Cathie.best

Yesterday I whined a little about how hyperlinks and convenient search tools may be making for lazy researching. Today’s Tip is a reminder about how to search for judicial consideration of a statue section without using those convenient tools in CanLII, Quicklaw and Westlaw .  If you are looking for cases that consider section 119 of the Health Professions Act, RSA 2000, c H-7 you could use the legislation note up shortcut tools that are provided with your favourite service OR you can search within any full text case law database with this formula:

“name of act” /10 #

Stated in words, the search is: act name as a phrase within 10 words of the section number. Using my example, the search looks like this:

“Health Professions Act” /10 119

Here are the CanLII results filtered for Alberta for the above search.

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has launched a new website this month. The site will be rolling out additional features in the coming months, but already has a new section for the public called "Going to Court?" which provides some basic information about the justice system. There is also a page in this section for teachers and students which provides instructional resources.

In Chief Justice Heather Forster Smith's speech during the Opening of the Courts on Sept. 24, 2013, she focused on access to justice and the role of technology. In addition to envisioning greater e-filing in the courts, she described the new digital recordings before the Ontario Court of Justice, and the policy for electronic devices in the courtrooms. The new website integrates well with both of these initiatives, as she described below:

The details of both of these policies are readily available on the Superior Court’s website, which brings me to a further successful initiative this year. Our court’s website is being entirely revamped with the goal of providing much more practical information for the public about all facets of the court’s operation. Our most recent bi-annual report, released last November, is available on our website. I highly recommend this report as a valuable source of information on the many initiatives I am describing today.

Changes may be finally happening in our court system, perhaps not as fast as we would like, but it does appear to be on the horizon. The new website will be a good resource to help keep abreast of those changes.

Professor Dr. Jan M. Smits of Maastricht University has posted a paper entitled Of the Vocation of Our Age Against Codification: On Civil Codes in the Information Society.

Here is the abstract:

The belief in presenting the law by way of comprehensive systematisation by national states seems to be as important today as it was 200 years ago. In this contribution it is investigated whether this belief in codification is still accurate. It is at least surprising that an institution that was invented more than two centuries ago still has such a prominent place in the (civil) law. It is argued that the most important function of codification, namely to provide information about the law, can today be achieved in a much better way than through state-made systematisations. This calls for a different way of presenting the law to the general audience: not by way of national codification or through legal science, but by creating alternative models of legal information management.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers Tagged: Codification of legislation, Codification of statutes, Jan M Smits, Jan Smits, Legal codification, Legal Information Management, Legislative codification, Legislative information systems, Organization of legal information, Organization of legislation, Presentation of legal information, Presentation of legislation

In preparation for the commencement of work on the 20th edition of The Bluebook, due out in 2015, that manual’s proprietors have placed a survey online at: https://www.legalbluebook.com/survey.  Anyone with views on how that reference might be improved in scope, delivery, or content should register them … soon. Submissions must be received by Nov. 8.

When is an author not the author?

The publication of the twenty fifth annual edition of Tremeear's Criminal Code by David Watt and Michelle Fuerst raises an obvious question about the naming tradition in legal publishing. Why name a new edition of a book after someone long deceased, who had nothing to do with its creation.

Specifically, why name an annotated Criminal Code prepared by Justices Watt and Fuerst Tremeears Criminal Code?

The making of a "tradition"

Over the past century or two, a practice evolved whereby legal publishers launched new editions of established works under the name of the original author long after that person passed from the scene. The new editions would be prepared by ambitious young lawyers with appropriate pedigrees who hoped to gain stature and reputation by linking their name with the author of the established work. Reputation by association so to speak.

Initially, a young lawyer would be named as the "editor" of a new edition of a work originally authored by someone else. After two or three editions, in which the editor put his or her stamp on the publication, the editor would be promoted to co-author of the work. Eventually the editor might even displace the original author, once he or she had become established as the leading authority on the subject.

Commercial Origins of the Tradition

The origin of this "tradition" was clearly commercial. Launching a new no-name publication is time consuming, risky and expensive. There is no certainty that the legal publisher will cover its costs of production, let alone the cost of marketing a new work.

By comparison, publishing a new edition of an established publication is comparatively easy. The legal publisher knows who is interested in the publication and how many of them are likely to purchase a new edition. Print runs are certain and marketing costs insignificant.

Once a publication is established in the legal marketplace, the publisher even gets to choose the most opportune time to publish a new edition. In the early years, the publication of new editions was tied to significant legislative change. More recently, annual editions of key practice titles have become the norm.

The only real challenge for the publisher is to find the right person to prepare a new edition when the original author becomes unable or unwilling to do so, usually someone who is highly credible but not so far along in their career as to demand star billing.

The pursuit of a shared personal interest in a new edition by both the publisher and editor came over time to be marketed as a "tradition" in legal publishing. Authors of were encouraged to grant copyright to the publisher on the premise that their work would never die if the publisher was granted the rights. The contract would frequently provide that the author's name would remain on all future editions of the publication in exchange for assigning the publisher the copyright. There are many examples of authors long since deceased whose names have lived through literally dozens of subsequent editions of their seminal works. The Tremeears Criminal Code is but one of them.

Tremeear's Criminal Code

It is now more than a quarter of a century since David Watt first approached Carswell regarding the preparation of a new edition of the Tremeears Code. The sixth edition of Tremeears Criminal Code by Leonard J. Ryan had been last published in 1964 and a new edition was overdue.

David Watt seemed to be an ideal choice as his successor. He had both the background and the determination to make the project succeed. When I first met him, I was impressed by the breadth and depth of his publishing ambitions – his stated objective at the time was to write the definitive statement of every aspect of criminal law of Canada, including substantive law, the law of criminal procedure and the law of evidence. At this point in his career, he has come remarkably close to doing just that. His long list of credits include: Watt's Manual of Criminal Evidence, Watt's Manual of Criminal Jury Instructions, Helping Jurors Understand, and Criminal Law Precedents.

Michelle Fuerst, his partner in the Tremeear's venture, has an equally impressive background. Her publishing credits include the Law of Evidence in Canada (as a co-author of the recent editon of the Sopinka classic) and The Trial of Sexual Offence Cases.

As time would tell, they would prove to be the ideal choice.

History and Origin of Tremeear's Criminal Code

W.J. Tremeear was the author of an annotated criminal code originally published in 1908 by the Canada Law Book Company. Mr. Tremeear was the original editor of the Canadian Criminal Cases. The case summaries that he prepared for the C.C.C.'s from 1898 until his death in 1927 were the raw material for creating his original annotated Criminal Code and for his two subsequent editions.

As well as being the founding editor of Canadian Criminal Cases, W.J. Tremeear was one of the original Managing Editors of the Canadian Encyclopedic Digests and the author of literally dozens of titles in the first edition of both the C.E.D. Western and the C.E.D. Ontario. No one did more than W.J. Tremeear to help lay the foundations of a legal literature for Canada.

After his death, the annotated Criminal Code had a number of editors, all of whom continued to use the Tremeears name in the title and on the spine. A sketch of the subsequent history of the Code can be found in the Preface of the sixth edition by Leonard J. Ryan published in 1964:

Mr. Tremeear's annotation was first published in 1902, ten years after the enactment of the original Code. His three editions, as well as the fourth edited by Arthur W. Rogers, and the monumental fifth edition, by the late Alan B. Harvey, were based on the 1892 Code, as amended from time to time and consolidated in 1906 and 1927.

