue to support and improve the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, and to develop and implement the next generation of the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Filing system.

PACER fees are set by the Judicial Conference of the United States. The electronic public access fee has not changed since 2005. If my memory is correct, in 2005 the price rose . . . [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]

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]

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]

I agree, this is not news. Our lives are getting faster and we expect to know what is happening right now in the world, not what happened five hours ago or yesterday. For those of us who work with information and live online, television and radio are often not fast enough. We expect to hear about things as they happen.

Lawyers need to stay on top of what is happening to clients so they can help respond in a timely manner. As librarians, the challenge is pulling information together so that those we serve are up to date. In the . . . [more]

Attention: what follows is not me, my head shot to the left is not representative of the following paragraphs. Over the summer we have had a library school intern working in multiple capacities at the Sir James Dunn Law Library as our student reference assistant. During this time Amanda (Andie) Bulman has become a fan of Slaw and I thought that as the summer is drawing to a close I thought I would give her a chance to craft a post for Slaw on what her experience has been like over the past several months. I gave her a . . . [more]

For the last few months, I have been tracking new issues of Canadian law journals for Bora Laskin Law Library’s Recent Law Journals Tables of Contents service (July issue here) . This was as part of a bigger project, that will hopefully see the light of day someday. One of my collaborators on that project Andrea Davidson (a lawyer who is currently a masters student at the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies) thought it was worth noting that a number of the journals we were looking at were not available on either Lexis . . . [more]

The papers recently carried the news of the death of Paul-André Crépeau, C.C., O.Q., c.r., LL.D., D.h.c., m.s.r.c., who I would argue was the most influential law reformer in Canadian legal history.

From the initial invitation in 1965 from Jean Lesage’s Justice Minister Claude Wagner to take over the Office de Révision du code civil, originally set up during the Duplessis years with Thibaudeau Rinfret and André Nadeau, Crépeau’s vision and his life work was la révision du Code civil, and under his leadership the Office focused on the daunting task of updating the general provisions of a century-old . . . [more]

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner announced the release of “PIPEDA and Your Practice — A Privacy Handbook for Lawyers” (also available in a PDF version) at the Canadian Bar Association Canadian Legal Conference and Expo 2011. As the handbook says:

In some cases, the requirements of PIPEDA mirror lawyers’ existing professional requirements. In other cases, navigating the requirements of PIPEDA in a legal practice can add further complexity. Lawyers must not only consider their own privacy obligations but also the different obligations that each of their clients may face. Privacy obligations applicable to clients can sometimes restrict what lawyers

Fastcase has just announced the Fastcase 50, the “fifty most interesting, provocative, and courageous leaders in the world of law, scholarship, and legal technology”. The entire list is interesting but let’s mention 5 friends who may be familiar to Slaw readers.

Congratulations to each of them:

David Whelan
David Whelan is a lawyer, librarian, and technologist who has truly seen it all. He currently serves as the Manager of Legal Information for the Law Society of Upper Canada (as head librarian of the Great Library, the job is often referred to as “the Great Librarian”). David previously served as . . . [more]