Cathie.best

I’ve been looking for alternatives and didn’t like Yahoo!‘s and am not in the market for paid services like Talkwalker or Meltwater.

Topsy’s one I’ve added too. And I was glad to see Google Alerts bring back RSS support so I have added a number of “Everything” alerts that just churn into my feed reader as they hit matches. But I’m still looking for something so that if/when Google decides to drop alerts, I won’t be scrambling. I’m hoping Huginn - an open source project that uses alerts and triggers – will be the answer.

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) was founded 10 years ago and has become a popular place for legal academics to share their research. The SSRN objective is “to provide rapid worldwide distribution of research to authors and their readers and to facilitate communication among them at the lowest possible cost.” The success of their efforts sees SSRN currently listed by the Ranking Web of Repositories site as second in the world.

So it’s not surprising that the SSRN download count has fast become a valued measure of an author’s readership and the potential impact he or she might be having in their particular field. And it’s also not surprising that some faculty worry that the introduction of an institutional repository might have an impact on the SSRN status they have been carefully building.

For anyone who may not be familiar with what an institutional repository is consider the definition that Clifford Lynch provided in his 2003 report to the American Research Libraries, “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age“:

“[An institutional repository is] a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.”

There has been a fair bit of interest in this “SSRN vs. the institutional repository” issue recently. One of the best articles written on the subject is by James M. Donovan* and Carol A. Watson**, “Will An Institutional Repository Hurt My SSRN Ranking?: Calming Faculty Fears.” Donovan and Watson provide a nice overview of the different purposes and function between SSRN and an institutional repository. They also compare download counts between SSRN and SelectedWorks one of the components of the Digital Commons institutional repository software from Bepress.

They arrive at this conclusion:

“Faculty members should not view the proposed IR as a drain on their SSRN rankings. While SSRN excels at delivering their work to the cadre of legal specialists, IRs typically do a better job of presenting it to a broader readership. This expanded exposure should be judged a positive benefit of participation in the IR, helping to mitigate criticisms of law faculty as sequestered, insular, and writing only for themselves. Anyone interested in giving their ideas the widest possible hearing should deposit their intellectual work in as many venues as possible. For law professors, this means they should have both SSRN and the IR working for them.”

They see the two working together. They are complimentary services rather than two services placed in competition with one another.††

Simon Canick*** comes to a similar conclusion in his article, “Library Services for the Self-Interested Law School: Enhancing the Visibility of Faculty Scholarship”:

“Our law school’s experience with using both SSRN and our repository, Mitchell Open Access, supports Donovan and Watson’s key conclusion; namely that redundant posting dramatically increases net downloads. In William Mitchell’s case, SSRN downloads have declined marginally since the debut of Mitchell Open Access, but net downloads have skyrocketed. This is the rare service with no downside; it provides broad dissemination of faculty work, predictable and enthusiastic institutional support, quantifiable and measurable success, and fixed costs.”

Canick also makes the following useful observation in note 62 about monthly statistics and open access:

“Professors who never expressed much interest in open access report their appreciation for receiving monthly download statistics from the repository. Probably a part of it is vanity, but there are other reasons as well. Seeing a spike in downloads for an older article tells a professor that a long forgotten research interest may be worth revisiting. Professors have also been invited to submit new articles for forthcoming symposia, or to present at conferences, because of work found in the institutional repository or SSRN.”

With an increase in “net downloads” this kind of exposure to scholarship is beneficial no matter where interested readers or fellow researchers might happen upon their work.

Canick was kind enough to share an updated version of the chart he includes at the end of his article.

Download counts for SSRN are represented here by the relatively flat blue line along the bottom. The William Mitchell College of Law download statistics for their institutional repository are represented by the green line. And the combined total of the two is shown by the red line.

The download count for their SSRN papers have fluctuated between about 7,000 and 10,000 per month over the course of the last three or four years. Canick reports that they have been receiving over 4,000 downloads per month for their faculty scholarship collection which generates a cumulative total of about 50,000 per year.

Citation analysis is important because it’s used to measure the impact that scholarship has on research in specific disciplines. The focus of citation analysis is on who might be citing whom or, in other words, whose scholarship has been used to further the research of other scholars. Although citation analysis has its flaws it is used in academic hiring and is still a valued part of the tenure review process.

To some extent the ease in which scholarship is currently accessed on the internet is starting to influence how the impact of one’s research is measured. This can certainly be seen in the recent value placed on metrics that count downloads from institutional repositories and website hit counts. However, what it all seems to boil down to is access and availability. When I look at the red line representing total “net downloads” in Simon Canick’s chart above I wonder if, in the end, it really doesn’t matter where readers access relevant scholarship only that they have an opportunity to do so.

• For organizations that rely on a large number of RSS feeds to gather content from CanLII, adjusting the frequency of your calls on the system downward will greatly reduce the probability of captcha interruptions experienced by your users
• CanLII offers APIs (application programming interfaces) to support high-volume developer access to CanLII content
• If you have unique needs and would like to discuss further, drop us a note and we can discuss other options  

Google Alerts are emails generated by Google when it finds new results. Alerts have mentioned on Slaw including an interesting article by Omar which offered an alternative service that uses a desktop or mobile device download – Mention.

Despite reports of concern about the continuing functionality of Google Alerts, I have continued to use the service for select monitoring with success. Google Alerts continues to be generally reliable and it was recently used by a team member and I to watch for notice of a newspaper article. There is an interesting story about our watches that may be relevant to those still hanging on to their Google Alerts.

My alert was set up with “all results” as the volume, “as-it-happens” as the frequency and was a search in the “News”.
My colleague’s alert was set up with “best results” as the volume, “as-it-happens” as the frequency and was a general search rather than being a search in Google News.

My email came through at 11:10 PM last night, my colleague’s was received just before 4 AM this morning. Both results were timely and successfully delivered the relevant, identical article.

Where am I going with this? To one conclusion – Google Alerts is still a functioning, no fee service that can be used to monitor the web – at least for now.

So, who else is still using it?

[This is the second of a two-part column on open access and public access to Canadian legal scholarship. The first part is available here.]

There is an overwhelming public good and social benefit to be obtained from open access publishing. The principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is itself a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable. Arguments in support of mandatory open access publishing are even more compelling when the university is a public one and the researcher’s salary is supported by public funds. The US National Institutes of Health require scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that result from NIH-funded research to PubMed Central, the NIH’s publicly-funded digital library within the US National Library of Medicine. Unfortunately, the public research funding agencies in Canada – the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) – though well-intentioned, are non-committal about open access.

Open access is also public access.

The concept of free access to law is well established in Canada. CanLII (the Canadian Legal Information Institute) is recognized as a world leader in providing free access to Canadian law. Our governments, legislative bodies and courts have shown leadership in minimizing the constraints of Crown copyright (for American readers, this means putting materials in the public domain) and providing access to comprehensive collections of public legal resources on well-designed websites. But who is providing access to Canadian legal scholarship?