In his Preface to the fourth edition, Arthur W. Rogers describes both the effort and the result that went into the preparation of Tremeears :

The late W.J. Tremeear produced three editions of his Annotated Criminal Code. To their making he devoted countless hours of painstaking care directed by a mind well versed in legal learning. Definite improvements in style of treatment were made with each until he achieved, with his third edition in 1919, that which he no doubt sought, a compliation of the law that practically every lawyer was bound to have and once having, was bound to keep….The reason for the popularity of the book is not far to seek. The law was where the practitioner expected to find it, well classified and carefully indexed. So Tremeear's Code became known as "a very present help in trouble" a veritable defence counsel's "bible".

Leonard J. Ryan continued this tradition, publishing numerous cumulative supplements to the sixth edition before passing the torch to his successors.

Watt and Furest's Annotated Criminal Code of Canada

Twenty five editions ago, it became the turn of David Watt and Michelle Fuerst to put their stamp on the Criminal Code. Their approach differed from that of Tremeear in several ways. The most obvious is the frequency of new editions. Annual editions published whether the law had changed or not, replaced periodic revisions linked to significant changes in the form and content of the Criminal Code.

Another notable change to the Tremeears Code in the hands of Watt and Fuerst is the addition of charts and tables in which Criminal Code offences are dissected and cross-referenced. by starting a research trail through the charts and tables in preference to the conventional Table of Contents and alphabetized key word Index, one can see the Criminal Code from a different perspective. In its essence, however, the Code remains a collection of case summaries grouped by key words with cross references, that characterized previous editions, enhanced with "comments" in the form of short précis for every section and easy to read case summaries that substitute abbreviations for Defendant/Accused (D), Prosector/Crown(P) and Victim/Complainant(V).

At this point, however, it is unlikely that a single phrase (except those contained in the Criminal Code itself) in the current edition of Tremeears can be found in the original editions prepared by W.J. Tremeear. The great man has passed from the scene both in form and substance. All that remains is his name. The debt due him for his significant contribution to the creation of a legal literature for Canada has been paid. It is time to move on.

It really is time for the first edition of Watt and Fuerst's Criminal Code of Canada. Just a thought.

Footnote – It is not often that publishers change from edition to edition. Publishing rights to commercially successful publications are carefully guarded by a publisher. The Tremeear's Criminal Code is a rare exception to the norm. Tremeear authored three editions of the Code. The first edition of Tremeear's entitled simply the Criminal Code of Canada was originally published by Canada Law Book in 1902, as was the 2nd edition in 1908. Burroughs of Calgary published the 3rd edition in 1919. Without saying how it happened, Butterworths:History of a Publishing House states that Burroughs broke away from Canada Law Book in 1912 to set up his own business and somehow took the Tremeears Code with him.

The 4th edition by Arthur Wyckoff (1899-1958) was published by Burroughs in 1929. The 5th edition by Alan Burnside Harvey (1899-1958) was published by Burroughs in 1944. Carswell only became involved with the publication of the 6th edition by Leonard J. Ryan in 1964 after absorbing the Burroughs business though an acquisition of some kind. These mysteries remain to be revealed if and when the history of Canadian legal publishing is ever written.

From the November issue of Scientific American:  Why the brain prefers paper, by Ferris Jabr

In many studies people understand and remember what they read on paper better than what they read on screens.  Researchers think the physicality of paper explains this discrepancy.

Legal information is boring. As much as you may enjoy reading a court case, a legal article or conducting legal research, the experience cannot realistically be compared to listening to a song or planning a vacation. Browsing a legal resource will never entertain you more than searching YouTube or TripAdvisor. Exceptionally, isolated masterpieces here and there spark a certain degree of buzz and then the tide of uninteresting data takes over again.

Legal information professionals and users should not feel singled out though, because legal information is not the only boring information out there.

But why is it that legal texts turn off many eager readers? Sometimes this is due to their inherent complexity. No one can reasonably expect to obtain a simple overview of the Canadian tax system. It is complex and so are the rules that enforce it. Sometimes, legal information is made unnecessarily complex. One could think that plain language is heresy amongst authors of primary legal information. Even though court cases stand closest to common everyday communication, a trend becomes apparent that court opinions are getting longer and more complex. Public access analysts say that it has become a challenge for judges and justices, public information officers, and members of the bar to make sure that the public understands what is expressed in a court opinion. Evidently, contracts are among the less legible documents. Consider any sample shareholder agreement that you can find on the web and try to locate a clause that can be understood at first glance, unlike this one:

(10) Two of the Shareholders may jointly accept the Offer to Sell under Section 3.04(2) and, in such event, the further provisions of Section 3.04 shall apply except that the number of Shares to be purchased by each of them under Section 3.04 may be set out in the notice given by them under Section 3.04(2) and Section 3.04(9) provided that the aggregate of such numbers equals the number of Shares beneficially owned by the Offeror.

In addition to necessary and unnecessary complexity and jargon, there is one more reason why legal documents are boring: they are exclusively textual which is not as fun and self-explanatory as graphics and images. The power of visual communication has long been exploited by other “boring” disciplines. The field of open data often emerges as a natural playground for visual applications. Visualization experiments are not recent at all as witnesses this article from 2007. Some readers may even remember data visualization efforts dating back to the nineties.

Legal information authors and providers are also starting to tap into the potential of visual communication. The examples are quite frequent. One of those examples is the use of visuals by courts illustrating their judgments. Fastcase visualizes its search results in the form of maps playing with relevance, recency and influence of court opinions. Similar to that, Ravel designed a court opinions search tool mixing influence, relevance and relations between cases. JustCite has been offering a visually mapped citator for several years.

Furthermore, in a field where you would least expect this, such as municipal law, the city of Kirkland designed an interactive map of municipally regulated activities allowing citizens to quickly and easily locate by-law provisions of interest to them. Thom Neale’s CiteFight using CanLII’s data is yet another great example of how citation data can be made visually appealing and pleasant to consult. In the field of legal information, such examples are popping-up more frequently than ever before.

Images are pretty, much prettier than text. But are they useful? Would you rely on floating bubbles or comics-looking tools in your research? The quick answer is: if you are about to fire up a barbecue in your backyard, yes; if you are selling your business, no.

However, these innovative tools deserve more consideration. Some researchers (wrongly) perceive those applications as not sufficiently serious for legal research. The thing is, law rules everything, from embryo to exhumation, and in between there is a lot of trivial stuff with less at stake. As Tom Bruce said, “We tend to think about legal research taking place in multibillion-dollar cases, but often it’s a dry cleaner trying to figure out how to stock chemicals.” Legal research is about risk management and not a single resource can be considered serious enough or sufficiently comprehensive when the stakes are really high.

So, are those applications attempting to make legal information less dull useful? Definitely yes. And we can be surprised by the number of users who are perfectly happy with “less serious” tools that are helping them find the answers they need through a more enjoyable and direct research process.

Ivan Mokanov

In the October issue of the CBA BarTalk we brought you the short version of this tip.  This is our expanded piece.

I know - you google things all day long.  But have you checked Google Scholar? With extensive US case law from 1950 onward and both US and Canadian journals, www.scholar.google.ca  has some promising potential.  Here are a handful of cool things lawyers can do to maximize Google’s more studious cousin.  

1. How Cited
   

   I confess – I have used Google Scholar and have completely missed this feature.  Boy was I missing out!  You don’t need to make the same mistake.  Use GoogleScholar to see how your leading case has been treated and where it appears in scholarly pieces.  Please note that this is not about finding the full text of your decision.  For this, I would certainly start with an excellent program like www.canlii.org.  Instead, this is a tool to see how your case has been discussed since it came out. 

   It is simple. Open scholar.google.ca and search your case name, making sure to select “Case law”. I did this: 
   
   
    
   
   The results come up with a link to the case and a list of options below.
   
   
    
   
   “Cited by” will get you a list of places your case has appeared.  It looks something like this:
   
   
   
    
   
   “How Cited” will get you the reference in context for efficient reviewing.  Not only does it show you the contextual quote with how the case has been discussed, it clusters like quotes together. This can save a lot of time in reviewing a set of articles for those most relevant to your issue. 
   
