Reed Elsevier Plc, owner LexisNexis, today lost a case that denied it the ability to trademark the phrase “lawyers.com” for its Martindale-Hubbell online legal information service.

Martindale-Hubbell had run the Web site for nine years, and was seeking to protect the lawyers.com mark to prevent others from trading on the brand.

The decision is fairly brief – and contains the nicely barbed line:

“For better or worse, lawyers are necessarily an integral part of the information exchange about legal services,”

It continued:

information exchange about lawyers is not at all discrete from information exchange about the law, legal news, and

Canadian tech magazine Backbone has started a blog called Backblog. Bloggers to date:

• Andrew Rideout
• Peter Wolchak
• Danny Bradbury
• Miles Faulkner
• Don Tapscott (author, co-author of Wikinomics)
• Anthony D. Williams (co-author of Wikinomics)
• Jon Husband (Wirearchy blog)

They don’t blog nearly as often as we do–yet–but they have some wide-ranging blog posts with some good depth.

Interested in becoming one of their technology bloggers? And perhaps even cross-pollenating some ideas by contributing an article or two to the magazine? They have just sent out a call for bloggers–see How to Blog With Backbone. What . . . [more]

Nick Park, the master of claymation and creator of the Wallace and Gromit films, did a couple of series of shorts earlier in his career called Creature Comforts, which featured, as the credits put it, “voices of the great British public” as soundtracks to various delightful pseudo-documentaries.

In one Oscar winner winner animals discuss life at the zoo. “Accustomed to open spaces and sunnier climes, they comment on the accomodation, diet and the English weather.” You can see this 5-minute short on Atom Films, a site where Park’s film is shown with his permission. (Ignore the brief annoying ad . . . [more]

Those of you who are as old (or nearly as old) as I am will be saddened to hear of the death of Ian Baxter. I came across his death notice in the Globe & Mail yesterday. (It’s re-published today.) The family has said that there will be no memorial service.

I remember Ian as a careful scholar with a delightful sense of humour and a man of great modesty. He was the principal author of the report of the old Law Reform Commission of Ontario which was the basis for the radical changes in family law represented by the . . . [more]

My colleague was recently doing some historical research and came across a very interesting entry in the Canadian Law List from 1900. Personally, I am very excited by his discovery, and it has given me inspiration to create a new TV show. First have a look for yourself:

That’s right! Blackadder a lawyer, in Halifax, circa 1900. I’m not too concerned with spelling, I mean really, would Blackadder get stuck on spelling (especially the first incarnation). And let me assure you that Halifax, especially Halifax in 1900, would be a treasure trove of plot ideas and misadventures for Blackadder and . . . [more]

I’m in the process of transferring responsibility for The Court to the new Editor-in-Chief, James Stribopoulos. Transitions are difficult in a number of respects, but there’s one aspect of it all that’s made me take another look at the tools available to those of us who work with computers, whether or not on the web; and that’s the business of designing a good operater’s manual. Although what I’m about to worry here has arisen out of that process, it would apply just as well to the production of any sophisticated document aimed at instructing or supporting the user.

The . . . [more]

John Willinsky recently gave a lively and informative talk at the UofA on the coming “sea change” in scholarly publishing. It is linked from the new OA/UofA blog. I’m looking forward to the PKP publishing conference in July. . . . [more]

As someone who works closely with our Sales and Business Development team to help them identify and research prospective clients, I was happy to come across the recent article “Courting clients: Are law school grads getting the business skills they need?” in The Lawyers Weekly. It discusses the need for law schools to incorporate client development training into the curriculum, and how various law schools are doing this. Currently, business development training has been a focus of the schools’ career services offices (the article highlights the career services programs offered at University of British Columbia and University . . . [more]

Environmental Law, a law review published by the Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon, has introduced a blog-like online companion entitled Environmental Law Online.

The supplement provides access to the articles of the journal, as well as to case reviews of 9th Circuit court decisions and to comments.

“Environmental Law Online joins a growing list of elite law reviews with online companions, including The Yale Law Journal’s Pocket Part, Harvard Law Review’s The Forum, Michigan Law Review’s First Impressions, Northwestern University Law Review’s Colloquy, Texas Law Review’s See Also, Virginia Law Review’s

The magazine Scientific American reports that Google and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have launched an online mapping project to provide evidence of atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. Many human rights groups have called the mass killings at the hands of Sudan government-sponsored militia a form of “genocide”.

“Using high-resolution imagery [from Google Earth], users can zoom into Darfur to view more than 1,600 damaged or destroyed villages, providing what the Holocaust Museum says is evidence of the genocide”.

The BBC News service reports today in an article entitled Google Earth turns spotlight on Darfur that the project . . . [more]

It’s a bit past April 1, but OHLS has now announced its new admission policy. Alumni will have received (or will be receiving) the Osgoode Brief e-mail from OHLS announcing this.

Part of Osgoode’s new admission policies is what I read as the effective elimination of the window that allowed some people in without an undergraduate degree immediately after 2 years of undergraduate work. The notice of motion that lead to the adoption states “that ordinarily the minimum number of years of university study that an applicant must complete prior to admission be increased from two years (60 credits) to . . . [more]

Those of you who like words — discreet pause while 2.36 readers sigh and leave their machines — will be interested in WebCorp, a lingustic tool of the University of Central England that treats the web as a corpus:

However large and up-to-date the electronic text corpora available are, there will always be aspects of the language which are too rare or too new to be evidenced in them. WebCorp is a suite of tools which allows access to the World Wide Web as a corpus – a large collection of texts from which facts about the language can