For those of you that thought having two Simon’s here at Slaw was confusing, get ready for take-off! This week Slaw is ecstatic to welcome three new weekly contributors – David Bilinsky, David Canton, and David Fraser. If you’ve followed Canadian law blogs over the past couple years, none of who will need much of an introduction. But, we’ll do it anyway…

David Bilinsky is the Practice Management Advisor and staff lawyer for the Law Society of British Columbia. His impressive CV includes such items as being Chair of the Editorial Board for Law Practice Magazine, . . . [more]

Out-Googling Google.

by David J. Bilinsky

July 29, 2008.

♫ I tried my best to let you know
That I’m not trying to test you
It’s just so hard to let you go
When I have nothing against you…♫

Words and music by Midtown

It was just a matter of time. It isn’t that I have anything against you, Google, indeed I have learned so much from you, but in time, all things must end. Alas, I have found another.

Cuil (pronounced cool) is the new well, Cool search engine in town. And she is big – very big . . . [more]

What with the arrest of Radovan Karadžić, world attention will likely return for a moment at least to the Hague, and to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in particular. One way to stay in touch with developments at the ICTY and, indeed, all international justice doings at the Hague, is to frequent the Hague Justic Portal. Available in Dutch, French and English, the portal is the creation of The Hague Academic Coalition, a consortium of various institutes in the Hague. . . . [more]

Summer got in the way of the last few Fridays, but I’m back with something completely irrelevant, as ususal. This week it’s numbers. Numbers that make no sense to anyone with the exception of two people in the world. So why would we want to pay attention to something so…cryptic?

Because it’s all about secrets, the sort that spies have. And about numbers stations that are still today used to broadcast shortwave messages to those spies.

All over the world unlicensed broadcasts occur at various points on the shortwave band, most at rigorously regular times, some at apparently random times, . . . [more]

beSpacific reports that LLRX has posted a positive description of Zotero. The review does not mention that there is only a draft version of a citation style for the Blue Book, and nothing in the works to make Zotero work with our own inimitable Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation.

I think Zotero is the product of the near-to-mid future, and I expect legal writers will move to it as soon as there is a style for them to use, because most of us are fed up with the vagaries of Endnote and related products (lack of networkablility . . . [more]

Genie Tyburski gave us the disappointing news yesterday that she is bringing her site, The Virtual Chase, to a close over the coming months. I will miss her regular updates, hints, tips, and posts of other useful information. She has been maintaining the site and its update, TVC Alert, hosted by her firm Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll in Philadelphia for 12 years. I think congratulations to Genie are in order both for her excellent work with The Virtual Chase and for her new role, as of yesterday, as library manager at Ballard Spahr. However, note that Genie hints . . . [more]

Or rather the value of access to Halsbury’s Laws. That’s the issue that the English courts must decide in a breach of contract claim involving a Reed-Elsevier legal author and the Anglo-Dutch legal publishing conglomerate.

English silk, David Phillips is suing the English division of the publisher, trading as LexisNexis Butterworths, for £316,730 including interest and costs.

Legal publishers aren’t used to being sued.

The claim alleges that LexisNexis breached a deal with Phillips’ father a High Court judge who edited the Income Tax volume of Halsbury’s in the 1970s. I suspect that his Lordship didn’t think it . . . [more]

We encourage you to take a look at our friend Jordan Furlong’s provocation to his legal publishing colleagues:

Stop.
Time out. Stop doing what we’ve always been doing. Put aside the deadlines and schedules for a moment. Put down the pen, those of us still using one. Push back from the keyboard, take a deep breath, and close our eyes. Make a mental list of all of our longstanding assumptions about this industry — what we produce, how we sell it, who buys it. Now, throw all these assumptions out, because it’s just about time for us to reinvent

I’ve just discovered that Google offers a way of stripping style sheets (and images, if you like) from any website, with the effect that you’re left with simply the text and fundamental html formatting. The advantage is that this can make reading the text of sites much easier on the small screens of various mobile devices.

The Google URL is http://www.google.com/gwt/n, which offers you an ultra simple screen:

I’m glad to say that Slaw works well when fed through this device. The following link will take you to Slaw with all style and images removed:

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slaw.ca&_gwt_noimg=1

If you’re able . . . [more]

The Twelfth Annual Canadian IT Law Association Conference, October 27–28, is being held in Halifax this year and offers two days of heavy-duty talks on issues such as “Structuring Multi-Jurisdictional IT Contracts” and “Extraterritorial Application of Laws: The Borderless Internet.” The full program is available in PDF from the sponsoring IT.CAN site. . . . [more]

Shifd is a nice little program that just might prove handy for some folks. Created by two guys from the New York Times R&D department in a 22-hour hack at a London contest, the app lets you file snippets of data that interest you and retrieve them from any computer or your cell phone. (The feature involving mobile phones is currently only for the U.S. but they’re working on Canada, we’re told.) There’s also a desktop version running on Adobe Air that syncs your notes with the Times server.

You’re invited to file data in one of three modes: notes, . . . [more]

After an article published earlier this year in the New Atlantis, the discussion has flared up again about the negative effects that distractions and multi-tasking can have on productivity.

In response to the New Atlantic article, others have been chiming in. Nicholas Carr, whose blog we have mentioned here in the past, wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for the Atlantic Monthly. The Sunday Times this week published an article called “Stoooopid …. why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks.” All of these articles complain that the way we access information is harming . . . [more]