   
   

2. Find full text legal articles. 
   

   If you are looking into an overview of an area of law from a scholarly journal, you can find a number of sources here and even full text of a number of articles.   

   We’ve used this tool many times in Courthouse Libraries to help clients. On one occasion, a lawyer was looking for the most recent volume of a journal from one of the law schools. Although we subscribed to it, we discovered that the journal was too recent and the school had not yet sent out any copies.  We then ran a quick check on Google Scholar and discovered the full text of the piece. 

   You have the option of either searching for a particular article or looking for journals on a particular topic. In this case, I ran a search for some key words:
   
   
   
   
    
   My results span a number of sources:
   
   
   
    

   Those results that show addresses on the right side of the page, are those that have a free copy of the article immediately available.  They look like this one:
   
   
   
    
   For those articles without a direct link, many have a HeinOnline citation.  HeinOnline is available for free for every Law Society of British Columbia member in our online Reading Room for Lawyers as well in our Courthouse Libraries BC locations. For the Reading Room go to www.courthouselibrary.ca/readingroom 

3. Get notified if a paper or case is cited
   Search for the title of your case, click on the "Cited by" link and then click on the envelope image at the bottom.  You can sign up here to be automatically emailed if any new articles or cases appear.
   
   
        to then bring us to: 
   
   
    
   The result is that every time the article, “Doctors as fiduciaries: do medical professionals have the right not to treat?” is cited, I will get an email.
   
   All these handy little tools come to your courtesy of Google Scholar completely for free.  
   
   

If you have questions about this or other research needs, please feel free to contact us at librarian@courthouselibrary.ca. 

 

As we've discussed a number of times on Slaw, a good many hyperlinks break over time as their targets get moved or taken down. This link rot is particularly challenging in academia and in law, where cited authorities are an important component of one's argument.

In a 16 page document available on SSRN three weeks ago, "Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations," Harvard professors Jonathan Zittrain and Kendra Albert:

. . . document a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs found within U.S. Supreme Court opinions do not link to the originally cited information.

Given that, we propose a solution for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.

(The study — more of a "spot check," as the authors call it — only looked at "open web" links and ignored links to proprietary databases such as LexisNexis or Westlaw.)

The solution proposed is perma.cc,

a service, currently in beta, that allows users to create citation links that will never break.

When a user creates a Perma.cc link, Perma.cc archives a copy of the referenced content, and generates a link to an unalterable hosted instance of the site. Regardless of what may happen to the original source, if the link is later published by a journal using the Perma.cc service, the archived version will always be available through the Perma.cc link.

Readers who click on a Perma.cc link are taken to a page that lets them choose to go to the original site (which may have changed since the link was created) or see the archived copy of the site in its original state.

Perma.cc is an online preservation service developed by the Harvard Law School Library in conjunction with university law libraries across the country and other organizations in the “forever” business.

There are currently 27 law library partners in the perma.cc collective, none Canadian yet, I'm sorry to say.

Lexum, the company that designed and developed the free legal information site CanLII, turns 20 this month.

It began operations in 1993 by publishing the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada online.

It since then has developed, designed and hosted websites for numerous Canadian and foreign legal institutions.

The anniversary page has a timeline that shows the evolution of Lexum over the past two decades.

There are a lot of great resources for primary law online, both free and fee. However, to get legal analysis and cutting edge thinking on current legal topics there are also some great resources for free online. Bar associations are a great source (of course!) but here are some others that have great content. You just have to know where to look.

Lexology
Lexology (aka ACC Newstand) brings together articles submitted by major commercial law firms. Register and then search the site or set up custom RSS feeds to be delivered Outlook or your feed reader. International in scope, the topics tend to have a focus on business law issues.

Mondaq
International in scope, you will find the latest thinking on legal, accounting, regulatory and commercial issues supplied by the world's leading professional advisors. Browse or you can search the database for articles by date, topic, firm, country, author, free text, etc.

Fee Fie Foe Firm
Fee Fie Foe Firm USA is a search engine that focuses on the websites of US law firms. Use the search box to search for legal experts, law firm bulletins, articles, press releases and more! Though it hasn’t been updated in quite some time, it is built on a Google Custom Search so as long as the law firms maintain their URLs then there is still value in this resource.

Free Full-Text Online Law Review/Journal Search
This free search engine from the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center searches the free full-text of over 400 online law reviews and law journals, as well as document repositories hosting academic papers and related publications such as Congressional Research Service reports. Several of the law reviews and legal journals (such as the Stanford Technology Law Review), working papers, and reports are available online only.

Blogs

Blogs, or weblogs, are another way to get legal research information and current awareness. Many lawyers are blogging, providing commentary on practice area specific information. Some very good blogs provide legal research information and tips.

The legal profession has enthusiastically embraced blogging. Vast directories of legal-centric blogs have been compiled, including Justia’s Blawg Directory, and the ABA Journal Blawg Directory, which list blogs on topics ranging from administrative law to workers compensation and most everything in between. The ranks of lawyer bloggers now include prominent judges, numerous law professors, nationally-recognized appellate lawyers and entire practice groups. These directories allow users to search the blogs all at once, or drill down to practice areas.

Shared Content Sites

With the advent of Web 2.0, and the increasingly familiar and trusted experience of participation and sharing on the web through social media, shared content sites that allow end users to upload and share content, comment on other’s content, and gain recognition for contributions, has resulted in some very useful sites for lawyers.

Other sites, such as Scribd, SlideShare, and DocStoc, let users upload documents and slide presentations. Many companies, individuals, and law firms upload information to share on these sites, making them a goldmine for information that an entity may, or may not know, is being shared publically.

JDSupra
Among other things, JD Supra allows lawyers and legal professionals to upload representative documents – briefs, articles, presentations, etc. to be freely shared – and searched. Large firms such as Bryan Cave and Fenwick & West, as well as many others, submit content.

SSRN (Social Science Research Network)
The Social Science Research Network contains vast amounts of scholarly articles, from law, accounting, corporate, political science and much more. Scholars and academics submit research articles to SSRN before they go through peer review and the formal publishing process. This means the articles are often not the final version, but they are made available much faster than the traditional publishing procedure allows. Users can hone in on just legal articles, some articles are available only in abstract.

Professor Michael D. Murray of Valparaiso University Law School has published The Promise of Parentheticals: An Empirical Study of the Use of Parentheticals in Federal Appellate Briefs, Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD, 10, 229-263 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

This Article on current practices in advocacy and briefing reports an empirical study of the use of parentheticals in federal appellate court briefs submitted between February 1, 2011, and July 31, 2011. The study was designed to answer the question: How are parentheticals currently used for rhetorical purposes in appellate briefs to explain a synthesis of authorities? The study proves that parentheticals currently are used beyond a simple informational function in citation forms for four rhetorical purposes: (1) to quote and highlight portions of authorities (“quotation” function); (2) to explain and illustrate the principles induced from a synthesis of authorities (“explanatory synthesis” function); (3) to explain and illustrate the effect and operation of public policies underlying the law in multiple authorities (“public policy synthesis” function); and (4) to explain and illustrate the narratives of success or failure among multiple cases in which the law was applied to produce a concrete outcome (“narrative synthesis” function). Parentheticals in synthesis are used at a significantly higher rate that the other common method of communication of information about multiple authorities in legal analysis known as textual, case-to-case analogical reasoning.