Common law legal concepts and research methods make a strong distinction, less pronounced in the civil law tradition, between primary sources of law (statutes and case law) and secondary sources (legal scholarship and commentary); regardless, access to interpretive commentary on the law, including legal scholarship and especially publicly-funded research, would significantly enhance the public’s understanding of the law and their rights, and promote access to legal services generally. This relationship is stated explicitly in the Calgary Statement on Free Access to Legal Information / Déclaration de Calgary sur le libre accès à l’information juridique, adopted by the Council of Canadian Academic Law Library Directors in May, 2011.

In North America, we in Law are fortunate that so many of our law journals – more than 600 law reviews in the US alone – are published at law schools by non-paid student editors on a not-for-profit basis. Many of these journals are freely available as open-access publications on publicly-accessible websites within their schools’ institutional repositories; indeed, in keeping with the objectives of the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, many American law reviews are moving from print production, supported by subscription fees, to freely-available digital-only formats. The law school at Duke University recently announced that six of the nine law reviews published at their school will move to digital-only publication. All nine of the titles are already available open-access on the Duke Law Scholarship Repository, an a collection of all published scholarship published by the faculty there. In Australia, the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) provides free access to over 80 Australian and New Zealand law journals as well as a growing number of law texts and monographic series. In Britain, BAILII, despite funding problems, offers access to two complete journals. In Canada, though almost all our law school-published law journals are available on commercial digital services, only ten (listed below) are available open-access. None is available through CanLII or any other publicly-accessible collection.

• University of Alberta’s Constitutional Forum and Review of Constitutional Studies
• Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies
• Manitoba Law Journal
• McGill Law Journal/Revue de droit de McGill
• Osgoode Hall Law Journal
• Ottawa Law Review/Revue de droit d’Ottawa
• Queen’s Law Journal (current issue embargoed)
• Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke (RDUS)
• Western University’s Journal of Legal Studies

The Barreau du Québec’s Revue du Barreau is available open-access. The CBA’s Canadian Bar Review, on the other hand, is not. Quebec’s Centre d’accès a l’information juridique (CAIJ) and its JurisBistro, with a website available in both French and English, provides access to a surprisingly wide range of professional, full-text legal commentary (doctrine, in French), as well as annotated legislation (including an annotated Civil Code) and an extremely useful list of Research Questions, arranged topically by field of law, with links to legislative and interpretive sources available on the site. One could argue that CAIJ’s offering is not “scholarship”, but that does not lessen the value of its contribution.

Regrettably, what open access there is to legal scholarship is piecemeal and dispersed. Unlike aggregated collections of legal information such as Lexis, Westlaw and others, repositories of open-access legal scholarship function at the institutional level. However, because these repositories are web-based and publicly accessible, they can be indexed by internet search engines, and Google has become the principle means of searching, discovering and retrieving their contents. There have also been several efforts at centralizing and consolidating access to the American institutional repositories of legal scholarship, at least those built on the Digital Commons software platform from bepress (Berkeley Electronic Press). The first of these – Law Commons – provides centralized, consolidated access to almost 200,000 law-related scholarly articles from the institutional repositories of not only the 47 law school repositories on Digital Commons, but from the hundreds of academic institutions worldwide using the platform. A subset of this collection is the Law Review Commons, which brings together in one place a growing collection of more than 75,000 articles from law reviews and legal journals published on the Digital Commons platform. Finally, there is the NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository, from the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO). Though built on the Digital Commons platform, this repository provides free and persistent access to articles, working papers, reports, lectures series, workshops and other scholarship created by faculty at NELLCO member schools whether or not they are themselves Digital Commons customers. Consequently, it includes law-related scholarship from the institutional repositories of Harvard (DASH), Columbia (Academic Commons) and New York University (Faculty Digital Archive), all built on the DSpace open source repository platform. Unfortunately, though a number of Canadian law schools are NELLCO members, none is currently participating in the NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository program.

All of this poses the question of whether academic legal “scholarship” (as opposed to legal analysis and commentary from professional and practice sources) is necessary and even relevant to a public hungry for legal information. The classic critique of academic legal literature is Yale law professor Fred Rodell’s 1936 essay “Goodbye to Law Reviews”, Virginia Law Review 23 (1936-1937), 38-45, in which he starts by saying: “There are two thing wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.” In a recent article in the New York Times (“The Lackluster Reviews That Lawyers Love to Hate”, October 21, 2013), Adam Liptak argues that law review are not really meant to be read. They mostly exist as a way for law schools to evaluate professors for promotion and tenure, based partly on their success in placing articles in prestigious journals. The judge, lawyer or ordinary reader looking for accessible and timely assessments of the law is much better off turning to the many excellent law blogs.

But this is beside the point. The point is expanding and improving access to legal literature for the benefit of all who have a stake or interest in the research and its results, enhancing access to justice by facilitating access to legal information. So far, people outside law schools and large law firms – ie, people in business and the professions, in the public and not-for-profit sectors, non-specialists and members of the public generally, without access to Lexis, Westlaw or Hein Online – have yet to see the benefits that the online environment could bring in providing access to legal research and its results. Barriers to access – including traditional means of communicating and publishing scholarly research, aggravated by traditional tenure evaluation practices, and especially publishers’ restrictive copyright licensing practices – are increasingly unacceptable in an online, born-digital world. The principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable. The effective and sustainable publication and dissemination of research and scholarship is essential to realising these principles. To date, we in Canada have not been doing a great job, despite demonstrated leadership in providing access to primary sources of legal information. We – librarians, faculty and perhaps even regulators – must do better if we are ever going to realize these goals.

For those interested in expanding open access for scholarship, including monographs, with a considered and continuing role for formal publication and publishers, I would recommend reading The Finch Report (Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications: Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Research Findings), chaired by Dame Janet Finch and submitted to the UK Department of Business Innovation & Skills on July 16, 2012.

The 2008 Law via the Internet conference got things started; October 3, 2011 marked the first meeting specific to the EuroLII initiative. January 2014, the EuroLII Observatory site launched with the aim at answering the question of how European countried promote and improve free access to law.

The site provides a jumping off page to the European Law overview page at WorldLII which helps searchers determine data coverage as well as search.

Some of the new content added to WorldLII January 28, 2014 includes:

Portuguese Constitutional Court Summaries
Portuguese Constitution 2005
Vatican City Laws
Bulgarian Laws
Azerbaijan Laws
Albanian Constitutional Court
French Constitutional Court

Congratulations to all involved in helping build EuroLII. Hat tip to the Legal Informatics Blog.

A post earlier this week on In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress in Washington, explained that the Australian federal legislative website ComLaw and the New Zealand legislative website were offering official versions of their laws.

In other words, the sites guarantee that the text that a searcher finds there (usually the PDF version) is a correct statement of the law and is admissible as evidence in court. Traditionally, only the print version of legislation from a government printer is official.

Many people are surprised to find out how few electronic versions of laws and regulations are considered official, even today.

In Canada, for example, the print version is the only official one in a majority of jurisdictions.

