Called “Law21, dispatches from a legal profession on the brink,” Jordan says of the new year’s baby:

In the 21st century, the practice of law is shaking loose from its traditional moorings and heading out into uncharted territory. Opportunities abound, but so do pitfalls. Most of the old rules won’t apply anymore, while some will matter more than ever.

Welcome to the new legal profession, powered by collaboration, innovation, and client service. This is your front-row seat.

The RSS feed for posts is http://law21.ca/feed/.

As readers of the National or Jordan’s column (Law21) in Slaw will know, . . . [more]

The Law Librarian Blog today drew attention to the relatively new Best Practices for Legal Education Blog, “a site [that] was created with two goals in mind: 1) to create a useful web-based source of information on current reforms in legal education (…) ; and 2) to create a place where those interested in the future of legal education can freely exchange ideas, concerns, and opinions.”

Contributors are from the United States and the UK (or Glasgow anyway – is Scotland still part of the UK? In, out, half in, half out, sovereignly associated with the Brits?). . . . [more]

An interesting article in the NYTimes on the recent health issues of Om Malik. Om, for those of you that don’t follow tech blogs, is a long time industry insider and the publisher of GigaOm.

On Dec. 28th Om had a heart attack, and well wishes aside (I’m a long time subscriber), the combination of the sedentary life style, smoking and scotch (nah, couldn’t be the scotch…), are cited as causes to his health issues. The big kicker for me was the fact that Om is 41! Now that’s a wake-up call if ever there was one. Ouch.

The . . . [more]

In the same tradition of Dennis Kennedy’s Blawggies, Steve Matthews has just announced his 2007 CLawBies – Canadian Law Blog Awards.

Big winners this year are Rob Hyndman who won the Non-Legal Audience Award and tied for the Best Canadian Law Blog (or Blogger) Award and to Slaw for the Best Legal Technology Blog and runner-up for the Best Canadian Law Blog (or Blogger) Award.

Full disclosure: Steve Matthews is a co-contributor and friend here on Slaw, and he also awarded me runner up for Law Librarian Blog Award, which deservedly went to both Michel-Adrien Sheppard’s Library . . . [more]

What is the end of the year without a “best of” list or a blog award? For a third year, lawyer, consultant, speaker and writer Dennis Kennedy has put together his picks for the 2007 Blawggies, the law-related blog awards.

Here’s the “executive summary” of the award winners. I do encourage you to read the whole post for details and the honorable mention choices.

2007 Blawggie Award Categories and Winners.

1. Best Overall Law-Related Blog – Tom Collins’ More Partner Income

2. The Marty Schwimmer Best Practice-Specific Legal Blog – Ken Adams’ AdamsDrafting

3. Best Law Practice Management Blog –

The Lawyers Weekly December 21st article “Should legal blogs be seen as scholarship?” does just what its title says: It briefly explores the key differences and similarities between legal blogs and journal articles, and whether blogs have the same authority/credibility as journal articles inside or outside a court of law. . . . [more]

Those of you who are interested in the whole phenomenon of social networks and blogging generally — if only because innovations will come to law sooner or later — might take a look at a piece by Alex Iskold on Read/WriteWeb, “The Evolution of Personal Publishing.” His opening diagram gives you a sense of what he’s thinking. Note that blogging (which is us, and which is finally after some years catching on with lawyers) is firmly lodged in the “heavy” and “corporate” end of things — appropriately, I suppose.

. . . [more]

Steve Matthews, the brain behind Stem Legal and LegalPubs.ca, has revivified his original list of Canadian blawgs by giving it a home of its own as the Canadian Law Blogs List. This is brilliant.

The only thing that’s needed now, Steve, is the RSS links for each, and the ability to mix a feed of our choosing right there on the site, and….

When you have time, that is. . . . [more]

I came across a story, “London’s most wanted” by Ed Gottsman, posted yesterday on ZDNet‘s Between the Lines, one of the blogs I follow. It had to do with a report detailing the ineffectiveness of London’s 10,000 official CCTV cameras in solving crimes. I thought that this might interest some Slaw readers, but that it wasn’t so squarely up our alley (can that be right?) that it merited an entry, so I was simply going to post a link in the Slaw Linkblog to the report that gave rise to this article .

The ZDNet piece . . . [more]

Manitoba lawyer Donna Seale has been blogging since the end of August but somehow we missed that fact. But now we’re on it: her blog is Human Rights in the Workplace. Says Seale, a former Manager of Investigation & Mediation at the Manitoba Human Rights Commission who now has her own consulting business:

My intention in starting this blog is to use my knowledge and experience to help employers, employees, managers, supervisors, human resource specialists and union representatives understand the ins and outs of Canadian human rights law as it relates to the workplace.

Of course, there is an . . . [more]

HRCP Blog, the blog of the independent NGO Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, has been documenting the repression of members of that country’s legal, human rights and academic communities since President Musharraf imposed a state of emergency earlier this month.

One of the major targets of what has been described as a coup has been the increasingly independent-minded judiciary of the South Asian country.

The blog has been trying to make sure that the names of people arrested remain in the public eye.

Cross-posted to Library Boy. . . . [more]

Well, not by everyone, but by the efforts of thousands of people at least. That’s how the giant Oxford English Dicitionary was created, as pretty much everyone knows.

Reading The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester recently, I was struck by a few parallels between then and now — or, rather, between that and this. One thought was that this is a pretty good illustration of the wisdom of crowds, so popular nowadays. Of course, it depends on the crowd you hang with as to how wise the product will turn out to . . . [more]