Filed under: Articles and papers, Research findings Tagged: JALWD, Legal communication, Legal Communication and Rhetoric, Legal rhetoric, Michael D. Murray, Parentheticals in court decisions, Parentheticals in judicial decisions, Rhetorical analysis of court decisions, Rhetorical analysis of judicial decisions, Rhetorical analysis of parentheticals in court decisions, Rhetorical analysis of parentheticals in judicial decisions

The Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) representing all university libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland published last month a 135-page document

Briefing on Mandatory Open Access Policies

Prepared by Sarah Durrant, Red Sage Consulting and Ann Rossiter

Hat tip to DocuTicker.com.

Legal publisher LexisNexis Canada has published a paper on the Future of Law in Canada that outlines 4 possible scenarios for the future of the Canadian legal system by the year 2020:

"To guide us along the journey of describing the future, we utilized an important — and novel — component of our strategic toolkit: scenario planning. Rather than try to predict a single future, we believe that scenario planning has great potential for use in this “transitional period” to simulate and rehearse multiple possible futures that could have profound implications, and highlight previously undiscovered areas of connection and intersection."

"The results of our 2013 scenario planning exercise demonstrate a provocative and engaging exploration of the future of the Canadian legal system through 2020, as you will read in the following pages. This report is crucial reading for anyone interested in creatively considering the multiple, divergent ways in which our world could evolve. The sparks of insight inspiring these narratives — along with their implications for our legal system as a whole — were generated through the invaluable collaboration of many stakeholder representatives, external experts, and LexisNexis staff."

The scenarios are:

• Controlled evolution: Familiar and known stakeholders retain a full span of control over the evolution of the Canadian legal space. While there is increased focus on the cost and efficiency of legal services, the overall system adapts using proven technology and processes. Even with the cost constraints, the law societies work successfully with the court system to improve the affordable access to justice. For corporate clients, their increasing sophistication and bargaining power are keeping law firms on their toes, and the winning service providers create a lean and flexible work environment that attracts top talent and delivers the best value to the marketplace.
• Open season: Globalization and new technologies have opened the door to unexpected competitors that disrupt the legal system. Leveraging law society regulations that allow third-party legal services, professional services firms previously offering accounting and consulting services now offer legal services as part of their end-to-end offer, while tech-savvy boutique law firms are delivering legal services in novel, low-cost ways. Clients are reaping the benefits of more choice and better access while law societies, the judiciary and law schools reorganize to better address the new entrants. Traditional firms have made drastic changes to survive. The winners take risks and create innovative practice models that change the way lawyers value themselves and their firms. 
• Patchwork reform: To address the public outcry for affordable access to justice, governments from across Canada intervene in the regulation of the legal system. Public funding has modernized the court system and increased legal aid, and the new regulations triggered the launch of a broad range of lower-cost legal services enabled by innovative and efficient uses of technology. While the law societies have lost some independence, the legal community consensus is that government reforms and funding have helped inform the public and demystify legal services. The winning law firms have restructured to better service more market segments, and offer more flexible career choices. Clients benefit from the structured choices and prices available in this more controlled environment. 
• Breakaway: By creatively embracing technology, the Canadian legal system is better, faster and cheaper. New government regulations have encouraged corporate ownership and governance of law firms and the consumer-oriented Canadian Legal Bill of Rights continues to attract tech-savvy entrants who bring the best practices in digital innovation to Canada. In addition to smaller niche players, large non-legal service providers enter the market with unprecedented scale and efficiency. Traditional law firms have been hit the hardest. Many lawyers have had to specialize, and competition for the best talent is intense. The winners operate as decentralized, virtual teams working closely with non-legal business partners to find growth opportunities.

The Social Science Research Network features a recent text on Free Scholarship: Developing a National Legal Scholarship Library, authored by three Australian academics including Graham Greenleaf, co-founder of the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII).

From the abstract:

"This article considers how a country’s legal scholarship can become a major resource on a free access legal information institute (LII), and the relationship of such a national facility to global legal scholarship facilities such as SSRN’s Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) and Google Scholar. It commences with an analysis of the attractions of those global services to authors and users, and by comparison what advantages a nationally-focused scholarship facility can provide. The initial conclusion is that a combination of the two could be the most desirable result for both users and authors. 'Open content' is distinguished from 'free access,' and it is argued that the latter is more important than the former to the public interest in access to scholarship."

"AustLII's development since 2008 of the 'Australasian Legal Scholarship Library' is explained. The current version (Stage 1) includes about 55,000 searchable items of free access Australasian legal scholarship in 93 databases (over 100 if law reform databases are counted). The Library includes law journals (most back to their first issues); law school research repositories; judicial scholarship; law texts from open content publishers; and law thesis abstracts. It may be the Internet’s second largest national free access collection of legal scholarship, after the US collection in the SSRN/LSN). It also includes the LawCite citator, which automatically tracks citation of scholarship in the case law on AustLII and on all LIIs with which AustLII cooperates."

"From 2013-14 the Library is to be expanded (Stage 2) to at least 100,000 searchable items, and improved technically, with research infrastructure funding from the Australian Research Council. In addition to expansion of existing categories, digitised historical law texts and law reform reports are being added. The article considers how the Library Stage 2 must be re-conceptualised in light of what is provided by global legal scholarship services, and the ongoing relationship with such services which is desirable in the interests of its authors and users. Matters discussed include approaches to permissions, collaboration with commercial publishers and other repositories, and proposed technical enhancements such as ‘AustLII authors pages’, metrics (citation and usage) for each item of scholarship, and for each law journal, improved feedback mechanisms to authors and readers, and similarity-based searching."

"The article concludes with an assessment of the factors in the Australian context that have been most conducive to the Library’s development so far. While not all of these may be replicated elsewhere (eg numerous law-school-published journals; research infrastructure funding), most elements are not jurisdiction-specific (or have analogs), and therefore may be of broader relevance."

The text is being presented later this month at the 2013 Law via the Internet conference on the Island of Jersey in the English Channel. The conference brings together people from the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) from different countries and continents that together form the Free Access to Law Movement.

The goal of the LIIs is to maximize free access to public legal information such as legislation and case law from as many countries and international institutions as possible. CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute, and Lexum, which publishes the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada online, are prominent members of the movement.

Katie Thomas, Law Librarian, Toronto, Canada

Web: http://katiemthomas.wordpress.com

 “With a MOOC MOOC here,

And a MOOC MOOC there,

Here a MOOC, there a MOOC,

Everywhere a MOOC MOOC…” *

 Law librarians have many options for professional development opportunities. Annual conferences, meet-up groups, webinars, twitter chats, and collaborating with colleagues are just some of the eclectic ways we can keep our ear to the ground. But what about MOOCs (massive open online courses)? What’s in it for librarians or better yet, law librarians? I thought I would find out.

 What’s a MOOC? The idea has been well covered in the professional press and I encourage you to plug the term into your favourite search engine.  As a starter, you may want to read Susan Munro’s piece entitled MOOC, Distance Education and CLE or Judith Gaskell’s MOOCs: What are they good for?, both posted on SLAW.

 This post focuses on the professional development opportunities offered through MOOCs for librarians. I am not so much interested (at least just now!) in how librarians can provide support for MOOC learning to our clients and students as a considerable amount has already been written in this area, especially in the academic librarian literature. And, as Susan Munro and others have pointed out, there is no lack of topics to address. Quality of the educational experience, student engagement, student-teacher interaction, the business model behind the phenomenon and librarian support for the MOOC are just some of the issues that can be explored. 

 So where to start? Well, that’s the thing. There is no “official” place to start looking for MOOCs, never mind just the “librarian-ish” courses. Yes, you can plug the term library, librarian, information, metadata, legal etc. into any of the MOOC websites like Coursera or edX, but expect mixed results.  An aggregator such as ClassCentral helps, but it does not pull some of the iSchool courses I will describe below.