The exceptions are:

• Canada Gazette: the online PDF format of the Canada Gazette has been official since April 1, 2003.
• Consolidated Acts and Regulations on the Justice Canada website: as of June 2009, these documents are considered official
• Ontario e-Laws: on November 30, 2008, the following copies of source laws and consolidated laws accessed from the website were prescribed by regulation as official copies of the law:
  • An on-screen display of a law viewed on or downloaded from e-Laws in HTML or Microsoft Word format.
  • A print-out of a law viewed on or downloaded from e-Laws in HTML or Microsoft Word format.
• Quebec’s Gazette officielle: since July 5, 2012, the PDF version has been considered official
• the New Brunswick Royal Gazette and Acts and Regulations are considered official under the authority of the Queen’s Printer Act.
• Nova Scotia’s Assented to Statutes from 2003 onwards in PDF format are official

In the United States, FDsys, or the Federal Digital System, is run by the Government Printing Office and provides access to official publications from all three branches of the US Federal Government. The PDF documents on the site contain digital signatures that guarantee their authenticity.

One could think that our neighbours to the South would be more advanced when it comes to official online publications.

But only a minority of U.S. States have endorsed the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act proposed by the Uniform Law Commission to encourage the publication of official versions of online legal materials in a format that can be authenticated.

The American Association of Law Libraries has done some very extensive work in trying to identify which state electronic legal materials have any official status. For a majority of US states, it appears that print is still king when it comes to official status.

Robin Cover, Director of Information Services at OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), has released version 2 of his annotated bibliography on standards for legal citation.

This extensive collection provides a list of references “intended to provide general background to the larger ‘legal citation’ problem.” A Standardized Data/Markup Model to Support Neutral Citation of Court Cases, Legislation, and Regulations includes references from 1995 up to and including mid-January 2014.

In his introductory remarks Cover notes that “As of September 12, 2012, community discussion was underway about the value of a standardization effort to define a non-proprietary and royalty-free citation markup language model for legal/legislative content.” It won’t be easy. Nothing ever is. Settling on a standard method for legal citation is one of the many daunting tasks that we will need to tackle as we move toward a linked data model for legal resources.

Cover frames the problem nicely:

“… the number of officially binding electronic resources for legislation, case law, and official documents is increasing. Relying solely on the printed text of citations will add to the cost and burden of researching and complying with increasingly complex legal issues. A uniform approach to legal citations is crucial for the long-term accessibility and preservation of legal content …”

The solution he proposes is to develop a formal vocabulary and markup system for legal citations a goal I whole-heartedly support. However, there are many, many independent efforts developing metadata standards for legal resources and a “unified approach” may be a tall order.

One of these initiatives is URN:Lex (A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Sources of Law (LEX)). The first draft was submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the spring of 2010 and the most recent draft is dated November 30, 2013. Cover provides valuable links to recent “conversations” that will be worth reviewing and he also notes that this effort has the support of the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council, the National Centre for ICT in Public Administration (now the Agency for Digital Italy), PRODASEN (the IT Department of the Federal Senate in Brazil), and Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

The goal of URN:Lex is to:

“… assign an unequivocal identifier, in standard format, to documents that are sources of law. The identifier is conceived so that its construction depends only on the characteristics of the document itself and is, therefore, independent from the document’s on-line availability, its physical location, and access mode.”

In terms of how this may feed potential URIs as described in Tim Berners-Lee’s linked data principles this is definitely work to be watched closely.

In addition to Cover’s fantastic reference list I would also recommend Robert Richards list of resources for “metadata specifically designed for legal information.” Richards’ list also shows the variety of work underway in this area.

Plenty of food for thought here and I hope to return to both of these resources for some future posts exploring legal metadata.

The day is not far off when the providers of free legal information services will be able to match the services provided by Lexis, Westlaw and Wolters Kluwer.

There was a time when I would have said that this was not possible. My belief was based on the idea that the free services would always be playing catch up to a moving target, as the major legal publishers continued to enhance their products with high quality content and product innovation.

The scenario that makes the seemingly impossible possible is the “attack” on all things “Editorial” in the major legal publishing houses and with it, the lessening of their ability to provide the enhancements necessary to continue to differentiate their content from that offered by the free services in the market for legal information. (I use the word “attack” for effect, not having yet found a less inflammatory word that describes that the scale of the cut backs in the editorial departments of the big three companies).

With the reduction in editorial staffing and with it, editorial enhancements, one can see the day coming when the free services are able to challenge the major legal publishers. This can be easily be done by combining secondary and primary content in similar manner to the major legal publishers.

In Canada, for example, this can be accomplished by alliances between the smaller commercial and academic publishers with LexUM and/or CANLII. LexUM in particular could transform the Canadian market by licensing or acquiring secondary content from smaller commercial legal publishers such as Wilson & LaFleur, Emond Montgomery and/or Irwin Law, and mounting the secondary content on LexUM with direct links to the primary data available through CANLII.

Real competition and real pressure to cut costs

Real competition in the market place combined with real pressure by the consumers of legal information to reduce their spending, has transformed what was comparatively easy business to make money into an industry struggling to maintain profit margins.

Revenues are declining, caused by fewer subscribers paying less for service, as customers chose one product over an another rather than buy competing services. With profit margins threatened by these developments, cost cutting has become the order of the day. From reports from various sources, it appears that this is being done primarily at the expense of Editorial, the traditional “engine of real growth” in the legal publishing industry.

Automating data processing and using search engines

Automating data processing and using search engines to create value added features is a great equalizer. Anything that an automated process can do for the commercial publishers can be equally well done for the free services. The end result is that any product enhancements resulting from such processes will be the same from every data source – anything you can do, a free service can do just as well if not better.

Primary data is the most amenable to automated processes. However, when the data is the same from every source, the only differentiation that will remain is retro data, a deficiency that can be easily remedied by the free services with a few government grants.

Scaling back Editorial

The second option being pursued is cutting staff. Specifically editorial staff. The contribution of editorial to legal publishing has always been underestimated and undervalued by corporate owners. Editorial built the business and established the standards on which the reputations of the major legal publishing houses are based.

Cutting some editorial staff is necessary but, if not done with an eye to the future, can result in the dumbing down of content and the loss of the competitive advantage that the commercial services presently have over the free services. Restructuring thoughtfully for the future needs to be at the heart of any process that reduces editorial staff if the objective is to strengthen the companies.

Advantage Won

The major legal publishers won their leading positions in the market for legal information by providing high quality editorial enhancements over many decades. These editorial enhancements were provided in both good years and in bad. Early in my professional career, the quality of the product really did matter as much as the profit margins.

The editorial enhancements were provided by in house editors and/or freelance editors trained by the legal publishers who exercised their skills on both primary and secondary content. The work done in writing headnotes and preparing case and statute citations is irreplaceable. These require the application of the human intelligence to deliver an acceptable outcome. Cases need to be summarized in context. Incomplete and inaccurate references in judgments and texts need to be identified and expanded or corrected.

“Editorial” was also largely responsible for the key product development initiatives that drove growth. The loss is not restricted to primary content. New titles and new editions of secondary works require intensive editorial work that cannot be replaced by automated processes. The option available to the major legal publishers is to publish less, creating the opportunity for smaller publishing houses to take their place. Stripped of trained editorial staff, the major legal publishers will come to have little to differentiate themselves from the free services.

Advantage Lost?

The hard won advantage that today’s major legal publishers have acquired over many years can be lost.

