Well, we were a bit disjointed, but so was most of the evening. We loaded onto lovely city buses from the conference hotel, the Westin, and had a nice 1/2 hour ride to the West Edmonton Mall. We entered via the “Bourbon Street” entrance, and trailed behind our hosting vendor. It was quite amusing seeing the long trail of librarians walking through the mall, up the escalator, and into Red’s. And to make us even more conspicuous, we had been given Olympic-type medals saying “Committed to Excellence” to sport around our necks.

When we arrived we stood in line to . . . [more]

Les cabinets d'avocats devraient-ils tenter d'exploiter ce phénomène et les nouvelles technologies s'y rattachant? Je suggère ci-après quelques pistes de réflexion sur ce sujet.

Since it’s my “day” to blog, I’m indulging in a topic quite far removed from legal research and technology (but so have the rest of you from time to time!). This news story reminds me of the freedoms we generally take for granted:

I guess I hadn’t realized or had forgotten how religion trumps the state in countries like Iran. . . . [more]

Hats off to Jordan Furlong and Mélanie Raymond for a neatly written alphabet of trends shaping and shaking the practice of law in the next issue of the CBA National.

But Slaw readers can get a sneak preview – just launched today – of what the CBA gurus think is happening. . . . [more]

Despite the fact that Judge John Spooner, an administrative law judge, ruled that a New York City employee cannot be fired for surfing the Web at work in April, the employee has been fired anyway, reports Techdirt and a number of other news sites.

So, slackers beware. Despite the best protestations, it seems that goofing off – whether it be with your iPod, the phone, email or the Internet won’t go unpunished if most companies have their way. . . . [more]

The research lawyers here are in the middle of our summer student/clerk Boot Camp training, so it’s uppermost on my mind. These are students that have completed either 1 or 2 years of law school, and will be given less complex research assignments during the 4 months here at the firm. We’ve developed a week long training schedule, that I will share with you as follows (if anyone is interested in the detailed schedule, I can send it via email):

*Introduction to the firm’s expectations, internal processes (submitting memos for review, etc.);
*creating and recording a research plan/trail; research guides; . . . [more]

If you think things are a bit quiet this week, it’s because so many of our colleagues are whooping it up in Edmonton, sin city of the wicked west, at the CALL conference.

But some inkling into the goings-on can be found at the CALL Blog. Don’t forget to check it too – it’ll let you know where the latest rave, pub crawl or thé dansant is happening this week. . . . [more]

In my ebulletin this morning from Chancery Lane, a list of links that may be helpful to Slaw researchers who have to look at English law.

Obviously a complete pathfinder would be a much larger taskStart with these:

Sarah Carter’s LLRX Guide
the Essex Guide
the Duke Guide
Duke English Legal History Guide;
Good PowerPoint from the Law Bod
and finally the Kent portal
, but these offer a good starting point.

How to find Treaties

How to find public statutes

How to find Bills

How to find law reports

How to find information for a student project

How

. . . [more]

After the front cover piece in CBA National , recently mentioned on Slaw, it may seem as if there is a certain inevitability in the move away from billable hours, and to the development of technology-enabled commodity products.

This was the view espoused by Richard Susskind and embraced by legal futurists in North America and Australia.

I questioned whether this was really occurring in practice and whether firms were prepared to make the necessary investments in a piece at the first Pacific Legal Technology Conference back in 2002.

Now a survey of major projects suggests that there . . . [more]

Richard Susskind’s visionary look forward at the SCL 2006 LectureFor those who missed it there was a good summary at Legal IT, postings in the US, Australia, and England and of course the the good folks over at Slaw picked it up as well: The Next Ten Years is now available in transcript form as well as in podcastAnd here as well..

The most interesting ideas are picked up in a recent interview Richard gave to the Law Society Gazette:

‘Lawyers are correct about worrying about the economics of commodity pricing, because when

. . . [more]

Since the history of law librarianship in CanadaI acknowledge the start made in the Diana Priestly festschrift, Law libraries in Canada : essays to honour Diana M. Priestly, edited by Joan N. Fraser and published by Carswell in 1988, and the recent CALL publication on Law Reporting and Legal Publishing in Canada: A History, but that’s not really on topic. is relatively underdocumented, it’s interesting to note the Canadian references in our American colleagues’ massive centennial history of AALL.

1912 – June 26–July 2 . . . AALL’s 7th Annual Meeting is the first to be held outside . . . [more]

Two cases, one fairly recent, that address the issue of whether a name within an email might constitute a signature for the purposes of forming an enforceable contract: Mehta v J Pereira Fernandes SA [2006] EWHC 813 (Ch) and SM Integrated Transware v Schenker Singapore, [2005] SGHC 58.

The Singaporean case is found on LawNet, to which I don’t have a subscription.

The English court said that the sender’s automatically inserted email address did not constitute a signature, not being intended as one, but “if a party or a party’s agent sending an e mail types his or her . . . [more]