 I began with the article entitled MOOCs to Watch written by librarian Courtney Brown. She provided a helpful list of courses that would be of interest to librarians. They are primarily technology related such as Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps.

 iSchool MOOCs which have received rave reviews (based on the website comments and speaking with colleagues who have enrolled) include the New Librarianship Master Class open online course taught by Dave Lankes at the Syracuse University iSchool. Professor Lankes writes that “Through this course, [librarians] will learn how to better capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities.” The videos, slides, readings, and structure have remained available for free on the website but you will first need to register with the provider COURSEsites. By the way, the first MOOC offered at the iSchool was A Brief Introduction to Data Science with R and a second is planned for autumn 2013 entitled Applied Data Science: An Introduction.

 Over at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Dr. Pomerantz at the School of Information and Library Science has been teaching the MOOC, Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information, again to rave reviews. It is being offered again for the fall of 2013.

Then there is the Hyperlinked Library MOOC at San Jose State University SLIS, which explores how libraries are using emerging technologies to serve their communities. Last I checked, the course had reached its full capacity of 400 students! It is clearly filling a niche for professional development for librarians.

In Canada, Wendy Newman at the University of Toronto iSchool is very excited to be offering, in the winter of 2014, a MOOC on Library Advocacy through edX.  She says, “The MOOC description is not yet fully confirmed, [however]…it is a 6-session adaptation for a wider audience of my regular credit course.” Keep your ear to the ground for further updates.

And what of MOOCs for law librarians? I did not find any that were purposely geared to law and librarians. There are courses on environmental law, criminal law, English common law, constitutional law and more. I think Wendy Reynolds raises a good point when she surmises in a comment on SLAW that, “I also wonder about the value of MOOCs in helping librarians gain exposure to other disciplines and emerging ideas. Are employers willing to treat these programs as “real” learning? Does it matter?” We should be exploring new ideas and thinking outside our box. So yes, as to MOOCs, there’s lots “in it” for law librarians.

Finally, if MOOCs have caught your fancy, you could attend the symposium Pushing the Envelope in Education: Roles for Libraries — MOOCs, eLearning & Gamification taking place in Toronto from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1, 2013 at the University of Toronto. A session on MOOCs for Librarians will cover how to plan and implement a MOOC for the library community. Also, you may want to follow up on any archived materials available from two previous conferences MOOCs and Libraries: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (July 2013, London, UK) and MOOCs and Libraries:  Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge? (March 2013, Philadelphia, PA).

In researching this paper, I found that the only MOOCs being offered, at least through iSchools, are those that are described above. If there are any I’ve missed please let me know! It would be great to see more. It would also be good to have a repository listing of iSchool MOOCs somewhere. Is this being done? Lots to think about. I think I hear a follow-up article being written!

*With sincerest apologies to Old MacDonald.

Google Search is turning 15. Remember what it was like to search in 1998? You’d sit down and boot up your bulky computer, dial up on your squawky modem, type in some keywords, and get 10 blue links to websites that had those words. It seemed like magic (and it was way way faster than card catalogs and microfiche!).

The world has changed so much since then: billions of people have come online, the web has grown exponentially, and now you can ask any question on the powerful little device in your pocket. You can explore the world with the Knowledge Graph, ask questions aloud with voice search, and get info before you even need to ask with Google Now.


But 15 years on, we’re just getting started. We want to help you make more of each day. Here are a few of the latest features you can try out:

Comparisons and filters in the Knowledge Graph

We keep expanding features of the Knowledge Graph so it can answer more questions—even those that don’t have a simple answer. Let’s say you want to get your daughter excited about a visit to the Met. You can pull up your phone and say to Google: “Tell me about Impressionist artists.” You’ll see who the artists are, and you can dive in to learn more about each of them and explore their most famous works. If you want to switch to Abstract artists, you can do that really easily with our new filter tool:


Or let’s say you want to compare two things: How much saturated fat is in butter versus olive oil? Now you can simply tell Google: “Compare butter with olive oil.” Our new comparison tool gives you new insights by letting you compose your own answer:


You can try this for some other things you might be curious about, such as dog breeds (“compare pekingese vs. chihuahua”) or celestial objects (“compare earth vs. neptune”)—and we’ll keep adding more.

Get things done with Google across your devices

Having a “conversation” with Google should also be more natural. Ideally, you wouldn’t need to pull out your phone or tap buttons to use Google. We’re not quite there yet, but you can already do a lot with just your voice. In the next couple of weeks, you’ll be able to download a new version of the Google Search app on iPhone and iPad. With this update, you can get notifications across your devices. So if you tell your Nexus 7, “OK Google. Remind me to buy olive oil at Safeway,” when you walk into the store with your iPhone, you’ll get a reminder. We’ll also show you Google Now notifications so you’re not late to your cooking class.


A simpler, more unified design on mobile devices

You’ll also notice a new look and feel for Google Search and ads on your phones and tablets. It’s cleaner and simpler, optimized for touch, with results clustered on cards so you can focus on the answers you’re looking for.


We’ll keep improving Google Search so it does a little bit more of the hard work for you. This means giving you the best possible answers, making it easy to have a conversation and helping out before you even have to ask. Hopefully, we’ll save you a few minutes of hassle each day. So keep asking Google tougher questions—it keeps us on our toes! After all, we’re just getting started.

Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP, Google Search

The Internet has eroded traditional sources of authority. Where once the Encyclopedia Britannica was a final word on many subjects, Wikipedia now reigns supreme. A decade or two ago, the annual Information Please almanac with its sweet index could settle all arguments, now a Google search will do. A highly articulated structure of editors and review panels once guarded the mountain top of cognitive authority. But no more. The retrieval of information no longer troubles us, sorting out the glut of data is the trick. Yet one source holds sway in the world of legal information: The Uniform System of Citation, aka the Bluebook, has held fast. 

After fighting off the assault of Judge Posner’s practical Red Book and the more modern and accessible ALWD Citation Manual, the Bluebook is battle tested. It does not survive through its utility. It survives because of its power. In a 2011 Yale Law Journal article, the ever-restrained Judge Posner wrote:

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation exemplifies hypertrophy in the anthropological sense. It is a monstrous growth, remote from the functional need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of the legal culture and its student subculture.

Its archaic symbols and abbreviations remain a challenge to use. Learning its intricacies still serves as a means of hazing students who wish to join an academic law journal or who wish to survive a first year course in legal writing. Why? Part of the Bluebooks’s resilience lies in the installed base of jurists and law professors who, forced to master it as a part of the process of legal education, feel obliged to require others to do the same. This is a human trait that I have never understood. If one suffers through some awful experience shouldn't one wish to fix it? But so often one instead wishes others to go through the same agony. It is one of humankind’s less pleasant attributes. The Bluebook resembles a secret code, known only to the elect. As Kathleen Vanden Heuvel puts it, mastering it makes one a member of a special club: outsiders will be lost in the maze.

The prestige of the authors of the Bluebook plays a role as well. The law reviews of Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Penn produce this gem, putting it through edition after edition, each one of which must be bought either in paper or via online service. I do not know how much money it produces for each review (I asked and was told to talk to an attorney) but the Harvard Law Review has its own building.

This situation poses a familiar conundrum. If the use of the Bluebook is required by Courts and is so much a standard that everyone has to use it, how can anyone own it? Is this a shadow of the worries about Thomson Reuters West owning judicial opinions? I think that it is different. TRW is a publicly held company and it acts as the deity intended, it is about profit. One expects no more. The four law schools that produce the Blue Book are about education. Should they be in it for the money? Or is my premise here totally misguided? Is it all about the money?

If you hear a bugle call, you are right. The indefatigable Carl Malmud is riding over the hill and he is in hot pursuit. Carl believes in public access to public information. Should the average citizen be able to use the legally required citation system for free? The question is not whether these top tier law school law reviews can corner the market and exploit it, the question is should they? Should they at least think about it? Can the public interest ever outweigh an income stream? I bet a nickel on Carl. The edifice of any paper-based citation may be crumbling as official entities migrate to digital publishing but it would be a grand gesture to open the sluice gates and to admit anyone while the system is still viable.

