This is an important (though admittedly recherché) area of corporate practice, which has a great resource of background materials maintained by the ABA Business Law Section Committee on Legal Opinions.

The Canadian equivalents are (hélas) maintained behind firewalls. . . . [more]

CasemakerX announced today the development of a social networking site which will be available to American law students, law school faculty and law librarians who register as users ((CasemakerX is a free service supported by the Casemaker Bar Consortium and its 475,000 attorney membership consisting of State Bar Associations across the USA. The purpose of CasemakerX is to provide a conduit to network law students and legal professionals, creating an information portal for self-promotion, education, mentoring and future opportunities in the legal profession. Our mission is to help law students connect and use the power of group knowledge and professional/social . . . [more]

Over at TechDirt, a comment on the idea, now espoused by at least one patent lawyer, that multiple inventions of the same thing at the same time should be taken as evidence that the invention is ‘obvious’ enough not to warrant a patent. . . . [more]

Fascinating real-life stuff.

New York Post photojournalist Steven Hirsch writes a blog called Courthouse Confessions.

It is all based on his encounters in front of the Manhattan Criminal Court with criminal defendants leaving the building.

He snaps their pictures and asks them a few questions.

[Source: New York Times, August 3rd, 2008]

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

I’m pleased to report that Alex Manevich has joined Slaw as a core contributor. Alex is a lawyer with Ogilvy Renault LLP, in its business law group, and is interested in a wide range of legal mattters, including patent law, international arbitration, and communications regulation, as well as corporate and commercial mandates. Please join me in welcoming Alex to Slaw. . . . [more]

Simon Fodden noted in a post a couple of days ago that a couple of copyright commenters have stopped commenting because “the current state of copyright law is truly depressing”, or “ “corruption” of the political process”.

IMHO, one of the problems with the current state of copyright law is that legislators, lobbyists, interest groups and lawyers are for the most part all so bogged down in the details that they fail to see the big picture and fail to go back to the fundamentals to think things through.

As lawyers we are (or at least we should be) good . . . [more]

A tip of the SLAW hat to Richard (Rick) Sage (of the Ontario Legislative Library) who made me aware today of “Our Ontario” (http://www.ourontario.ca) (SLAW’s Neil Campbell mentioned a related initiative relating to Alouette Canada in his 17 April 2007 post here).

The Government Documents collection on the “Our Ontario” site at http://govdocs.ourontario.ca can be used to find old Ontario Legislative Assembly Journals (turn-of-the-century old, e.g., from 1867).

If you type in the following terms – ontario legislative assembly journals – using the “AND” connector radio button, the first link is to the “repository directory” being http://www.ontla.on.ca/library/repository/ser/23347/ . . . [more]

Si on pourrait quitter les folies francophones à Montréal ce week-end, on pourrait avoir assisté à le premier congrès de l’Association internationale francophone des bibliothécaires documentalistes ((L’organisation se réjouit de la participation active de professionnels du
domaine de la bibliothéconomie originaires de différents pays francophones d’Europe,
d’Afrique et du Québec.)). Le président du congrès Réjean Savard, professeur de bibliothéconomie à l’Université de Montréal a fourni une allocution sur les défis que l’Internet lance pour des bibliothèques et ces employés ((Voir aussi son écrit (en anglais) Canadian Libraries on the Agenda: their accomplishments and directions en IFLA Journal, Vol. . . . [more]

Hats off to David Whelan and his colleagues at the Great Library for an intelligently designed practice portal clustering together resources for real estate lawyers in Ontario. Somewhat similar to the Pathfinders developed in many firms, it’s a great resource for solos and small firms. . . . [more]

OA News points to an interview with the head of Harvard Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication on the prospects for OA and related issues at Harvard. . . . [more]

As Slaw readers will certainly have noticed, in the three years of our existence we’ve opened our arms increasingly wide until we now embrace not simply the legal research and technology that were our original subjects but essentially anything of interest in law. It’s time to acknowledge this broader Slaw and to say, as our revised tagline does, “Slaw is a Canadian cooperative weblog on things legal.” At the same time, I want to reassure those for whom legal research and technology are vitally interesting: we have no intention of abandoning these subjects and will continue to welcome contributors, entries . . . [more]

Okay, so here we are, in the dog days of summer. Canadian readers have just come off the August long weekend, and most probably wouldn’t object if this three-day holiday were suddenly extended to a full week by executive fiat. But no matter where you are (okay, not Australia), you’ve had your fill of daytime heat, evening thunderstorms and the like. You’re ready for a splash of something different.

And here it is: welcome to the first annual Legal Profession Blue-Sky Challenge! It’s time to engage in some serious blue-sky brainstorming, to think way outside the box, to engage bold . . . [more]