The history of legal publishing is characterized by the rise and fall of legal publishing houses. It has happened before and it can happen again. In Canada, Canada Law Book was partly supplanted by Burroughs, which in turn was absorbed by Carswell. It is not inevitable that the current big three continue to dominate their markets. If they make the wrong choices in difficult times, they will not.

Advantage Lost, Advantage Won Again

In the recent past, the proprietor of a publishing house would sell off a business that could no longer meet its revenue and profit margin requirements, or when the proprietor no longer believed in its potential. The examples of this practice are too numerous to mention. Most recently, think of newspaper ownership.

In the current climate, however, there are not many potential buyers. Bloomberg BNA is the one of the few with its ambition equal to its resources. In addition to having a differentiated pricing model, Bloomberg BNA believes in the potential of the legal information business. If not true, the rumours that is of the sale of Westlaw to Bloomberg BNA as reported by Sean Hocking on practicelaw.org, they should be.

One certainty is that continuous editorial downsizing can only lessen further the value of all three major legal publishers if and when a business is sold or wound up. The editorial advantage won over many years can be lost. In the hands of the right owner, it can be won again.

Professor Dr. Yonatan Lupu of George Washington University and Professor Dr. James H. Fowler of the University of California San Diego, have published Strategic Citations to Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court, Journal of Legal Studies, 42, 151-186 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

Common law evolves not only through the outcomes of cases but also through the reasoning and citations to precedent employed in judicial opinions. We focus on citations to precedent by the U.S. Supreme Court. We demonstrate how strategic interaction between justices during the Court’s bargaining process affects citations to precedent in the Court’s opinion. We find that the majority-opinion writer relies more heavily on precedent when the Court’s decision is accompanied by separate opinions. We also show that diversity of opinion on the Court, a factor often overlooked, has a significant relationship with citations to precedent. Finally, our results indicate that the ideology of the median justice influences citation practices more than ideology of the majority-opinion writer.

HT Dan Katz

One of the two most sought after resources at the Courthouse Library are the McLachlin & Taylor BC Forms & Precedents and the British Columbia Practice.  We are happy to announce that with our expanded Quicklaw suite both of those resources are now available in digital format and accessible on public terminals at any BC Courthouse Library location.

Let’s explore a few typical questions that can be addressed using these two resources:

Q: How do I find these two resources on Quicklaw?

Step 2: The equivalent of the 4 volume (red) set of BC Court Forms by McLachlin & Taylor select the product called British Columbia Court Forms.  To access the 3 volume (blue) set of BC Practice select the product called British Columbia Practice.

Q: I am looking for a precedent on adding a party to an application / making a joinder application.

A classic example of when we turn to this resource.  Follow the steps outlined above to select McLachlin & Taylor BC Forms & Precedents and select the search option.  In this case we suggest constructing the following terms and connectors search - adding /s party /s application – which yields the following results. 

Q: Can I search for commentary on Civil Rule 4-5, serving someone from outside of BC jurisdiction?

And here we have a glimpse of commentary that came up in the search -

Q: How can I download a form that I plan to fill out / edit later in my office?

Let us demonstrate.  One of biggest advantages of having a digital version of these two powerful resources is the ability to download, save and edit required forms.  Let’s say you are looking for a Notice of Civil Claim for a Breach of Contract (Form 11F232). 

Once you have located the correct form, you have two options.  (1a) You can place a checkmark next to the form in question and (1b) click on the diskette icon on the top right hand corner to download the material.  Alternately, you can click on a small Word Doc icon located on the grey bar (2).  This function will open a new Word document with a fillable version of the respective form.  At this point you can save the document to your computer or removable disc.   

We are very excited about being able to offer these two stalwart litigation resources in their digital format and we encourage you to stay tuned as we introduce more digital options to resources formerly only available in print.   

find∙a∙bil∙i∙ty n. – “the ease with which information contained on a website can be found, both from outside the website (using search engines and the like) and by users already on the website”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Findability)

I prefer this term to “search” as it focuses on outcomes (how easy it is to find something), rather than inputs (what someone may or may not put into a search box). It also transfers the onus onto those in KM to make something really easy to find, rather than on lawyers knowing what they should or shouldn’t be typing into that box.

I’ve noticed a bit of a sea change amongst those of my clients who have had enterprise search rolled out for more than a year or two. Firms have reviewed their search logs and usage statistics and found that their lawyers are finding some good things but not always The Very Best Things from the deep smarts of their firm. They are now looking for ways to further optimize the search experience for their lawyers. I feel optimism in my bones as firms realise that awesome algorithms are just one piece of the puzzle. For most of us, tinkering around even with the simplest algorithms and weightings can end up causing unintended consequences for other users. And until someone in our field earns their millions by figuring out a simple law firm equivalent to Google’s PageRank algorithm, as Ryan McClead sets out in a 3 Geeks blogpost from 2012, we need to find other magical ways to match the ease, simplicity and quality of the Google experience.

So how are these firms optimising their search experiences? How are they integrating search technologies into a broader findability platform? Their focus is on maximising the usability and findability of 3 main user interfaces at the firm.

(1) The Search Box.

The first key question when a firm buys enterprise search is: where will you put the search box? The majority create a new blank ‘search page’ and stick the search box somewhere in the middle of it.

Lawyers will always want Google (as Connie Crosby insightfully explains here on Slaw). So we try and deliver Google by replicating their just-a-search-box-on-a-page interface. But searching for client matter information or researching deep expertise on a legal topic is not the same as looking for the currency used in the Bahamas. On top of that, not everyone is a searcher and not every knowledge journey is best performed using a search box. At law firms we need to design for both our search and our browse audiences.

I’ve adapted a Donald Rumsfeld speech from 2002 to illustrate the different knowledge journeys:

A. We use keyword searching to retrieve the:

- Things you know you know, and

- Things you know you don’t know

Here, lawyers are usually looking for “known items” as well as the more general “I need everything you have on a particular topic”.

B. While we tend to browse an information space to retrieve the:

- Things you don’t know you know (ie. that which you’ve forgotten), and

- Things you don’t know you don’t know

Here, lawyers may have an idea of what they are looking for but may only “know it when I see it”. Or, they may have no precise search term in mind, turning to the back-of-the-book index for inspiration, serendipity or the entry point you need. Browsable options and navigation schemes also give lawyers an at-a-glance view of the collection they’re looking at.

So whilst creating a Google-simplicity page seems a great idea at first, most firms that are one or more years into their search maturity start looking at ways to integrate that search box with an experience that already exists. But bunging a search box on an intranet homepage (for example) turns out to be more complicated than it sounds. A findability platform that supports searching and browsing for content is like designing a full-on website. So, for inspiration I look beyond the legal industry to see how other websites have integrated both search and browse experiences into a single fundability interface.

(2) The Combined Search & Browse Interface.

A lot of the good websites that we use every day have often followed a design practice to create a ‘strong information scent’ on their pages.

It may sound a bit weird but there’s substantial data out there by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to support the analogy of “wild animals gathering food to analyse how humans collect information online”.

When lawyers are presented with an interface, they will quickly evaluate the links and options presented, looking for the ones that “give them the clearest indication (or strongest scent) that it will step them closer to the information they require” (StepTwo Designs).