As he does each year at about this time, Rich McCue tipped us to the fact that the results of his survey of incoming law students are now online. The University of Victoria Law Student Technology Survey has run for ten years now, providing a nifty picture of how things are changing for law students — so far as technology is concerned. The executive summary of this year's survey, which had a whopping 90% response rate, is as follows:

• 96% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up from 89% last year and 50% three years ago), with 54% of the total being iPhones, 31% Android and 11% Blackberry (Blackberry usage is down from 27% two years ago). New law students are primarily using their mobile devices for directions, email, and looking up schedules & contact information.
• Tablet & eBook ownership have doubled in the past year with 44% of students owning tablet devices or ebook readers, up from 31% last year. That said, 64% of students never bring their tablet or ebook reader to school, probably indicating a preference for laptops for note taking and research, and still heavy reliance on printed text books.
• When asked if they would use a library run tablet lending program, 53% said they would not use it while 18% said they would use it daily or weekly.
• 92% of students use Skype for real-time audio/video calls and collaboration. 42% use Apple Facetime and 9% use Google Hangouts.
• 59% of students use Gmail as their primary email account, 22% Outlook.com, and 6% use UVic email. Of the 6% of UVic email users, half forward their email to another service. It will be interesting to see if the recent NSA data snooping revelations will impact students’ current preference for USA based email providers in the coming years.
• 49% of students identified Dropbox as their favourite tool for collaborative document editing, up from 22% last year. 41% use Google drive, up from 33% last year. 15% use Apple iCloud up from 4%. 3% use Microsoft Sky Drive which is unchanged from last year.
• 92% of students use Facebook (down from 97% two years ago), 31% user Twitter, 19% Linked In, 8% Google+ and 3% don’t use online social networks.
• 97% of students own laptops. 57% of laptops are Macs, up from 49% last year. 44% use Windows, down from 48% last year.
• 68% of students bring their laptops to school regularly & 21% bring them never or rarely.
• 73% of students use laptops to take class notes, 72% use pen and paper, 3% use tablets and 4% use cell phones. 11% record lecture audio with their laptops or audio recorder

For the details, head on over to Rich's site where you'll also find helpful graphs and charts.

At the CanLII Hackfest in Ottawa this weekend I learned, among a great many other things, about a simple, neat tool that's already been built with the CanLII API: Common Cases. It enables you to insert up to ten URLs of cases and kicks out citations that your cases have in common. I can see how this might be a useful shortcut for researchers at some points, enabling them to zero in on a core cluster of decisions with rapidity.

The bonus feature is that on the Common Cases page you're reminded by links of a couple of other, earlier tools from CanLII: browser search plugins and CanLII's hyperlinking tool (via Lexum's LexHub), which supplies active hyperlinks for cases mentioned in the document (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .html) you supply. (While I'm on search tools, you might like to be reminded that a bunch of Javascript bookmarklets for searching CanLII that I developed a long time ago, still work and are still available on Slaw; depending on which you call up, you can choose whether you want to search all of CanLII or only in a certain field.)

Like the best programmed websites, the newly launched CanLII works well on mobile devices and in a wide variety of browsers, Chrome, FireFox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

One thing to note for Internet Explorer (version 9) users is the IE Compatibilitiy View.  If you are having difficulties with a research website, try turning off Compatibility View (in IE under Tools on the menu).

Some sites require Compatibility View to be “on”. It is worthwhile knowing that this function is available and to select or de-select it as needed.

Associate Dean John P. Joergensen of Rutgers School of Law-Newark has posted Draft Proposal for a Legal Citation Markup Standard.

Here are excerpts from the document:

Several OASIS members with expertise in the legal field are discussing starting a Technical Committee to develop a free, open markup standard for citations to legal materials. How might such a standard benefit the legal community?

One of the fundamental principles of legal writing is that every statement of law or fact must carry a citation to its source. Citations document the history of precedent that ensures the continuity and consistent application of the law. Legal documents always include citations within the body of the text and, in fact, would be unacceptable without them.

The standards that exist today for constructing citations vary depending on jurisdiction and language and describe how they should appear in print. There is no generally accepted data structure or metadata definition for capturing the essential facts about the citation in a way that supports automated processing. [...]

Just as web browsers and related types of software have become core parts of our interactive computer environment thanks to the foundation of HTML, a legal citation markup standard can enable a new generation of tools and capabilities benefiting all players and allowing commercial entities to deliver new generations of products and services limited only by their imagination and ability to innovate.

A legal citations Technical Committee at OASIS would develop such an open standard for machine-readable tagging of legal citations. Specifically, the standard would provide a tagging model that:

• Enables cites to be richly tagged while leaving the visible text of the citation undisturbed;
• Works for the broad variety of legal content including court cases, legislation, and regulations;
• Supports any style of citations such as those used in different states within the US, those used in different countries, those documented in the Bluebook and the Universal Citation model (www.universalcitation.org);
• Allows other legal metadata to be associated with citations for purposes beyond just linking.

[...]

For more information, please see the complete post, or subscribe to the legalcite-markup-discuss online discussion list.

Filed under: Applications, Projects, Standards, Technology developments Tagged: Citation of legal authorities, John Joergensen, Legal citation information systems, Legal citation markup, Legal citation markup standards, Legal Citations Technical Committee, Legal information standards, Legal metadata standards, OASIS, OASIS Legal Citations Technical Committee, Open legal citation standards, Open legal information standards, Open legal metadata standards, Open standards for legal information, Open standards for legal metadata, Universal citation

From the mind-blowing to the mundane, our daily web routine is packed with moments of inspiration and learning. In the span of a few minutes, we may discover a new design direction, plan our next vacation and make progress on research. Each of these activities is important and needs to be captured, but sometimes simply saving isn’t enough. You may want to add your own thoughts to the saved pages or share your findings with friends.

That thinking led us to completely redesign our popular Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome. It’s all new, super powerful and amazingly simple. Let’s take a look.

New users: Get the Evernote Web Clipper 6 for Chrome »
Existing users: The extension will update automatically.

If you don’t use the Chrome browser, we recommend getting it. Install Google Chrome »

The All New Evernote Web Clipper 6 for Chrome

 

The new Web Clipper combines the classic features you’re used to with new capabilities from across our family of apps, all wrapped in a sleek, new look and feel.

The Big Redesign

The first thing you’ll notice is the Web Clipper’s new look. When you click on the elephant icon, the Clipper panel slides in from the right, exposing all the features from top to bottom. Some sections, like tags and notebooks, pop out to let you conveniently choose what you need.

New Ways to Clip

Let’s take a look at both the familiar and the new clipping options.

• Article: Clips the body content of the page, including images, links and styles
• Selection: Clips the text and images that you highlight
• Bookmark (NEW): Creates a note containing a snippet of the page and the URL
• Simplified (NEW): We brought in features from our Clearly extension to strip the page of all distractions for easy reading and clean clipping

Markup and Screenshots

We’re bringing features from our Skitch app right into the Web Clipper to let you overlay shapes, arrows and text on top of the page you’re viewing. Choose from the available markup tools to point out something interesting or to give design feedback to a coworker. When you’re finished, you can either save or share your work. If you change your mind, hit ESC and you’ll return to the original page.

One important note: when you start using a Markup tool, the Web Clipper takes a screenshot of the visible screen area only. It doesn’t capture the entire page.

