The wires are reporting that Thomson Corp. has agreed to sell its educational publishing division to a consortium of private equity funds advised by Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners for US$7.75 billion.

That’s a sweet $2.75 Billion more than the value that Thomson had initially placed on its educational publishing, as we reported last year. . . . [more]

Presentations from Computers in Libraries 2007 last month in Arlington, VA have now been posted to the Presentations page. . . . [more]

There’s a tempest brewing in some parts of the Canadian legal universe on what it means to say that there’s a relationship between condition X and harm Y such that the law will say that X is a cause of Y, and what the legal tests are for determining the existence of that relationship.

My note below deals with aspects of that controversy. As some of you likely know, a chief justice of leading Canadian court recently penned a sentence which contains a phrase that is likely to outlive (for the wrong reasons) much of the rest of the court’s . . . [more]

Future employers may be looking at them and making assessments of employability based on the content. You are what you blog.

That’s what Michael D. Mann (a litigation associate in the New York office of a major law firm that wishes to remain anonymous) says in a piece on Law.com today: Some Job Hunters Are What They Post.

We know (thanks to the Washington Post) that negative comments about a student – discoverable through a Google search – can affect recruitment.

Be sure to extend your searches on yourself beyond Google and Technorati to incude MySpace, Facebook . . . [more]

As a young lawyer, I observed the pain that went into a comprehensive revision of the Ontario Rules of Practice. Homenaje a Walter Williston and John Morden.

Now the Burton Awards – the Oscars for Legal Writing – are being awarded for a four year project to rewrite the FRCP. The new rules were approved by the Supreme Court of the United States and sent to Congress on April 30. They are scheduled to take effect on December 1, 2007.

The Rules were drafted in 1937 and while they’ve been changed and supplemented over the years, they have . . . [more]

“Legal Wikis Are Bound to Wow You” (May 7) not only gives a good overview of wikis in general (what are they?, usefulness/purpose, history, etc), but it also highlights the innovative ways legal professionals are using them.
Some examples:

Death Penalty Wiki – a collaboratively edited log of death penalty cases

IPdailyupdate – daily news stories related to intellectual property law

Lawpedia – aimed at family law attorneys with articles on property division, child custody and prenuptial agreements . . . [more]

John Gregory, impressive lawyer and occasional Slawyer, runs an email list (ULC_ECOMM-L) about electronic commerce and allied matters. I think of that list as life in the slower electronic lane, which is not a disparagement, but rather an appreciation of a pre-blogging information technology that was perhaps less in your face (though we’ve all been on email lists that fire entries like Gatling guns). If there were a web interface to go along with it, I’d suggest you take a look. But because there isn’t, let me give you a quick run over the topics broached in the last couple . . . [more]

At this week’s annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries in Ottawa, the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing was awarded to Maritime Law Book.

Since 1999, the Award has been given by the Association every year to acknowledge the work that is done by publishers to provide the Canadian legal profession with high quality materials for use in understanding and researching the law.

From the announcement:

“Maritime Law Book is a Canadian owned and operated company located in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It started operations in 1969 by publishing Canadian caselaw from jurisdictions not covered

In a post on his blog today, Michael Geist challenges both Warner Bros. and the Globe and Mail’s coverage of the former’s claims about Canada’s contributions to movie piracy. Referring to a story in today’s Globe that indicated that Canada is one of the world’s worst piracy offenders and that Montreal was identified as the world’s no. 1 city for illegal camcording, Geist points out that there is no consistent evidence placing Canada at the top of the camcorder pirate list, as the Warner claim suggests:

According to the MPAA, the world’s leading source of pirated movies is the United

In Washington this morning a major scientific announcement by a consortium of major scientific institutions:

In a whale-size project, the world’s scientists plan to compile everything they know about all of Earth’s 1.8 million known species and put it all on one Web site. . . . [more]

This morning’s Post (yes it does actually arrive in a once daily delivery) brought Mélanie Raymond’s bright new edition of the Canadian Bar National. On page 9, Connie has a piece called “Too cool for school – Law firm legal research adapts to a new generation of studentsResearch geeks will note the reference to Fountains Of Wayne.

The Blog list looks familiar:

Blogroll
Consult these five blogs to stay on top of the legal research scene
in Canada:
Slaw.ca – A co-operative blog about Canadian legal research and IT, etc.
Connie Crosby Oft-cited blog by the Library Manager . . . [more]

Online apps are great, but what about those times when you’re not connected? The thought is that the dis-connect deters people from relying on web apps for their basic computing needs, hence the current scramble to provide a way of working with such applications when you’re offline and having them sync when you connect once again. Scrybe, currently in closed beta, is one of the much-touted leaders in this quest, planning to provide calendaring, lists, note-taking and sharing of these.

I finally got a beta test account — one of the last to do so, I imagine, since Scrybe’s . . . [more]