A good waft of information scent comes about by supplementing what’s on that page with bucketloads of context that tells lawyers why they should click on this link or put a search term in that box. It tells them that they have indeed reached the right page. It can highlight that the firm’s deep expertise and knowledge of a particular topic is not far from here.

Think of any well-designed online retail website and how they provide a strong information scent when you’re shopping for Christmas tunes online, or a niftier snow shovel that can cope with the snow and ice this year, or (you’re not sure what yet) something a little bit special this Valentine’s Day. When you visit sites like Amazon, Home Depot, or Etsy, is there any doubt about the types of products and goods you can find there? Those engaging and eye-catching ads on the homepage provide a strong aroma of why they are the perfect place for you to stay a while and spend your cash. The navigation and signposts on product pages not only tell you where you are, but they also tell you where you can go next, and what you’ll find there – keeping you on their site and hopefully popping more and more things in your shopping trolley as you go.

News sites have a similar approach. By highlighting content on their homepages and by using ads on individual story pages (however much the flashing distractions drive me barmy) from across their navigation, they hope to provide a strong scent for all the different sections of news they cover – sport, entertainment, national and world news. These sites showcase the very best of what they have to offer. They’re saying, “kick back and stay a while – we have everything you’re looking for right here”.

By creating a stronger information scent on our Knowledge and Practice Group Pages we could show why clicking around these pages and using this search box, which includes the richer precedent and research content, is A Really Good Thing.

(3) The Search Results Page

One of the most important findability UIs is the search results page and firms are adopting some great UX and design practices to help optimise the experience. Quite apart from needing good facet design (which deserves its very own article) firms are adding ‘best bets’ and ‘sponsored links’ functionality to their search results pages.

What are lawyers searching for? What search terms are they using? Your search logs contain valuable insights into the what and why of your current search implementation. Which of your model precedents do you want returned at the very top of a lawyer’s search results? These are your best bets. The “sponsored links” are different – they’re the “you might also be interested in” ads that Google returns on its pages. This feature can highlight useful content from across your other collections and add to that strong information scent on your search results pages. With the flood of information at our firms we need to employ every opportunity to showcase our curated and recommended content.

I believe we are reaching the next stage in our search maturity model. We are moving beyond simple search and exploring the integrated search and browse platforms that we see on the Web. We’re discovering new and magical ways to improve the findability experience even without the magic bullet of a PageRank algorithm.

Nearly missed in the relative quietude of late December was opening of the next chapter in the ongoing Google Books litigation. As it promised it would, The Authors Guild Appeal initiated an appeal of Justice Denny Chin’s judgment (which substantially dismissed The Authors Guild’s summary judgment motion and granted Google’s motion). Michel-Adrien Sheppard wrote about that ruling back when it was released back in November.

On December 23, The Authors Guild filed its bare-bones Notice of Appeal (uploaded to Scribd by infoDOCKET) of Justice Chin’s judgment.

Publishers Weekly wrote (Dec 30) a nice summary of the litigation thus far, tying it to the related proceedings and rulings in The Authors Guild’s suit of HathiTrust. The news curation site Circa offers a good, brief roundup of the history of the litigation via news reporting of it.

Free resources can be great – the revamped Eur-lex in operation
When we use e-resources in the law, there has been a tendency to value the paid resources over the free ones. Sometimes the free resources are not seen as truly comprehensive collections, whereas the purchased ones are; sometimes the linking and cross referencing is more sophisticated in the commercial databases; often the value-added editorial content of headnotes prepared by legal editors has been enough to justify the outlay for these reports and legislation online.

However as more and more bodies such as governments make their resources freely available online, the standard of what is being offered to users is improving as well. Legislation sites frequently provide features such as point-in-time searching for legislation, hyperlinking, extensive legislative history footnotes, and links to Hansard debates. With case law , the freely available Legal Information Institutes, and others, offer hyperlinking and cross references to other judgments, and sometimes have keywords, cross linked footnotes, the ability to set up RSS feeds on queries, sophisticated search templates, and relevancy ranking.

A recent example of providing the depth of functionality one would expect from a purchased resource is provided by the new version of Eur-Lex, offering a set of legislative and caselaw resources that are core for many lawyers in the EU and beyond.

The European Commission’s project to bring together EU law into one comprehensive, free site has been publically available for over 6 months now, and with a new year it seems timely to visit the site and summarise its features. For the infrequent user of EU resources it can appear overwhelming at first glance, but I believe it is both intuitive and user friendly.

The types of documents included in the collection are listed here under the following headings:

• Treaties
• International Agreements
• Legislation
• Complementary legislation
• Preparatory Acts
• Jurisprudence
• National implementing measures
• National case-law
• Parliamentary questions
• Consolidated documents
• Official Journal C
• EFTA

The system uses a unique identifier for every document, called a CELEX number, regardless of language. It is made up of characters for the sector, digits for the year, characters for the document type, and digits for the document number. A document which explains this clearly is available on the site. This can be useful if you have a citation and do not know what sort of document it refers to. The numbering system appears complex to the novice until one investigates it, and sees that it is actually a cunningly constructed system that accounts for many of the variations of documents that arise in such a multi faceted organisation.

Searching the Eur-lex treasure trove is offered in two ways:

1. by a search widget on the home page, where you can enter a document number if you have one, or create a more advanced search, or
2. from the top right and bottom left hand sections of every single page – simple, advanced or expert options are provided, with extensive and useful help pages.

For example, entering the number of a regulation – e.g. 70/2010 – as a simple search will retrieve all the amending regulations as well as the original. Results can be viewed in html, pdf version or the published OJ version (if applicable).

Not all data has been transferred from the older site yet, so there may still be the need to refer to the previous Eur-Lex site for some material. In addition, it is useful to know that the electronic version of the Official Journal of the EU became the Official Version on 1 July 2013. It is published as pdf, in the 24 official languages of the EU, and you can verify the authenticity of electronic signature of the OJ version. This is only possible from the new site.

Directives

To find a specific directive you can use the Search box in the centre of the home page, entering the year, number and selecting the Directive radio button. The search result will provide you a version in one of 24 official languages, via html, pdf or Official Journal version. If you wish to compare the text of a directive in various languages, there is a multilingual display allowing side by side display of up to three versions of the same directive. This is not fully operational yet.

Case law

All EU case law is classified by a scheme to enable legal analysis, and that scheme was modified by the 2010 Treaty of Lisbon. The website allows the user to browse this digest by the old or new scheme, or by both, if the topics are the means by which you want to locate cases (for example, 4 of the topics are: the legal order of the European Union; institutional framework of the European Union; legal proceedings and internal policy of the European Union).

However for most of us, the advanced search screen is amazingly detailed and should allow quite specific searches to be undertaken. Once the results are displayed, there is a column on the left that allows you to narrow the search results even more by domain, author, year etc (these are known as facets). Searches that you may re-run regularly can be saved.

RSS feeds

If you register on the site, which is easy to do, you can use the RSS feed service to receive alerts for specific topics. For example, if you search for asbestos, the results screen enables you to create the RSS feed for any updates on the topic, and you can then subscribe via your favourite feed update service.