Sharing

The Web Clipper has always been great at saving the things you find interesting. Now, it lets you share them as well. Anything you do, from clipping to markup, can be shared with friends and colleagues over email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Smart and Simple
We’ve added a ton of new capabilities in this new version, but we kept the Clipper as quick and smart as ever. If all you want to do is clip the page, simply click the icon and then click Save. The content will be saved to Evernote and our Smart Filing feature will make sure that the page is organized within your account just the way you like it.

Add a Reminder

Frequently, we clip things just to have them, not because we’re looking to take any specific action. Other times, those clips are directly related to upcoming projects or meetings. In addition to organizing your clips, you can add a Reminder to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. To add a Reminder to a clip, click on the alarm clock icon in the popup that appears after you finish clipping something.

More to Come

Big redesigns always come with big opportunities for expansion. We’ve spent the past several months building the Web Clipper 6 and there’s still a lot more we plan on doing. Get it today and let us know what you think.

If you want to learn more, check out our Web Clipper for Chrome Product Guide »

The Evernote Conference

If you’re looking to expand your Evernote skills and learn how to use it for like, work and everything in between, then join us on September 26th and 27th in San Francisco for the Evernote event of the year. Get your tickets now »

The post The All New Evernote Web Clipper 6 for Chrome appeared first on Evernote Blog.

Lawyers and researchers looking into legal issues in international business transactions face a changing research landscape. Traditional tools for cross-border research are falling by the wayside. Lexis stopped updating the Martindale-Hubbell International Law Digests (summaries of foreign law authored by local law firms) after the 2011 edition. Lexis last updated its (now archived) International Multi-Jurisdictional Surveys in 2009. Westlaw no longer includes access to Practising Law Institute (PLI) course materials. Many researchers find print looseleafs difficult to use. Luckily, new research tools are filling the gap. Researchers looking into issues in transnational transactions have some really great, viable online options now. 

Because some standard tools have migrated from print to online, they remain useful tools for researchers. These include Reynolds & Flores’ Foreign Law Guide and “doing business in” general and legal guides published by accounting firms, government agencies, law firms, and bar associations. Westlaw still includes the ALI-ABA and ASPATORE practice materials, the Business Laws of [country] series, and over 50 multi-national treatises on international business law topics. And there are born-digital resources to use such as the World Bank’s Doing Business Law Library.

Researchers also benefit from wonderful new databases. Practical Law Company (PLC) is a relatively new kid on the block. The PLC database includes a global law department and cross-border resources sections. It has multi-jurisdictional topical legal guides, country Q&A comparison tools, checklists, practice notes, and kits for doing international deals.

The Practising Law Institute (PLI) Discover Plus database includes annually-updated practitioner-oriented course handbooks on international patent and trademark law, insolvency law, M&A, corporate governance, consumer data privacy, and other topics. PLI has a series on Doing Deals in Latin America.

Getting the Deal Through (GTDT) online has comparative guides to 56 practice areas (from Acquisition Finance to Vertical Agreements) for over 150 jurisdictions.

The International and Comparative Legal Guides (ICLG): Practical Insights into Cross-Border Law has similar content as the GTDT, but full access to the online content, while not intuitive, is free. The ICLG covers 34 practice areas (from Alternative Investment Funds to Trade Marks) for 120 jurisdictions.

Bloomberg Law incorporates the GTDT and PLI databases (except for the course handbooks), international news, DealMaker Documents, and other transactional resources. Bloomberg BNA publishes the following newsletters with accompanying e-alerts: World Securities Law Report (a recent issue includes an article in the cross-border securities regulation section discussed the Ontario Securities Commission’s new “serious offenses” unit for criminally prosecuting securities fraud); World Data Protection Report; World Intellectual Property Report; and the World Communications Regulation Report.

Last, but not least, Kluwer Law International’s International Encyclopaedia of Laws (IEL) comprises monographic treatments on the laws of selected countries and international organizations. Updates are irregular (some chapters are updated more often than others). The IEL is available in looseleaf format and online via the web. The IEL covers 25 topics: civil procedure, commercial and economic law, constitutional law, contracts, corporations and partnerships, criminal law, cyber law, energy law, environmental law, family and succession law, insurance law, intellectual property, intergovernmental organisations (including the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA), labour law and industrial relations, media law, medical law, migration law, private international law, property and trust law, religion law, social security law, sports law, tort law, transport law. For example, Canada is covered in the following 12 IEL sets: Civil Procedure (2006), Competition Law (2013), Constitutional Law (1996), Corporations and Partnerships (2008), Criminal Law (2012), Environmental Law (2011), Family and Succession Law (1997), Insurance Law (2002), Intellectual Property (2012), Labour Law and Industrial Relations (2000), Medical Law (2011), and Tort Law (2010).

Several of the resources have drawbacks. Many are subscription databases. Some, like certain IEL chapters for Canada, are woefully out of date. Not all countries are covered by each multi-jurisdictional topical legal guide. It is possible to locate pockets of free multi-jurisdictional collections such as the International Bar Association Arbitration Committee’s country arbitration guides and the European Corporate Governance Institute’s country corporate governance links. But overall, the new resources for conducting comparative corporate & transactional law research make transnational research easier. Please comment below if you know of other useful tools for researchers in this area.

The major strategic shift of the past two decades in professional publishing is the decline of the historical duopoly. Lawyers never really wanted to deal with more than a few reliable tradesmen (typically Butterworth and Sweets as was in the UK) and the owners of the primary sources certainly didn't want just anyone playing with their gems of wisdom. This supply-side duopoly propped up Lexis and Thomson/West in the UK for many decades. It coincidentally conferred on them financial supremacy: deeper pockets than the rest. Pockets they used to ramp up acquisition prices, R&D, front list development, etc in ways that kept others at bay quite effectively.

Now, partly though the increasing ease of access to primary sources, but more importantly due to a decline in its perceived relevance, the only real duopoly that matters is the financial one. To litigators, primary sources such as cases are of course the life blood of their competence, but the driver in law is transactions now (and increasingly specific and niched ones to boot). It’s not that erudition is declining, it just hasn't been the dominant consideration since the early noughties. The legal IT market has also been a consistent growth sector especially throughout the recent recessions. This category of spend, proves time and again that law firms invest in the expedition of business, not the ‘polishing’ of, or erudition of their talent. This is not the disruptive technology theory of some futurists, however. The technologies that stick are entirely supportive of legal services development. Law firms were late arrivals at the enterprise software trough, but they have been enthusiastic participants and have spawned a good range of specialists to help them. There’s nothing revolutionary in this at all. Spend on legal IT solutions in the UK over the period 1995 to 2013 has risen from 12.4% of the market overall to 17.2%. Solid growth, but not the biggest market change. The Practical Law Company will this year be about the size of the whole legal IT market was in 1995. They are a much bigger business than the whole of the Elite group in the UK. That PLC captured this market while others dozed is to their credit; but it was always there for the taking.

The Cure for Digitisis

PLC was a team which never suffered from digitisis. They were always a child of the future. They thought digitally; they designed digitally, they sold and delivered digitally. It was no big deal. They took erudition for granted; it was a recruitment issue, nothing more. They delivered expedition for busy commercial law teams. They did so with or without the permission of librarians or other gatekeepers. Partners recognised it and wanted it. GCs loved it and specified it. So what was it about PLC?

Yes, PLC's content is all delivered online and for the most part always has been. But that's not why it's so relevant to clients – they just expect that anyway.

Yes, their 'magazine' is high profile and well respected. But they never were a magazine company.

Yes, they produced precedents and template documents aplenty: the practical stuff lawyers use daily. But so did Sweets' Common Law Library, Lexis' EF&P, the old FT Law's Encyclopaedia etc and many, many more.

Yes, they did vanity publishing directories to make the link between private practice and GCs. But so did Chambers, Euromoney, Legal500, and LBR; 'vanity publishing' was not their forte.

