Much has been written on SLAW about the fairly recent 7th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (known as the McGill Guide, red in colour, and published by Carswell), including a lengthy 21 September 2010 post by John Davis that includes links to prior posts.

Although I was initially against the “radical” change to remove periods from most citations, I have since come to prefer the simplicity of removing periods on citations to legal documents over which I have editorial control.

However, the focus of the guide (understandably) is on citation style for your footnotes . . . [more]

QR codes can be useful tools for marketing (including for lawyers) and other uses – but they are a tool that must be used correctly, not a strategy on their own. At a TechAlliance session this morning on QR codes Donnie Claudino of TechAlliance and Jonathan Kochis of Resolution Interactive Media talked about how to use them. 

To put them in context, consider that some extimate that half of all web traffic will be mobile by 2015.

A lot of the bad press QR codes have received are based on poor uses. Examples of QR code fails can be seen . . . [more]

I have long believed, certainly before we spoke so much about “communities”, that if a professional publisher is to achieve its best, by all the relevant measures, it has to engage closely, intimately, regularly and consistently with the key member institutes, associations, societies and representative bodies in the market. In its efforts to reach and understand the members, as well as to build trust with them, to circumvent the membership route is unwise and can be a recipe, to some extent at least, for failure. That said, it is not necessarily an easy route for the publisher . . . [more]

Check out Virginia Decoded. It’s a new presentation of that state’s code aimed at making it easier for ordinary human beings to get access to the laws that govern them. Virginia Decoded is the first state to get to beta in The State Decoded program, a private, not-for-profit venture. The legal material is provided by the state via LexisNexis, which marks it up with SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), enabling the Decoded folks to manipulate it appropriately.

Canadians used to CanLII may be a trifle blasé, or even smug, about this development. It is the case that Americans . . . [more]

In anticipation of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries 2012 Conference, May 6-9 in Toronto, I have been thinking about the word innovation. Rebecca Strange, Librarian Specialist, Office of the Medical Officer of Health, Peel Public Health and I are preparing a session called Innovate. I hope to see Slaw readers at the conference.

A news release from Google offers some innovation inspiration. Google has teamed up with Historypin to launch an interactive online gallery to celebrate The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Check out the Google Blog post here. Historypin is a not-for-profit archives sharing project. Think Pinterest with . . . [more]

The Canadian government is set to pass back to work legislation for certain categories of Air Canada employees to prevent any major disruption of air travel by a potential labour dispute following difficult and unsuccessful collective bargaining (see here). The Honourable Lisa Raitt, Minister of Labour, introduced a bill to this effect yesterday and it is expected that it will be adopted by tomorrow. The legislation would require that the disputes over working terms and conditions be referred to binding arbitration.

Back to work legislation for Air Canada was also considered back in 2011 (see a Slaw blog posting . . . [more]

Irwin Law has recently released a short (132 page) monograph by Professor Karen Eltis of the law faculty at the University of Ottawa entitled Courts, Litigants and the Digital Age: Law, Ethics and Practice. (The book is also available in an iPad version.) It’s a book that should find itself on every judge’s and every lawyer’s must-read list, because Eltis tackles some of the difficult and currently intractable-seeming issues posed by information technology, issues that will only become manageable as they are more broadly understood by all branches of the profession.

The chapter heads will give you a . . . [more]

by Tom Ullyett*

Cross country skiing is Canada’s sport. This is almost sacrilegious to say within living memory of the recent national celebration of hockey known as “Hockey Day in Canada”. Don Cherry would beg to differ and probably label me a wimp (until he found out that I was the penalty leader in my 9-team hockey league). But folks, really, “xc” skiing has been with us for over 100 years. Consider Exhibit A: The Montreal Ski Club started to offer xc ski trips into the Laurentians as early as 1905. To top it all off, any Canadian with Scandinavian . . . [more]

The following article by Cleo Kirkland, senior recruitment consultant at The Counsel Network in Toronto, is featured in the January 2012 edition of LAWPRO Magazine. The article includes a number of sidebars featuring insights from firms that excel at recruiting and retaining lawyers. The sidebars can be viewed in the full version of the article.

When candidates approach our firm about a lateral move, they all tend to ask a variation of the following questions: which firm is the best for me? Which will make the greatest difference in my career? which offers me the greatest opportunity for . . . [more]

An ever-increasing body of ethics opinions and reports on the suitability of cloud computing for lawyers aim to provide guidance that may appear deceptively straightforward. Take the following as an example:

Cloud computing is acceptable, but make sure you first undertake an appropriate level of due diligence on your prospective cloud computing provider.

While this doesn’t appear onerous on the surface, the cumulative expense of performing due diligence on multiple cloud providers could prove to be prohibitive for solo- and small-firm lawyers – the very demographic that benefits most directly from cloud computing.

Take the simple task of reviewing privacy . . . [more]

The unique and indefatigable Tom Bruce is the Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell – no need for a geographical adjective when you were the first on the block.

Yes, LII was the first – and it’s coming up to its Twentieth Anniversary – or at least an excuse for a party in Finger Lakes.

Tom explains:

The LVI conference started out as a rather clubby event for a smallish group of open-access publishers largely based in the academic world. More recently, we’ve been joined by some academic researchers in legal informatics and by a few government

One of the most popular uses of libraries and archives–especially public libraries and municipal archives–is genealogy research. I had never seen law libraries, however, used for this purpose. I was therefore surprised when watching the celebrity family history research show Who Do You Think You Are? on Friday to see Jennifer Frazier, Kentucky State Law Librarian, filling in some of the last vital pieces of the puzzle for NFL superstar Jerome Bettis.

Some of the key pieces of information in researching his family history were found in a court decision: his ancestor Abe Bougard had taken on the Illinois Central . . . [more]