Subject approach

If you wish to access EU legislation by subject, the Directories option provides a classification scheme for searching by subject – eg, by fisheries, or energy.

Additional resources for European national legislation and case law

There is a tab for National Law which takes you to the official sites for the countries of the EU. Where these are available, they are only in the national languages, and of variable quality. The description of each national database is available in English, however, and provides a very useful summary of the nature of the legislation.

The section on National case law restricts the cases to those with references to EU law. The citation to the case and some more detailed metadata is provided.

Summary opinion

The collections included in the new EUR-Lex were sometimes difficult to use in the past, and frustrating as well, because it was often necessary to search more than one database. This effort by the EU to bring the data together with a common approach, a uniform search capacity, and the ability to personalise the service to the user’s needs, must be applauded. To provide all of this, with no subscription cost for the users, is a model which would be marvellous to see replicated by national governments. The EU is arguably a costly institution for the 350 million Europeans who support it, but it also takes seriously its mandate to keep its citizens informed, to make all the rules, regulations, laws, directives and cases freely available to all – and no longer in a rudimentary, even clunky system, but by using technology, web design, and ontologies of the highest order, to provide the depth of quality one has come to expect of the subscription database providers. Not a bad achievement for such a complex collection of resources covering all the aspects of EU law.

News Flash! European Sources Online – a database flies free

THE ESO has just announced that it will no longer be a subscription database, but will provide its wealth of links and summaries free of charge. From its website – European Sources Online (ESO) is a free access, added value information service that focuses specifically on Europe. The ESO editorial team, led by Executive Editor Ian Thomson, is based at Cardiff EDC.

ESO provides information on the institutions and activities of the European Union, the countries, regions and other international organisations of Europe, and the issues of importance to European citizens, researchers and stakeholders. It is a dedicated European information service that through expert selection, a wide range of sources, powerful functionality, added value content and a coverage that goes beyond just the EU, really does offer you something more. No other source allows you to find the same range and breadth of information sources focused on Europe.

Professor Dr. Jon Bing, a pioneer in the field of legal informatics, died on 14 January 2014 at the age of 69, according to reports by Olav Torvund, NRK, and Norway Today.

Professor Bing, a faculty member at the University of Oslo Faculty of Law, made highly influential contributions to legal informatics, particularly concerning legal information retrieval.

Among his later works on legal informatics was Let There Be LITE: A Brief History of Legal Information Retrieval, European Journal of Law and Technology, 1(1) (2010).

Lists of Professor Bing’s legal informatics publications are available on Cristin and Google Scholar.

HT Tom Bruce

F. Tim Knight of York University and Sarah Sutherland of CanLII have won a research grant from the Canadian Association of Law Libraries to “explore the development of KF Modified as a linked data classification scheme,” according to an announcement on the Osgoode Hall Library blog.

Here are excerpts of the announcement:

The 2013 CALL/ACBD (Canadian Association of Law Libraries/Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit) Research Grant of $3,000 has been awarded to Tim Knight, Head, Technical Services in the Osgoode Library, and Sarah Sutherland, Manager, Content and Partnerships at CanLII, for their project Exploring the Linked Data Application of KF Modified Classification. This project will “explore the development of KF Modified as a linked data classification scheme” involving “analysis of the Library of Congress initiative; developing an appropriate data model for KF Modified; formulating the conversion process; coding the classification data as linked data.”

[...] Linked Data describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful, using standard web technologies to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried. Linked Data is an important component of the new Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard for cataloguing library materials, officially implemented by the Library of Congress, other national libraries (including Library and Archives Canada) and the Osgoode Library in 2013. [...]

HT @parallaxinfo

It used to be that either a decision was “reported” (i.e. published in a print reporter) or it wasn’t (an unreported decision). Unreported decisions were hard to find; generally, you needed to get a copy from the court or from one of the parties involved. The situation started to change as publishers began to offer summaries of cases:

The WLP Decisions, along with the All-Canada Weekly Summaries led to the rise of ‘unreported decisions’ being readily available for lawyers to use in their research. The heyday of print law reports as the only official record of legal decisions had peaked, but we didn’t know it yet. It was a slower time. When I phoned Western Legal or Canada Law Book to request a full-text judgment, I often simply requested that the decision be mailed to me. A wait of two or three days to receive the desired judgment was acceptable to most of our lawyers most of the time.
(Gwendoline Hoar, “Before the Flood: How It Was When VALL Began”, VALL Review, vol. 21, no. 1)

With the advent of electronic products and then CanLII, it became even easier to obtain what would have been considered an “unreported” case in the old days.

The ease with which one can now get a case online has lessened the need for law reports. An informal survey reveals that Canadian law libraries are dropping the number of law reports they subscribe to, since they are no longer as necessary to find cases. Nor are law reports as crucial to alert readers to important or noteworthy new cases given all the alternatives that now exist. What will be the impact of this on law reports themselves? It seems likely that publishers will move towards publishing law reports in electronic format only. For example, the Supreme Court Reports and the Federal Courts Reports will end print publication by April 2014 and from then on be published in electronic format only. This will even further blur the perception of what is a reported case and what is an unreported case.

However I would propose that there is a new category of “unreported decision”: those judgments that the courts do not make easily available. Although they cannot be easily obtained online they are still cited in court judgments or in secondary materials, and as a result lawyers expect to be able to find them.

Oral decisions often fall into this category; for example, in British Columbia even if an oral decision is transcribed, the judge or master involved has the final say over whether it is added to the website. If consent is not given, the decision will not be made available.

In Ontario, all court decisions are automatically assigned a neutral citation. However the existence of this neutral citation does not mean that the decision has been published in CanLII. The only way for a librarian to distinguish between the two types of decisions is by putting the neutral citation into a database and seeing if anything comes up.

So how do you find this kind of unreported decision? The two most effective ways are contacting the registry or contacting one of the lawyers involved, although neither technique is foolproof. One challenge in finding these cases is simply not having enough information; if you do not know either the correct registry or who the counsel were, you are going to spend a lot of time on the telephone.

It would be helpful if publishers established a policy whereby no case could be cited by an author unless the publisher provided access to the full text of the judgment. While there might be challenges with court approval, one would assume that if a case was important enough to cite in a text, it should also be important enough for the court to publish. Similarly, it would be useful for courts to ensure that any case cited in a decision was readily available to those who might want to read it.

There are some recent decisions of the Federal Court that acknowledge the necessity of using online legal research sources and seem positioned to allow law firms to charge reasonable disbursements for them. The basis for having computer research costs allowed appears to be the ability to justify both the amount claimed, how it is calculated and the relevance and necessity of the research performed.

The key to costs happiness will lie in how legal researchers keep track of their work. A researcher in a costs argument will have to explain that the disbursements for billed research on Westlaw or Quicklaw was both relevant and necessary to the file and reasonably calculated. Consider how handy it would be if your research output documented both the method and sources used and a notation about what the disbursement is for that particular piece of work. Documentation on how the disbursement is calculated in your organization should also be readily available.

