A frequent posting on the Canadian Association of Law Libraries listserv (CALL-L) is a request for an English translation of a Canadian court decision written in French, typically from a Quebec court.

Although the CALL-L Archives contains some of the information that follows, it does not contain all of this information. In addition, responses in the Archives are not accessible by non-subscribers and hence are not indexed by Internet search engines. As such, my goal with this post — with the help of any SLAW readers adding additional information or clarifications in the Comments section below — is to update . . . [more]

Software developer Aji has just released a new version of iAnnotate with some feature upgrades that will please lawyers who’ve given up reading printouts of cases but crave an active electronic reading experience. Here’s Aji says about version 1.4:

Version 1.4 adds: Typewriter annotations, thickness and transparency for drawing annotations (including a “free-form” highlighter), and ability to view many other types of PDF annotations created in other tools. The ability to save web pages as vector (fully-searchable, highlightable) PDF files. The ability to import Word and PowerPoint files as vector PDF. Single-page mode option including swipe, slide, and tap to

This post concludes with the last two draft recommendations of the CCCT IntellAction Working Group on Court Web Site Guidelines:

• Site Features – Keep It Simple
• Publication of information – Make It Simple

The previous draft recommendations can be found here:

• Court Web Site: Use a Web Content Management System
• Court Intranets: Use the same Web Content Management System
• Recommended content of court web sites
• Search, Navigation & Taxonomies – Keep It Simple

Grateful for any comments and suggestions that you may have – merci! . . . [more]

Now that 2010 has come to a close and the ink is dry on the flurry of year end deals, many of us can now sit back . . . draw in a long, deep breath . . . relax . . . and start to focus our vision on the opportunities that lie ahead for 2011. What would the start of a new year be without some predictions on the future of business process outsourcings (BPO). Here’s some of our projections for 2011: 

Importance of Cost Reduction – Cutting Measures 

The debates continues as to whether or not we . . . [more]

One of the tasks a law librarian might carry out is legislation monitoring. At the Field Libraries we keep a detailed spreadsheet of which bills lawyers or clients may want status updates for, we monitor legislation from any jurisdiction and we email interested parties whenever there is a status change for a bill. We also watch for regulations, proclamations, government news releases and other published legislation hints. It is one of those tasks that is best carried out by a small organized team so that only the relevant information is disseminated to the many. I confess to a geeky interest . . . [more]

We learn last week that the Cornish pasty is safe at last from plain pasties passing themselves off as being from Cornwall, thanks to a decision by the European Union to give that delicacy Protected Geographical Indication status. In this it joins 19 other UK products and over a thousand from elsewhere in Europe protected by GI (“geographical indication”), DO (“designation of origin”), or TSG (“traditional speciality guaranteed”) status under European law.

There’s a designation database available online that you can search or browse by country, product and protection type.

A very few non-European nations can be found in the . . . [more]

Once law reform on the topic of electronic communications had dealt with first-level issues like how to satisfy writing requirements or signature requirements electronically, people started paying attention to harder questions. One of these was how to meet a requirement that a document must be transmitted or stored as an original. 

The approach to such questions at the  United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), which has tended to lead world thinking on the subject, is to seek a ‘functional equivalent’ of what satisfies the requirement on paper. What is the function or policy purpose served by the requirement, . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association has released a discussion paper by Ottawa law prof Adam Dodek, “Solicitor-Client Privilege in Canada, Challenges for the 21st Century” [PDF]. Although, as Professor Dodek says, the privilege has evolved into a “quasi-constitutional right,” its future is far from clear or, indeed, secure. From the conclusion to the 50-page paper:

As the CBA’s interventions with governments demonstrate, legislative intrusions on the Privilege are frequent, possibly more so. We live in an increasingly globalized legal world and Canadian law on the Privilege differs in significant respects from other jurisdictions which are important both in terms

Because international law supported European assertions of sovereignty over Indigenous territories beginning in the 15^th century it’s appropriate for international law to deal with the issue of Indigenous rights now. The current situation of Indigenous peoples was created by international law. European nations created an international law that allowed European powers to divide up and colonize the rest of the world and profit from it. Europe exported enough of its population to at least some of the colonies in the Americas and the Pacific that when they were decolonized, Europeans or their descendants continued to govern on the basis . . . [more]

Google’s Gmail service is suffering an outage that has left 120,000 of its 150 million Gmail users without e-mail, contacts, labels and other content since the weekend. While some will no doubt use the incident as a basis to proclaim the cloud as unreliable, the truth of the matter is more complex. Both on-premise and cloud-based services can, potentially, suffer from data loss. With on-premise services, you (or your IT staff) are typically 100% responsible for backing up your data, securely storing it, and testing recovery procedures. All (or at least most) cloud-based services will take care of this for . . . [more]

We are hearing so much these days about the changing landscape of legal services. See ‘The End of Lawyers?’ by Richard Susskind http://www.susskind.com/endoflawyers.html, or the writings of Jordan Furlong – http://www.law21.ca/consulting-services/ (also see his SLAW contributions).

One recurrent theme in the legal press now is that lawyers enjoy a legislated monopoly over the provision of certain services which do not require legal expertise. . . . [more]

Last Saturday, I shared on Slaw the first two recommendations of the CCCT IntellAction Working Group on Court Web Site Guidelines. In this post, I’m sharing our draft recommendations 3 and 4.

(note: in the next few days, I will share our two remaining recommendations, 5 and 6)

As usual – your comments and suggestions are welcome! Please let us know if you think we are in the right direction… . . . [more]