Canada’s online legal magazine.

Archive for ‘Legal Information: Libraries & Research’

Unfiltered Orange – Electronic Discovery Industry Updates


The folks over at Orange Legal Technologies have put together a news feed they are calling “Unfiltered Orange” focussing on electronic discovery. You can access Unfiltered Orange a few ways:

They are apparently using Twitter to create the original feed. They have created this . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Practice of Law, Substantive Law, Technology

New Issue of OHRLP Available

Issue 2 of the Osgoode Hall Review of Law and Policy is now available online. The lead article in this student-run journal is “The SAC Proposal for the Monetization of the File Sharing of Music in Canada: Does It Comply With Canada‘s International Treaty Obligations Related To Copyright?,” [PDF] by Barry Sookman, of McCarthy Tétrault LLP and Co-Chair of its Technology Law Group. This issue of the OHRLP can be downloaded entire in PDF. . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Legal Information: Publishing

Legislation Online Goes “official” – a Problem or an Opportunity for Commercial Publishers

Recent developments regarding the official status of legislation available online are certain to have an effect on the legislative products offered by Canada’s commercial legal publishers.

As noted in a recent SLAW posting, Ontario now recognizes its legislation website as an official source of the law. As of November 30th, 2008, an “on-screen display of a statute or regulation viewed on, or downloaded from the e Laws website” is now official.

Quebec is expected to follow suit. Just prior to the recent dissolution of the National Assembly, a bill was pending that would recognize the official character of its legislation . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Legal Information: Publishing

Legal Outsourcing – Offshore and Domestically

A recent WSL Blog posting on legal outsourcing to India (a topic covered quite extensively on SLAW), reminded me I was going to mention the panel that spoke on this topic a few weeks back at the Canadian Law and Technology Forum in Toronto. One speaker discussed offshore outsourcing and the other speaker discussed outsourcing domestically to Canadian lawyers.

The offshore outsourcing speaker was lawyer Gavin Birer of Legalwise Outsourcing Inc. (who wrote a good introductory article on the topic here on SLAW earlier this summer). Given good high-speed Internet, secure communications and a body of qualified lawyers in India, . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Outsourcing

English Reports 1220-1873 Available Free Online

CommonLII has just announced that, thanks to Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby, it is now making the English Reports from 1220-1873 available online. (Well, from 1457, really; the 1220 cases, of which there are a great many, are nonetheless outliers: the dates leap from 1220 straight to 1457. The data were provided by Justis.

The cases are in PDF and not searchable, so far as I can tell. OCR of that old type would be a nightmare anyway.

I have to say it is an impressive sight to look at the four centuries of links to this great . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research

Litigation & Bankruptcy Services From CourtCanada.com

While on Twitter I recently came across Mari Moreshead who does “client services and community management” for CourtCanada.com. I had never heard of CourtCanada and so checked their website and asked if I might interview her for the purpose of reporting back to Slaw readers.

CourtCanada was started in 2006 by former bankruptcy lawyer Gregory Azeff who is the company’s President and Chairman of the Board of Directors. CourtCanada is currently comprised of two services:

InSolve – a bankruptcy case management system, first beta tested in February 2007 and released in final version January 2008. For cases in the . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Legal Information: Publishing, Substantive Law, Substantive Law: Judicial Decisions, Technology

Dialogue on the Future of Legal Publishing: Is It Time?

Every year a ‘Vendors Forum’ is held as part of the annual meeting of the Canadian Law Libraries Association (CALL). In recent years the forum has evolved into a series of simple product presentations by the legal publishers. The most recent meeting held in the spring in Saskatoon was no exception.

In earlier years, the forum was a bit more exciting with panels of representatives of legal publishers frequently under the gun as they were asked pointed questions on the legal information issues of the day. Some thought that the questions were too tough and that the forums themselves lacked . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Legal Information: Publishing

Up-to-the-Minute News on Mumbai Attacks

I just arrived home and am catching up on the terrorist attack on Mumbai this evening (tomorrow morning in India).

BlogTalkRadio SAJA (South Asian Journalist Association) are holding web-based phone-in discussions every 12 hours, 10 – 11:30 am/pm ET or 8:30 – 10:00 am/pm Indian time. The guests on the first call (evening of Nov. 26 in Canada) included Benjamin Piven, former Fulbright Scholar in Mumbai and Suketu Mehta, author, “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.” Author Rohit Bhargava has posted the details on his Influential Marketing Blog.

For those wishing to follow the latest news, some . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Substantive Law, Technology

Google SearchWiki

On Friday, Google launched its “SearchWiki,” a way of customizing your own search results. I gather that they’re rolling it out according to some pattern, which means you may not see this feature in your results for a few days yet.

What you will see is illustrated below:

If, for example, Slaw hadn’t come up top in my results in a search for “slaw,” I could have moved it up there with the arrow, and ever after it would be first. For me. Which is what I don’t quite get: why exactly would I want to fix the results of . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Technology, Technology: Internet

Europeana.eu Crashes

Back in September I posted about the imminent launch of Europeana, the digital library, museum and archive that will share Europe’s cultural objects online with Europe and the world. Well, it launched on November 20, as scheduled, got 10,000,000 hits an hour and crashed. The site is now down until some time in December, we’re told, when it will return in a more robust form and ready for the huge digital crowds that clearly want in. Ah, the tribulations of success.

[via ::CultureLibre.ca::] . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Technology

3li_EnFr_Wordmark_W

This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada | Ce projet a été rendu possible en partie grâce au gouvernement du Canada