Some snips from the Federal Court decisions help with the rational my advice:

Cameco Corporation v. “MCP Altona” (The Ship), 2013 FC 1263 (CanLII) (December 19, 2013)

[54] Counsel for Nordbank claims a total amount of $1,615.15 (Quicklaw: $1006.89 and Westlaw Carswell: $608.26) for electronic legal research. Considering the paucity of evidence submitted, it is not clear whether the amount claimed is linked to searches done with regard to the priorities issue. I generally have no issue allowing claims for on-line legal searches. However, their necessity and relevance to the issue need to be clearly justified. In the circumstances of the Motion on Priorities, although it was relatively complex and heavily disputed, I find that I am not provided with the necessary evidence to support a claim of $1,615.15. As in Janssen (previously cited) at paragraph 152, I find that parties should not have to spend a disproportionate sum of money to prove a disbursement. However, a minimum amount of information should be provided as to why these searches were proper and relevant to the matter at hand and I would add, why they could not have been done using free on-line services. Furthermore, I was not provided with any relevant information as to the manner in which Mr. McEwen’s law firm pay for on-line research, yet I am aware that many law firms the size of Alexander Holburn Beaudin & Lang, generally pay a monthly fee to take advantage of systems like Quicklaw and Westlaw Carswell. Further, I agree with Mr. Isaacs’ representations that performing legal research using tools like Quicklaw has now replaced the use of the law firm legal library. As stated in Truehope Nutritional Support Ltd v Canada 2013 FC 1153 (CanLII), 2013 FC 1153 [Truehope], there might still be circumstances when on-line legal research could be a justifiable claim but the requirement to prove relevancy and necessity will continue to exist. In the case at bar, I do not find that Nordbank provided the necessary evidence to justify the amount claimed, nor the justification linking the research done to its relevancy to the Priorities Motion. As in Truehope (previously cited), I find it difficult to assess the relevance and necessity of the claim in consideration of the paucity of evidence submitted. In consideration of the fact that no clear justification has been provided to substantiate the amount claimed and the fact that I regard legal computerized research, unless otherwise proven, as office overhead expense as it compares to the subscription services law firms library had to maintain in the past and which were also considered office overhead, the disbursements claimed for electronic legal research are not allowed.

Hoffman-La Roche Limited v. Apotex Inc., 2013 FC 1265 (CanLII) (December 18, 2013)

[60] Roche has claimed $1,288.86 for Quicklaw and Westlaw fees. The only evidence provided is the statement at paragraph 14 of the Affidavit of Erin McIntomny. Counsel did not provide a copy of a printout from the accounting system referred to by Ms. McIntomny.
…
Similarly, given the lack of evidence provided by Roche, it is impossible to reach a determination concerning relevance or necessity of the on-line searches. Therefore the claim for Quicklaw and Westlaw fees is not allowed.

Truehope Nutritional Support Limited v. Canada (Attorney General), 2013 FC 1153 (CanLII), (November 13, 2013)

[124] From the case law submitted, there appears to be a trend toward limiting or eliminating allowances for on-line computer research. Although Courts have found circumstances when online research could be seen as part of overhead and not a necessary disbursement to be passed along on a party and party assessment, I find that there are still circumstances when it may be a justifiable claim. As was held in Aram Systems Ltd v Novatel Inc (supra), I consider disbursements for electronic legal research similar to disbursements for photocopying. However, in keeping with Janssen Inc v Teva (supra), I find that there is also a requirement to provide evidence that the research is relevant. Further, considering that the charges for on-line research can mount up, the justification for on-line charges claimed is essential.

[125] With this in mind, and considering the jurisprudence above, I find that, in order to determine whether on-line searches are reasonable and necessary, there is a need for the production of evidence concerning the relevance and necessity of the on-line searches claimed in the Bill of Costs. Further, given the Respondents’ evidence that they pay a flat-rate monthly fee, there is a need to provide evidence of how these charges were calculated for this specific matter while ensuring that the amounts claimed in the Bill of Costs are a reflection of the actual disbursements. In light of these requirements, it is important to note that, despite the need for proof, the cost of proving the expenditures for computer research should not exceed the amount claimed (see: Almecon Industries Ltd. v. Anchortek Ltd., [2003] F.C.J. No. 1649). Taking this into consideration, I find that, in the present assessment, the Respondents have not provided the evidence required to justify on-line computer searches.

[126] Concerning the relevance and necessity of the on-line searches claimed by the Respondents, I have reviewed the evidence provided in the Affidavit of Tabitha Potts and the cross-examination of Ms. Potts and find that there is no evidence concerning relevance. The Respondents have provided no evidence concerning what the searches relate to, whether they relate to the Judicial Review or a motion, or whether they relate to the Charter challenge or the striking of an affidavit. On cross-examination, Ms. Potts was not able to provide any assistance in determining which searches related to motions and which did not. As evidence of necessity, the Respondents have submitted that 20 volumes of their Application Record consisted of authorities. However, there is no evidence concerning the cost of researching those specific authorities and there is no evidence suggesting which of the on-line searches related to those authorities. It is left to the Assessment Officer to reach a conclusion concerning the relevance and necessity of the searches based on the dates of the searches. This is an impossible task. Without evidence relating to the subject matter being researched, it is impossible to reach a determination concerning the relevance and necessity of individual searches. Therefore, it is impossible to make a finding of relevance and necessity concerning on-line searches based on nothing more than the volume of authorities filed.

[127] Concerning the flat-rate fees paid by the Respondents for Quicklaw services, I have reviewed the evidence provided in the Affidavit of Tabitha Potts and the cross-examination of Ms. Potts and find that Ms. Potts was unable to provide any information concerning the specifics of the fees. Although the Respondents have presented some evidence suggesting that the flat-rate fees were pro-rated, there is no evidence concerning how this was done. Further, the evidence of the Applicants suggests that the flat-rate fee for a sole practitioner could be as low as $180.00 per month. Considering this, the pro-rated charges for on-line computer searches seem excessive given that there were two lawyers on record for the Respondents. As suggested by the Applicants, even if the Respondents have a flat fee for a group of lawyers, the amount claimed could be inflated due to inconsistent use by practitioners. Also, I have not been provided with any specific evidence concerning the nature of the Respondents’ flat-rate per month agreement with Lexis Nexis. Without this evidence, it is impossible to know whether the calculations suggested by the Respondents are appropriate or whether the on-line searches being claimed should constitute office overhead.

Legal vendors share their suggested pricing with subscribers. Some firms have electronic resource management software to help them capture billable research. Those that don’t have an ERM do have some other institutionalized method for calculating research disbursements. Good legal research practice is to keep track of the sources you have searched and what method you used. Adding some notes to enable future relevance analysis will go a long way to being able to justify legal research costs.

Why not keep track of what the disbursements will be with the sources consulted portion of each research memo?

Today’s Tip is about our languages thanks to a tweet from Susannah Tredwell, Manager of Library Service at Davis LLP in Vancouver.

Susannah shared news about TERMIUM Plus (R), the Canadian Government’s terminology and linguistic data bank.

What is in this data bank? According to the site:

• Almost 4 million English and French terms;
• More than 18,000 Portuguese terms;
• More than 200,000 Spanish terms;
• More than 4,000 monthly updates;
• Accurate, specialized and up-to-date terminology;
• The Government of Canada´s standardization tool;
• 17 diverse and user-friendly writing tools.

