We were discussing the role of the research lawyer in law firms the other day. In his post, Ted mentioned the oft-cited example of Bertha Wilson, the former research lawyer who, as we all know, went on to be a highly respected Court of Appeal and Supreme Court Justice. Today the federal Minister of Justice appointed Jo’Anne Strekaf to the Alberta Bench. Jo’Anne Justice Strekaf is (or was?) a leading competition lawyer, but also a longtime member of Bennett Jones’s research practice group. I am enjoying my perception that there is some significance in the announcement‘s express mention of . . . [more]

Perhaps encryption isn’t so easy after all, and some people could use a little primer. This is how I protect my laptop….

Wired – “How Does Bruce Schneier Protect His Laptop Data? With His Fists — and PGP“

After a discussion among academics about the perils of crossing the U.S. border with your laptop full of research data, I began to wonder how diligent law firms are in ensuring that nothing leaves the office on a laptop that is unsecured. The shocking incident in which Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs lost a couple of disks containing private . . . [more]

Sadly there’s one more niche for advertising to ply its charms. Yahoo and Adobe have signed a deal for Adobe to provide space in PDFs for Yahoo-pushed advertising. The joint communiqué — an ad-free PDF — can be found here. A publisher of information (U.S. only — for the time being?) registers with Adobe and uploads content; Adobe’s algorithm then pairs that content with ads; the distributed registered PDF comes to you adorned with ads. As the articley on ZDNet says, perhaps it won’t be so bad: who reads publishers’ PDFs anyway? . . . [more]

In Eugene Meehan’s Supreme Court letter today he states the facts of a proposed class action:

“The Applicants alleged that their flight back to Quebec City was delayed because of technical problems. Then, after takeoff, a loud banging noise was heard, the aircraft lost 10,000 feet in altitude, and the pilot had to return to the airport in Varadero, Cuba. An officer carried out a visual inspection of the aircraft and informed the pilot that part of the aircraft’s rudder (tail fin) was missing, and that the coffee was cold…”.

I’m not sure that, if I were a passenger I . . . [more]

This is interesting.

In an effort to make Dow Jones more 2.0, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Interactive Media is in talks to purchase LinkedIn. You may know that Murdoch already owns MySpace, very popular among teens.

Story from VentureBeat . . . [more]

The Right Honorable Antonio Lamer, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court between 1990 and 2000 who passed away on the weekend, lay in repose earlier today in the Main Hall in the lobby of the Supreme Court building.

His flag-draped casket had an honour guard of 5 soldiers from the Governor General’s Foot Guards and a Mountie in ceremonial red serge uniform. Lamer was Honorary Colonel of the Foot Guards.

Numerous members of the public and the legal profession came to pay their last respects and were filing by all afternoon long. When I left my office . . . [more]

I’ve only just noticed that CanLII has warnings that alert you if you wind up at a version of a statute that predates the last update of the collection. See, for example, this version of the Family Law Act. How might you get into an older version on CanLII anyway? Via Google. A Google search for “Ontario family property” gives a link to a 2004 version within the first 20 hits — and, alas, no more current link. . . . [more]

At last week’s monthly meeting of Toronto legal research lawyers we discussed the availability of online PDF’ed versions of judicial decisions that have also been published in print by the publisher.

In the States, for example, decisions from the West National Reporter Series are available online on Westlaw in a text/HTML format, and – for an extra charge – as PDF versions which are exact copies of the print version.

In the U.K., there is Justis.com that provides PDF versions of the official U.K. Law Reports, in addition to HTML versions (and their HTML versions are great because they insert . . . [more]

The Department of Justice Canada appears to have recently started to offer PDF, bilingual versions of key federal statutes on their site here.

An example is the Divorce Act current to about 2 weeks ago, available in HTML (English only or French only) and PDF (containing side by side English and French).

The PDF versions are current to the same date as the HTML version.

However, one criticism – if I may – is that the PDF version does not have the currency date on its face. As such, once printed, the reader does not necessarily know how current . . . [more]

As a follow up to my prior post on full-text keyword searching versus controlled vocabularies, I am wondering what law firms are doing regarding harvesting and re-using their internal research work product (research memos, client bulletins and newsletters, reasoned opinions and the like).

I know of some firms that actually catalog them in a separate database using a simplified legal taxonomy. I assume the other extreme is doing nothing but making them available on a document management system (DMS) to be searched full-text by keyword.

For those that do some level of profiling or cataloging:

1) What taxonomy works best . . . [more]

Thomas Mann, author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research, has recently written a good article called “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries” (PDF).

Colleague Clare Mauro brought this article to my attention after a discussion we had regarding my naive conclusion after reading Everything is Miscellaneous that the “magical search engine” just around the corner will solve all of our information needs and reduce or eliminate the need for “second order” control over information through controlled vocabularies.

Mann’s article reminds us of the power of “second order” precoordinated . . . [more]

What goes around comes around. It seems that two years ago almost to the date, I mentioned here on SLAW the discussions of an informal group of Toronto research lawyers surrounding the role of research lawyers in law firms.

At our meeting last week, the same discussion arose again, albeit in a slightly different context. Our discussion this time around focused on the frustration some research lawyers still feel in their role not being fully understood by others in their law firm or by clients. This frustration manifests itself in a number of ways:

1) There is a mistaken belief . . . [more]