Yes, they employed highly paid and experienced 'refugees' from practice. But so did BNA, CCH in their tax and legal titles, and Butterworths was also full of former practitioners in editorial roles. The margins of difference and emphasis are small but highly significant here; PLC simply did it better for longer.

With so many constituent parts of PLC's services already in their own shop windows already, how on earth did legal publishers decide that 'they (PLC) weren't publishers'? Clients didn't give a hoot; or to be more precise, the end users didn't give a hoot. Librarians love abstruse categorisations and often agreed that PLC really didn’t fit the boxes designed by Sweet & Maxwell and Butterworths, and yet front line partners and in-company counsel bought the PLC service whether librarians ‘allowed’ them to or not.

PLC was founded by two practitioners who saw the gap between what publishers offered and what practitioners needed. They were also lucky that that gap was only going to be driven wider and wider by the publishers. PLC were not rule bound by publishing processes, they were lawyers. PLC was just focused on how lawyers really worked. They understood professional support lawyer roles and other issues that librarians simply didn’t allow the traditional publishers access to. And they had a ‘non-of-the-above’ vote of confidence from the end user that is the envy of every large company; in particular not being Lexis was a major plus in the UK.

They were also well led. Having seen many firms where senior management spend 80% of their effort staying in place and less than 20% doing their job, this team which had that balance right – namely 99% focus on doing the job, and the position takes care of itself. Rob and Chris kept that focus from 10-20-200-500-750 staff; a rare achievement in any market. In 1995 PLC’s turnover in the UK was around £115k. In 2012 the group’s revenues were £66m (north of $100m) up 24.8% and still motoring very profitably. The point is they didn’t just put their tanks on Lexis’ lawn, they drove right through the kitchen, living room and built a new house in the sun. PLC is the solution of choice for all commercial transaction support work among major law firms and GCs; end of.

What did PLC get right?

PLC understood transaction lawyers, they ‘got’ what practice support lawyers did all day. These distinctions were often too arcane for most publishers, especially those blinded by digitisis. Even when they saw them, they didn’t appreciate the significance of them; they couldn’t. Denial takes a long, long time to move through anger to negotiation.

PLC saw that deal makers needed documents up quicker, better and requiring fewer drafts; there is always some pride in a law firm’s perfect precedent, but there is much more pride in the speeded up deal. They needed support for transaction lawyers likely to face esoteric nuances, so PLC’s maintained documents did just that. They needed ‘in-the-cab’ or ‘in-the-lift’ style summaries of bang-up-to-date legal technicalities designed for negotiators on the hoof: Practice Notes and Briefings did just that. Negotiators could agree to start with the PLC precedent, knowing they could rely on its veracity, quality, and get through the boilerplate issues quickly. PLC’s suite had many components of ‘publishing-style’ materials, but the net effect was an outsourced support service. They were as much outsourcer as publisher, as much a quality mark as an outsourcer. They experimented with automating every aspect of the service that would lend itself to it – as outsourcers always do. They not only maintained their precedent bank on a current basis instead of the traditional publishers getting some barristers to check it over again every two years; they maintained it with partner level authors. They were the first to offer PSLs in firms the facility to call for advice about drafting points on current issues, a service which is still growing and as much to do with outsourcing as publishing. No doubt there is much more to come in their new home too, but they are frankly streets ahead of even the one or two direct copycats now in play.

So Be Careful Who You Listen To

Pats on the backs, bonuses and more are currently being doled out among legal publishers for achieving eBook status on some front and even back list titles. Yeay! But it’s not enough; not even close.

Arguments about whether 25/55/75% of your revenue still comes from ‘legacy’ ie old/paper formats are irrelevant now. If you are not over 80% online, and genuinely online, you are already relegated to nice-to-have or boutique status; fine as far as it goes, but not mainstream.

So get back to basics. It’s not the format, it’s not the author, it’s not the document type – it’s who relies on you for what. Get that clear and redesign and realign the components you can manage, and you can get back in the game. Meanwhile, the lawyers who are spending cash, are spending it in ever larger tranches outside the solutions traditional ‘publishers’ offer. The 2013 legal information services market is £1.4bn and growing; just not where it used to. The trouble is that what works in the States is not necessarily what works best in the UK or Australia. What worked in academic, technical or scientific publishing – some of whom hit these issues earlier – is not necessarily what will work best here, either. Medics are no help. Dotcom refugees, data warehousers and credit firms think they have all the answers, but they don’t. Ask big firms, small firms, GCs, government, judges and accountants what’s needed and you’ll get very different answers. Tricky, isn’t it? But that’s also where the fun lies.

[This is the third of three entries on the legal publishing industry's "digitisis." Here are the links to Part One and Part Two.]

Lately CanLII has been shaking things up. The new search interface, in beta for four more days, is due to replace the current one on September 17. Then there's the hackathon coming up this weekend in Ottawa, where you're invited to learn how to become developers of apps that make use of CanLII's API. And we learn from the recent blog post on CanLII that there's a new forum for CanLII users, where they can share tips and give CanLII feedback. (At the moment it's gathering spam, so that has to be cleaned out and blocked, if it's to work the way CanLII wants it to.)

Finally, I learn from CanLII's Twitter account that they've worked with researchers at http://www.autodeskresearch.com/ to cook up a sample of what you can do with the CanLII API. Genealogy of Supreme Court of Canada decisions – a visual and interactive experience shows you in one glance the linkages among SCC decisions that are created by citations. You need Java installed to work the demo — and, I learn, a 64-bit browser (Safari or Firefox, I on my Mac was told, but not Chrome). Here's the opening visual:

I was unclear about what sort of data other than a global impression I could extract from the demo. Hovering over portions gives you the year and a popup showing a particular judgment, but if there's more to be extracted a bit of instruction would help. Still, the point is, I think, that there are a great many ways you can now make CanLII data come to life and answer questions, ways that transcend the traditional (but useful) text search methods.

We are excited to announce that following 4 months of public testing, CanLII's new search will be fully launched September 17, 2013.

The new search interface delivers improved functionality and gives users greater control over search options and results. It provides both novice and expert searchers with the tools and options they need to carry out efficient and effective research within Canada’s most visited legal information resource.

The main search interface has been simplified to one field, programmed to recognize and give good results for both simple keyword and complex Boolean searches; allowing researchers to engage with CanLII in the ways that best suits their needs. To support specialized search, such as by citation or title, or to note something up from the homepage, the simplified search box can be expanded with a click to reveal advanced search capabilities.

CanLII already saves you money because there are no charges for use. We are confident that the new search interface will save you something as important – time, by providing the functionality for refinement of searches after they are run. This brings CanLII into line with other online research systems and aligns with the changing expectations and work flow of public and professional researchers. But don’t worry: we’ve retained functionality that allows researchers to continue to enter precise searches from the beginning of their process.

During each month of our testing period, between 5,000 and 10,000 unique visitors to the “CanLII Beta” made between 10,000 and 21,000 visits and devoured a combined total of over a half-million pages of content. In addition, CanLII conducted direct user testing and solicited a great deal of feedback to ensure all concerns, large and small, were considered as we prepared for the leap from the “CanLII classic” in place since 2007, to the new experience.

CanLII’s interest in your feedback doesn’t end with the launch of the site. In addition to the regular channels through the site and elsewhere, we have recently launched a User Forum http://forums.canlii.org/ in the hopes of receiving more feedback and in the hopes of seeing our community of users take the opportunity to share tips and tricks with each other as they explore the full capabilities of the new CanLII.

Thanks always for your steadfast support of our efforts.

The Court of Appeal has issued two new Criminal Practice Directives which set out the procedure to follow for Summary Conviction appeals and Forfeiture, Dangerous and Long Term Offender appeals. The Court of Appeal has also updated the Sentence Appeal Practice Directive.