Irwin Law’s new e-book platform is now available.

[Note of disclosure: Irwin Law is a publisher for me and also for Simon Fodden but I regularly post on e-books (see here and here, for example) and will continue to do so regardless of publisher].

It appears that Irwin Law has made huge improvements over earlier efforts of making their books available online. I think their new online platform will come closer to addressing some of the concerns that Angela Swan (see here) and others have expressed over how e-books in law may change or affect legal . . . [more]

Simon Fodden mentioned Google social search back in October, but this was the first time I had seen results from people in my social circle be included. I was searching for “listserv alternatives” and was surprised to see my friend Jim Milles at University at Buffalo appear to give me some advice from one of his blogs, Out of the Jungle:

At first I thought it was coincidence, but then when I look closer it says he is included because we are “connected via Gmail.” (Sorry, Jim, if I blew the privacy on that connection!). So, while Simon was . . . [more]

London’s business press is reporting on the challenging results that Reed Elsevier posted for 2009 and the strategies that the new CEO Erik Engstrom will have to consider to turn the company around. Erik Engstrom is the third CEO within the last twelve months (To lose one CEO is a misfortune; to lose two seems like carelessness).

Reed reported a 36 per cent fall in pre-tax profits to £487 million, and flat revenues for 2009. It expected the first half of 2010 to remain challenging and described last year’s performance as “relatively robust given the depth of the global recession”. . . . [more]

I periodically get asked what courses are available for getting up to speed on how to conduct legal research. Clare Mauro has been the instructor for the Legal Research on the Web course at the Professional Learning Centre, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, for a number of years now. The next sign up for this popular course (with description) is as follows:

Legal Research on the Web
Mon. 1 Mar 2010 – Sat. 17 Apr 2010
7 weeks
Instructor: Clare Mauro
Fee: $435.00 Cdn
Location: online
Cert: optional
Status: open

This is an in-depth instructor-led web course focusing on

Ley.mx is a Justia site that provides free online access to federal and state legislation for the third amigo in the NAFTA trio. The Federal constitution, codes, regulations and other statutory instruments are available in both HTML and PDF formats. The same documents for the 31 states seem to be available only in PDF; though you’ve got the choice to download them or view them online within an embedded Google viewer. As well, there are links to the appropriate government sites, law schools, and a number of law firms.

The simple and attractive site is in Spanish, as are all . . . [more]

Nada Khirdaji has an interesting piece on her transition from legal research skills in law school to research skills in practice in CCH’s law student monthly,

Law school helped me to think like a lawyer, but it was only in practice that I began to appreciate the essential role of legal research. In fact, much to my chagrin, I remember derisively dismissing an optional course in advanced legal research on the assumption that it would be of little use to me.

I am now a research lawyer. Everything that I know about legal research I learned in practice. I

I don’t think we’ve yet pointed you on Slaw to the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at Cornell Law School. Among its various functions is the provision of legal resources “such as international laws, domestic laws, articles and reports on gender-based violence.

You’ll find the relevant documents from the United Nations, as well as those from the various and lesser-known (here) regional organizations, such as the Economic Community of West African States and the South Asian Association for Regional Co-Operation.

The Center also offers student research assistance to judges confronting issues of gender-based violence, though whether the . . . [more]

There is an excellent article over at the Stream comparing the electronic sources of the English Reports. Just like Drew Jackson, I love it when someone asks me for a case I know is one of the weird citations that are incorporated into the E.R.’s. I always feel like a superstar, which helps balance the “I have no idea what I’m doing” moments.

We have talked about the HeinOnline and CommonLII sources of this data on Slaw.

The usefulness of these, and other digitized collections of aging print, hit home for me this week. I was looking for some old . . . [more]

Legal publishers pairing themselves with applications that embed their subscription-based resources isn’t new. West KM does it, as does LN’s Quickfind. Now out of LTNY we hear about the latest tool addition, Lexis for Microsoft.

Do these tools add valuable functionality for firms? Even if we hesitate on a few of them, the overall answer is probably ‘yes’. But an issue that seems rarely talked about is that of usage rates – the measure by which most flat fee pricing for online database services is based. The end effect of many of these tools is that they drive . . . [more]

For about nine months now, HeinOnline has been running webinars, aiming to host at least one per month. The upcoming webinar, on Wednesday, February 24, is on “Using and Searching the United Nations Law Collection” and will run for 30 minutes. There’s an excellent list of points that will be covered on the relevant Hein wiki page, along with instructions as to how to participate.

All of the previous webinars are archived and available for viewing online or for downloading. Most are concerned with U.S. resources, naturally; but a number are of general interest — “Getting Started” in HeinOnline . . . [more]

Two completely different spheres have my thoughts overlapping like a Venn diagram. A recent interview with Arianna Huffington in the Financial Post and links from the Law Librarian Blog (among many other sources) showing an Inside Look at the WestlawNext and “New Lexis” Platforms.

Both these articles touch on monetization of web delivered services and how content producers may reap the rewards of their labours.

The Huffington Post model:

The Huffington Post is committed to the link economy and our business model is advertising-supported. The Greek philosopher Herodotus … said you cannot enter into the same river twice, and

Yesterday, two members of Slaw were given an in-depth look at the most profound re-engineering of a legal research system since the migration to the Web. In Thomson Reuters’ impressive Eagan facility we had a briefing on the new Westlaw – to be launched at New York LegalTech next Monday under the name WestlawNext.

WestlawNext is the culmination of five years of research and development and a massive amount of customer research into how legal research is actually carried out. . . . [more]