Here’s a link to a survey from the Law School Survey of Student Engagement, as reported in (hat-tip to) Inside Higher Education, Writing Lags in Law Schools.

The discussion on Legal Writing is interesting, and I don’t know of any reason why a Canadian survey would be terribly different . . . [more]

The professional social networking site LinkedIn has slowly been making a number of changes that are making the site increasingly useful. I am still finding my way around, but changes I find of interest:

• the addition of third party applications that allow me to do things like share my presentation slides (via Slideshare) and to see recently added presentations of others, and to see what my contacts are reading with the Amazon.com application;
• increased and improved functionality of groups, allowing those in a group to have a discussion;
• suggestions of people who I might know who are on LinkedIn

As Simon Fodden pointed out earlier, one of the greatest limitations of Twitter is the amount of unwanted “noise” it produces,

What has to happen for Twitter to become useful and enjoyable for me is the introduction of filters or channels or folders… I need to be able to group them by my own taxonomy and then, depending on what I”m up to, screen out the noise and leave the signal.

A new service by LexBlog might help legal professionals accomplish this.

LexTweet gathers tweets from legal professionals on Twitter, which effectively creates a legal channel. The service has . . . [more]

Here’s a third in the series of short posts about Google, appropriately enough about a short form of searching, this time. A Norwegian with the screen name of Mr. Calzone has created a site that makes short work of the otherwise long Google search string: no need to go to his website first, no need to download an app: simply put your search term at the end of the string http://gog.is/ Thus, for example, a search for “slaw” would be http://gog.is/slaw. You can use more than one search term if you separate them with commas or + signs, so avoiding . . . [more]

Not content with the blue ‘g’ announced this spring (too close to too many other icons?), Google has introduced yet another favicon:

This design is based on submissions by the public. I’ll get used to it, but at first sight it seems to me to try to do too much with too little space. . . . [more]

Just for fun I looked at how many pages Google throws up when you feed it “slaw.ca” in the search box. I’m wowed to be able to say the answer is a staggering 350,000 — or, to use Google’s more careful estimation “about” 350,000. Herewith the unaltered digital-image evidence:

Sure, there is a sprinkling of BBQ sites that got in somehow, but basically it’s turtles all the way down. . . . [more]

The traditional rule in common law provinces is that that the producing party is responsible for the immediate costs of the production of its documents to the other party. While British Columbia does expressly address the costs of electronic discovery, in Ontario, Rule 1.03(1) provides that the Rules of Civil Procedure shall be liberally construed to secure “the just, most expeditious and least expensive determination of every civil proceeding on its merits”. The cost of documentary discovery under the present regime may easily overwhelm the amount at issue in the litigation. One legal writer has called this the perfect storm. . . . [more]

Here’s a new US title that should be of interest to Slawyers. Its available in print from Yale UP, or online for free.

Daniel Solove, a lawyer and blogger, takes a look at the long term effects of the Internet on personal privacy and the legal ramifications of a loss of reputation. People often struggle with the fine line between privacy and free speech on the Web. You can share personal information about yourself or a friend on a blog, not realizing that it will be there for anyone — including future employers and dates — to see. […] The

Here’s an update about what’s happening on the website for those of you who read Slaw via RSS.

There are some discussion threads you might want to visit, if, like most of our readers you don’t subscribe to comments:

• Steve Matthews’ ABA Blawg Contest Rigged? has garnered 8 comments and is still counting.
• Ted Tjaden’s Legal Citation Question on Indicating Jurisdiction in Case Law Citations has just under a dozen comments, which, as Slawyer Alex Manevich said, may say something about us.
• Seven readers have contributed to the discussion of John Gregory’s Destroying Data

And as always there’s a bunch . . . [more]

As you’ll see on Slaw, I’m on about pictures again today — whether they’re worth a certain number of words, how exactly they marry (or not) with language. I suspect my occasional fascination with images has to do with the fact that I spend much of my time swimming in words, stroking for meaning; for those who, like me, are immersed in verbiage it’s important, I think, to pay attention to the visual field and to music as well, so that we are regularly reminded that wordy meaning is only one sort, and perhaps not the most powerful kind at . . . [more]

It’s not easy to get a computer to recognize Charley’s aunt — or your copy of Insurance and Risk Management in Commercial Leases, for that matter. Seems our visual cortex et al. do a rather marvelous job of making sense of photon streams. Thanks to ASCII and to some nifty OCR developments, words aren’t all that hard for the machines we live by, but people and objects are a tough nut that the computer world is working hard to crack.

There is, of course, the impetus provided by the U.S. Homeland Security’s wish to recognize the face of terrror when . . . [more]

Of the future, that is? The British blog, cutely named, Royal Pingdom, has measured the frequency of certain terms and buzzwords, using good old Google, and compared it to that for the years since 2004 to uncover possible trends — that glimpse of the future we all seek. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, “’Web 2.0′ peaked in 2007 and has been decreasing in 2008″ and “While the interest for ‘blogging’ hasn’t changed much over the last couple of years, ‘microblogging’ has seen a rapid rise since early 2007 (presumably due to Twitter).”

There’s a surprise or two, though, for me at least: . . . [more]