I missed this announcement back in September: LexisNexis Canada has launched the Canadian version of Lawyers.com. There were two press releases, both dated September 14, 2005:

LexisNexis Increases Web Visibility of Canadian Lawyers and Law Firms

LexisNexis Provides Free Legal Resource for Canadians

The Canadian service is at the same URL as the American, but it uses your IP address to determine whether you are in Canada or not and sends you to the appropriate database. A pull-down menu allows you to change country, or a link from the top of the screen (to the right) takes you to . . . [more]

We don’t often tip the hat to the legal publishers but Carswell has been recognized as one of Canada’s 50 Best Employers for the third consecutive year, according to today’s RoB Magazine listing.

Well done Don Van Meer and the company. . . . [more]

For you Copernic users: today’s Globe and Mail:

Search engine Mamma.com Inc. has acquired Copernic Technologies Inc. in a cash and stock deal, the company said late Thursday.

Mamma has paid $15.9-million (U.S.) and issued 2.38-million common shares of the company to acquire 100 per cent of the issued and outstanding securities of Copernic, Mamma said. The transaction closed Thursday.

Copernic had $5.9-million (U.S.) revenue in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2005. Based in Sainte-Foy, Que., it develops search and information management solutions.

Mamma, based in Montreal, is focused on providing quality information retrieval on the Internet through its

Today is the last day of regular posting to Slaw until the new year. As my favourite Dixieland band used to say when finishing a set, “Thanks for the applause, we’ll take a pause for a good cause — the band would like a little medicine.”

There may be contributions to Slaw from time to time over the holiday, so if there are longueurs during your time off work, you might like to pop in and see if anything’s new.

We at Slaw wish you all a happy holiday. . . . [more]

Last week, our firm launched its Microsoft SharePoint portal. Users are taken to the front page of the portal when they first turn on their systems (and every time they launch IE). They must also use the portal to launch all their applications.

The portal offers great potential for collaboration and sharing (of course, a lot of hard work will be required to get everyone fully “engaged”). It also offers some fun – opportunities to work with third party vendors who are busy developing enterprise wide aggregation for RSS feeds and more sophisticated discusssion forum technology.

Not everyone in the . . . [more]

I admit it, I am out of work mode for the holiday, so on that note, I thought Slaw’ers might be interested in giving e-greeting cards with a touch of the law this year. Canada Law Book has these available at the following location: http://www.canadalawbook.com/greetingcards.cfm.

More specific to the season is the Christmas Legal Greeting Card. . . . [more]

…and Hanukkah gifts.

To get away from “the pale cast of thought” that researchers suffer from at times, I thought I’d post about some sensual matters that have nothing to do with law. Herewith some little goodies that have come my way recently:

• The ArtsJournal.com’s AJ Blogs lead off, because we’re a blog, after all. Here you’ll find blogs by interesting experts on all the arts from architecture through jazz to the visual arts.
• Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: “Articles, a blog, and a book-in-progress by the music critic of The New Yorker” says it all, nearly. He’s

In two decisions released today, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that group sex organized in the context of bars/clubs for “liberated couples” (i.e., “swingers”) is not criminally indecent – see:

R. v. Kouri, 2005 SCC 81

R v. Labaye, 2005 SCC 80

I was pleased to note that page 8 of the December 2005 edition of the Canadian Bar Association glossy magazine entitled National printed a letter to the editor from a University of Windsor law student who responded to the piece in the previous month’s edition that included a roundtable on LRW that I moderated. The roundtable article on LRW lamented that many law students do not receive proper LRW education and that many of them do no know the Canadian Abridgment or Halsbury’s Laws of England. The letter from the law student stated that Windsor has a strong LRW . . . [more]

Further to an earlier post I made on SLAW on the topic of linkrot (i.e., the problem of references in scholarly publications to websites that no longer have valid URLs), the current edition of the Law Library Journal from the American Association of Law Libraries also has a nice article on the topic of linkrot – see:

Susan Lyons, “Persistent Identification of Electronic Documents and the Future of Footnotes” (2005) 97(4) Law Lib. J. 681 [available in full-text, PDF, 14 pages].

The current edition of the Law Library Journal from the American Association of Law Libraries has a nice article that documents a recent study testing the search behaviours of law students – see:

Lee F. Peoples, “The Death of the Digest and the Pitfalls of Electronic Research: What Is the Modern Legal Researcher to Do?” (2005) 97(4) Law Lib. J. 661 [available in full-text, PDF, 19 pages].

The study supports the suspicion that many law students go directly to full-text searching and overlook the use and advantages of digests (such as the West key numbering system, equivalent to . . . [more]

A recent Canadian Press story posted on the CTV News website, New Laws Making Arctic Campaigning Difficult, addresses the difficulties federal election candidates are facing in the Canadian north as a result of changes to election laws passed in 2003: S.C. 2003, c. 19 (Bill C-24, 2003), amending the Canada Elections Act, S.C. 2000, c. 9 and the Income Tax Act, R.S.C. 1985 (5th Supp), c. 1 . Notably, campaign contribution limits set at $1,000 per company have limited the free flights candidates can accept, making travel to actually campaign a real difficulty.

From the article:

“The new