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]

Are there any concerns from a risk management / liability perspective over the following warning/error message on the e-Laws website I noticed just now:

NOTICE OF ERROR
From December 18, 2009 to December 29, 2009, the e-Laws currency date should have been December 14, 2009.

See the screenshot here:

Do you review all of your legislative research from December 2009 within this time period?

Part of me says “no” since the Legislative Assembly adjourned on December 10, 2009, (to resume on February 16, 2010) and there appears to have been only 2 proclamations gazetted during the time period in question. . . . [more]

I learned recently that the University of Alberta has been digitizing microfilm or microfiche from the collection of Canadiana.org and placing the scans on the Internet Archive. (There’s a PowerPoint presentation online that will give you some sense of U of A’s digitization projects.) At present a search for [contributor:(canadiana.org)] turns up over 22,000 items. Of these, just under 800 are tagged “law” in some respect.

There is no attempt to catalog these items in any useful way, which means a researcher must rely on searching — not the easiest thing on the Internet Archive. (For example, . . . [more]

There has been much discussion on SLAW on the state of print case law reporters in the age of online judgments (click here for some of these posts).

For other research I am conducting, I obtained a photocopy of an article by Paul Perell (now a judge) from 1991 in the Legal Research Update quarterly newsletter (circa 1986 to 1996, RIP) called “Selecting Cases for the Ontario Reports.” In that article, (the now Mr. Justice) Perell lists out the six criteria for case selection as suggested by a Butterworths editor in England:

A case will be reported if:

–

I believe that the oldest use of media other than print to teach legal research was a videotape with voice-over by Stephen Borins back in the academic year, 1970-1971 in which he ran through a legal research problem which touched on Priestman v. Colangelo and the liability of police officers. It stressed the reliability of the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest and touched briefly on Butterworths Ontario Digest and the Canadian Abridgement.

The tape required a technician from York’s AV division to run it, and was very much talking head with some close-ups of book pages. It might be in a dusty . . . [more]

When Dominic Jaar became the CEO of the Canadian Centre for Court Technology, he immediately set out to constitute several “IntellAction” working groups. One of these groups had the mandate to promote the modernization of court web sites in Canada by way of producing guidelines on topic.

Dominic knew this was an area of strong interest to me, so he asked me to lead the group. We built the membership last September to include fair representation from the judiciary, lawyers in private and public sector practice, the Courts Administration Service, a few other areas and a journalist to represent . . . [more]

In response to my query in my earlier post on Fee Fie Foe Firm from a short while back in which I wondered how there could be 1,500 Canadian law firms targeted or searched by their custom search, I have had an update. Damien McRae, a knowledge consultant from Australia and founder of Fee Fie Foe Firm, has confirmed to me in an email that his site does in fact search/target 1500 selected Canadian law firms (as opposed to using some sort of automatic scraping of URLs).

Although I had meant to add some better refinements to my Custom . . . [more]

I thought I knew everything about legal research.

I don’t (although I suspect Simon, Simon and Angela do).

And to my surprise, it was Wikipedia that was my source for new information (in particular Wikipedia’s entry on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council).

We all know that civil appeals from the Supreme Court of Canada to the Judicial committee of the Privy Council were abolished in 1949.

In telling students this, I think I inevitably left the (mistaken) impression, by inference, that one did not need to worry about noting up Supreme Court of Canada cases after 1949 . . . [more]

Among the most important pieces of legislation that came into force last January First is the Act respecting the Compilation of Québec Laws and Regulations, S.Q. 2009, c. 40 (version française : L.Q. 2009, c. 40).

Pursuant to this Act, all consolidated statutes published by the Québec Official Publisher have official status “whatever the medium used“, including of course those published online by the Publications du Québec. Consolidations of regulatory texts will have official status on January first 2012. In the mean time, certain regulations will have official status if so stated within the published document. . . . [more]

To add to Ted Tjaden’s neat engine for law firm websites, and Google Scholar’s legal scholarship tool, you may be interested in the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center customized search engine

It announces a free search engine which searches the free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals, as well as document repositories hosting academic papers and related publications such as Congressional Research Service reports. Several of the law reviews (such as the Stanford Technology Law Review), working papers, and reports are available online only.

When you actually look under the engine it’s a customized Google . . . [more]

A reputable legal researcher recently suggested to the chief executive officer of a legal publishing company that the day was coming soon when his company would be offering its secondary content for free on a kindle. Needless to say, the CEO’s response was “not any time soon”. As an aside, he noted that it is becoming increasingly difficult to pay authors to write secondary content even now. He was frustrated by the growing market expectation that everything, including secondary content, would soon be available for free.

There is a growing assumption in the market that “someone else”, other than the . . . [more]

A group of Canadian authors has launched an online petition to protest the proposed settlement intended to put an end to a class action copyright lawsuit by U.S.-based author and publisher groups over Google’s plans to make and sell digital copies of millions of books.

In November 2009, the settlement was amended so that it would now apply only to books registered with the U.S. Copyright office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.

The Book Rights Registry board, the entity that will be responsible for paying authors and publishers from revenues earned by the digitization project, would also . . . [more]