Here at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, we recently compilted the results of th IT/Computer portion of the annual 1st year student survey. Here is a link to the three page survey.

Here are some highlights from the Survey:

• 94% of incoming students own laptops, and 98% of those laptops are wireless.
• 87% have high speed internet at home, and only 1% do not have any form of internet access from home.
• The average purchase price for laptops dropped again to $1358 (down from over $2000 in 2004).
• See the last page of the report for

The ABA’s Litigation Section’s website has a number of useful resources, but I hadn’t noticed its podcasts, including one that could be usefully shown to law students of young associates on how to use the web intelligently for American legal research.

It’s billed as follows:

Quick and Dirty Research

What happens when you need an answer right away, and you can’t bill for the research? No need to panic. Christina DeVries shares some techniques for finding the law in 30 minutes or less.

Lots of practical tips, which might just steer a student to use Google more intelligently. I . . . [more]

The Google Enterprise Search Superstar Award highlights people and companies using Google enterprise search products in innovative ways to improve the search experience and obtain better business results. Today the award was given to Justia Google Enterprise Search Superstar for its innovative use of the Google Mini for providing search results for its US Supreme Court opinion database.

Justia was selected for excellence in its approach to helping legal researchers search U.S. Supreme Court opinions online. “The Google Enterprise Search Superstar Award is great recognition for how we use the Google Mini to search U.S. Supreme Court opinions and other . . . [more]

For those of you following the debates around Google Book Search:

The January 2007 issue of Walt Crawford’s newsletter Cites & Insights has a great perspective piece on the past year’s developments related to Google Book Search. The developments discussed include:
-University of Michigan’s portion of Google Book Search
-the Google Librarian Newsletters
-improvements to Google Book Search (“Find this book in a library” and “Find libraries” links)
-University of California joins Google Library Project
-Google’s usage guidelines
-some publishers admitting that Google Book Search is helping sales
-value of using Google Book Search at the library reference desk . . . [more]

If you can tolerate yet another Simon (and who couldn’t, I ask?) take a look at Simon Archer’s blog at simonarcher.ca. It’s not strictly a blawg, but Simon has a lot on the site of interest to lawyers. There’s a “law” category of posts; and a whole lot of interesting pages under the headings of “projects” (e.g. a regional network of labour lawyers, involving North and South America) and “research” (patterns of corporate finance). . . . [more]

Vancouver Community College and the Law Foundation of BC have produced a multilingual legal glossary. It is:

an attempt to respond to an issue identified by the Law Courts Education Society of B.C. (LCES) and the Vancouver Community College Certificate Program in Court Interpreting (VCC) – that of a lack of consistency in the comprehension and use of legal terminology among unaccredited court interpreters working in the courts of British Columbia. This issue is particularly significant in areas outside the Lower Mainland, where accredited interpreters are virtually non-existent.

I imagine this will be of interest to a wider audience, . . . [more]

The Globe and Mail has been running a series of articles by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, co-authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, a book being published this week.

Here are the parts in the series:

• Peer Pioneers – A new world: Get your mass collaboration road map set (December 26, 2006)
• Ideagoras – Web’s greatest asset: A new marketplace for ideas (December 27, 2006)
• Prosumers – ‘Second Life’ is a signpost for the future: Fabricated online environment an exciting, long-term engine of change, innovation (December 28, 2006)
• The New Alexandrians – Lessons learned from the

The McGill Institute for the Study of Canada is hosting a conference from February 14 to 16 entitled The Charter @ 25.

“Our goal is to assemble a broad cross-section of people who can offer unique insights into the changes that have been effected by the Charter and offer a glimpse into the future. The Institute’s approach is unique such that the conference is not designed as a mere celebration of the anniversary of the Charter but rather as a ‘cerebration’, a reflection on the past, an analysis of the present and an anticipation of future developments.”

Further details: . . . [more]

I stumbled on an interesting set of interviews with Jimmy Wales in Wired and Searchengineland, about an experiment to apply the Web 2.0 spirit of collaboration to the building of the platform to develop a new open source search engine with user-editable search resultsIt seems as if the project went public after a premature story in The Times.. Here it is – in its own words:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is

The Project

The Priestly Law Library at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law and the Continuing Legal Education Society of BC recently received funding from the BC Law Foundation to further develop a legal research website and a legal research software tool (a downloadable program that runs locally on Windows). The project is at a point where we are interested in receiving comments from the readers of Slaw.

Background

Approximately 3 years ago one of the Law Foundations major funding initiatives supported a project called “Online Learning for Lawyers and Law Students”. The CLE Society of BC, the University . . . [more]

In the spirit of the Blawggies and the Blawg Review Awards, our own Steve Matthews has instituted the CLawBies (the Canada Law Blog Awards).

There are eleven CLawby categories:

1) Best Canadian Law Blog (or Blogger) Award
2) Best Practitioner Support Blog
3) Legal Culture Award
4) Non-Legal Audience Award
5) Friend of the North Awards
6) EuroCan Connection Awards
7) Practice Management Award
8) Law Librarian Blog Award
9) Best Legal Technology Blog
10) Best New Law Blog Award
11) Law Professor Blog Award

How many SLAWyers can you find in his list?

Great job on this, . . . [more]

I was about to start a post on this, based on the online discussions which Law Practice Magazine and the CBA National are publishing, but I discovered that it had all been done for me, by our colleagues across the AtlanticThe thought of a Data Protection Commissioner as either Sting or Bono, boggles the mind. Block that metaphor! . . . [more]