A quadralingual databank gives the precise English, French or Spanish or Portuguese equivalent for everything from plants, diseases, machines and tools. TERMIUM Plus also contains the meanings of very specialized terms and offers a writing assistance tool. Legal terms are included in the data bank with very specific source cites and context provided with complementary documents for many records.

There is a companion app that offers the ability to to find terms in both official languages available Apple and Blackberry devices and a mobile friendly web app for other devices.

Slawyers who need to ensure the accuracy of terms and phrases should check it out.

Thanks Susannah!

• Service Lifecycle Management:Pruning Gives Other Services Room to Grow (January 22)
• So what do you do – and why do I need you – exactly? Tips on Branding for Information Professionals (February 13)
• "Good Enough" Information: Threat or Opportunity? (March 5)
• Leading from the Centre: Using Basic Project Management Tools to Support Innovation (March 11)
• Herding Cats: Leading Teams Over Whom You Have No Formal Authority (March 13)
• Becoming Indispensable: The Value Proposition (April 10)
• Digital Scholarship from the Bottom Up: The Library’s Role in Open Access Student Journals (April 16)
• Transferable Competencies: Opportunities for LIS Graduates in Non-Librarian Positions (April 22)
• Mother Said There’d Be Days Like These: Dealing Professionally & Elegantly With the Unforeseen at Work (May 8)

Ronan Cormacain of the University of London has published Accessing Legislation: 40 Years Post-Renton: Have the Renton Committee’s recommendations on electronic access to legislation been fulfilled? Web Journal of Current Legal Issues, 19(3) (2013).

Here is the abstract:

Access to legislation is of fundamental importance to our legal system. The Renton Report made many timeless recommendations on legislation generally and access in particular. Five functions relating to access are derived. These functions should be satisfied by a good electronic legislation system. The UK system is analysed by reference to these functions. [Section 7 assesses The National Archives legislation website at legislation.gov.uk (developed by John Sheridan) by reference to these five functions.] Certain technological developments make access easier. The nature of legislation itself can make access more difficult. The article concludes with practical suggestions on improving accessibility.

One of our key goals is to shape our digital offerings and collections to meet the diverse needs in the legal communities we serve. With 29 locations throughout the province, it certainly is a challenge to provide all of the legal titles we would like to in each location. Many important legal texts are very expensive loose-leaf services that can have huge un-forecasted price fluctuations due to their pay-per-update pricing plan. Unfortunately it is simply too expensive to purchase print titles for all of our locations.

PALMPrint, the cooperative print legal preservation project organized by the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO) and the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA), now has 60 participating library members, according to a post by Darin Fox at the LIPA Blog.

NELLCO describes PALMPrint as follows:

Preserving America’s Legal Materials in Print (PALMPrint), is an exciting collaborative pilot project aimed at developing a shared, cirulating collection of primary, U.S. legal materials in print. Working with the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA), the two organizations jointly have committed to underwrite $120,000.00 of the total cost of the three-year project. The remaining costs will be shared by the participating libraries.[...]

More details on the project appear in this document.

Margie Maes of LIPA published a post about the project in October 2012.

It’s unclear whether PALMPrint functions as a last-copy print preservation program.

HT Margie Maes of LIPA and Tracy Thompson-Przylucki of NELLCO

Professor Dr. Graham Greenleaf of the University of New South Wales, Professor Andrew Mowbray of University of Technology Sydney, and Philip Chung of the University of New South Wales, have published The Meaning of ‘Free Access to Legal Information’: A Twenty Year Evolution, Journal of Open Access to Law, 1(1) (2013).

Here is the abstract:

Free online access to legal information is approaching maturity in some parts of the world, after two decades of development, but elsewhere is still in its early stages of development. Nowhere has it been realised fully. The main question asked in this paper is “what should ‘free access’ mean in relation to legal information in order for it to be fully effective?” As with software, we must ask whether free access to law is ‘free as in beer, or free as in speech?’

The six most significant attempts over the last twenty years to answers this question are analysed to show that a substantial degree of international consensus has developed on what ‘free access to legal information’ now means. Of thirty separate identifiable principles, most are found in more than one statement of principles, and many are now relatively common in the practices of both States and providers of free access to legal information (government and NGO). Many concern measures to avoid the development of monopolies in publication of the core legal documents of a jurisdiction. Which principles are essential to the meaning of ‘free access to legal information’, and which are only desirable, is usually clear.

Two complementary meanings of ‘free access to legal information’ emerge. The first states the obligations of the State in relation to ensuring free access to legal information – but not necessarily providing it. The key elements concern the right of republication. The second meaning states the conditions under which an organisation can correctly be said to be a provider of free access to legal information. We argue that a better definition is needed than the ‘consensus’ suggests, and propose one based on the avoidance of conflicts with maximisation of the quality and quantity of free access.

One use of such a set of principles is to help evaluate the extent to which any particular jurisdiction has implemented free access to legal information. A brief example is given of Australia, a county with a generally good record but some deficiencies.

Finally the paper considers what steps should be taken to most effectively realise a reformulated concept of ‘free access to legal information’, by civil society, by States at the national level, and at the international level.

A new interview with John Sheridan of The National Archives (UK) has been posted by Alex Howard at E Pluribus Unum: U.K. National Archives makes ‘good law’ online, builds upon open data as a platform.

The post discusses Sheridan’s Legislation.gov.uk open legislative system, the UK’s Good Law Initiative, and open legislative data.

Here are excerpts of the post:

[...] I’d first met Sheridan virtually, back in August 2010, when I talked with the head of e-services and strategy at the United Kingdom’s National Archives about how linked data was opening up eight hundred years of legal history. That month, the National Archives launched legislation.gov.uk to provide public access to more than eight centuries of the legal history in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Just over three years later, I stepped off the Tube at the St. James Park Station and walked over to meet him in person and learn how his aspirations for legislation.gov.uk had met up with reality.

Over a cup of tea, Sheridan caught me up on the progress that his team has made in digitizing documents and improving the laws of the land. There are now 2 million monthly unique visitors to legislation.gov.uk every month, with 500+ million page views annually. People really are reading Parliament’s output, he observed, and increasingly doing so on tablets and mobile devices. The amount of content flowing into the site is considerable: according to Sheridan, the United Kingdom is passing laws at an estimated rate of 100,000 words every month [...]

Notable improvements over the years include the ability to compare the original text of legislation versus the latest version [...] and view a timeline of changes using a slider for navigation, exploring any given moment in time. Sheridan was particularly proud of the site’s rendering of legislation in HTML, include human-readable permanent uniform resource locators (URLS) and the capacity to produce on-demand PDFs of a given document. [...]

More specifically, Sheridan highlighted a “good law” project, wherein the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel (OPC) of Britain is working to help develop plain language laws that are “necessary, clear, coherent, effective and accessible.” A notable component of this good law project is an effort to apply a tool used in online publishing, software development and advertising — A/B testing — to testing different versions of legislation for usability. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Click here for earlier posts about the Good Law initiative.

Click here for earlier posts about John Sheridan’s work.

HT @digiphile