Shaunna Mireau on Canadian Legal Research

Wolfram Alpha

2011-12-08T13:29:00.002-07:00

Don't just be a googler. The wonderful 3 Geeks and a Law Blog has a great post today about 10 things you can do with the Wolfram-Alpha search engine.

I have written about Wolfram Alpha and time sheets, others at Slaw.ca have written about using the site for generating passwords, and one Slawyer was bold enough to ask if it might make Google obsolete.

Wolfram Alpha is a Computational Knowledge Engine. Check it out.

Social Media policies and government

2011-11-25T08:11:00.002-07:00

There is an article in the Vancouver Sun about the Government of Canada's Social Media Policy.

The new policy was released Tuesday by @TonyclementPC - better known as the President of the Treasury Board, or perhaps you know him as the former Industry Minister.

The document is titled "Guideline for External Use of Web 2.0".

It is really too bad that any organization's policy has to say anything more than:

be truthful

be respectful

be nice

There is an excellent database of Social Media Policies if you are interested in making comparisons (Hat tip to Library Boy).

Desirable personality traits in the legal industry

2011-10-07T07:57:00.004-06:00

One of my favourite "To Read" sites is 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. Today they share
Elephant Post: What Is The Most Important Trait To Have In Your Profession?. I would highly recommend you read this whole post which has contributions by a wide variety of legal folk who chose to comment on one of a list of 24 personality traits that Greg Lambert and his blog colleagues identified from the book Character Strengths and Virtues by Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman.

The list of traits included:

Zest: approaching life with excitement and energy; feeling alive and activated
Grit: finishing what one starts; completing something despite obstacles; a combination of persistence and resilience.
Self-control: regulating what one feels and does; being self-disciplined
Social intelligence: being aware of motives and feelings of other people and oneself
Gratitude: being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen
Love: valuing close relationships with others; being close to people
Hope: expecting the best in the future and working to achieve it
Humor: liking to laugh and tease; bringing smiles to other people; seeing a light side
Creativity: coming up with new and productive ways to think about and do things
Curiosity: taking an interest in experience for its own sake; finding things fascinating
Open-mindedness: examining things from all sides and not jumping to conclusions
Love of learning: mastering new skills and topics on one’s own or in school
Wisdom: being able to provide good advice to others
Bravery: not running from threat, challenge, or pain; speaking up for what’s right
Integrity: speaking the truth and presenting oneself sincerely and genuinely
Kindness: doing favors and good deeds for others; helping them; taking care of them
Citizenship: working well as a member of a group or team; being loyal to the group
Fairness: treating all people the same; giving everyone a fair chance
Leadership: encouraging a group of which one is a valued member to accomplish
Forgiveness: forgiving those who’ve done wrong; accepting people’s shortcomings
Modesty: letting one’s victories speak for themselves; not seeking the spotlights
Prudence/Discretion: being careful about one’s choices; not taking undue risks
Appreciation of beauty: noticing and appreciating all kinds of beauty and excellence
Spirituality: having beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of the universe

Not surprising to me, librarians who contributed identified curiosity (x3 if you include Greg), social intelligence, citizenship, hope, and grit.

I was surprised that open-mindedness made the list from a (clearly superior and clever) Helpdesk Supervisor.

One of the personality traits that isn't on the list is Self awareness. In my opinion, knowing your strengths and weaknesses and the things that motivate you or drive you to procrastinate is a crucial part of being good at your profession. If you are unaware of what is driving you, it is difficult to know what kind of road to choose. Perhaps self awareness is less a personality trait and more a learned or naturally acquired skill.

I look forward to next week's Elephant Post offering of the least desirable personality traits in 'your' profession. Check it out next Friday, or be brave and contribute.

Words to live by

2011-09-30T10:31:00.002-06:00

Alberta is celebrating Arts Days, and as part of the festivities, my community - Onoway has some events planned on Saturday October 1. I am participating by giving a blogging workshop at the Onoway Public Library from 10 to 11:15 a.m.

I have been thinking about reasons to blog this week. What is it that blogging provides? Is it the adrenaline rush of fear that someone will give a negative comment when you press "publish post"? Is it the satisfaction from sharing? Is it pure self motivation?

Jennifer M. shared a great quote this morning which could be a reason for blogging:

Don't raise your voice, improve your argument. Desmond Tutu

Writing Mojo

2011-09-23T10:12:00.003-06:00

There is an interesting post on the Socialite Librarian blog about her loss of writing mojo.

What is your inspriation for relevant, frequent writing?

From the frequency of posts at this blog, I am suffering from the Socialite's syndrome, though I do meet my community obligations at Slaw.ca and Slaw Tips.

Perhaps treating writing as more of a community responsibility is the key to frequent blog posts. What motivates you?

Searching for journal articles

2011-08-30T09:46:00.004-06:00

John Papadopoulos, a new contributor to Slaw.ca recently wrote a great reminder about the ability to find Canadian Law Journals on Commercial Databases. In speaking about the unique collections that each of the commercial publishers offer and the dearth of crossover, John reminds us:

if you are doing journal research and want to know what has been written on a specific topic use an index - full-text searching is (still) not enough.

In addition to journal indexes, I want to remind you of the Custom Google search that Ted Tjaden created. By visiting this search site, you can search Canadian law firm websites, blogs & journals.

Remember to look everywhere - or delegate to the library staff to search for you.

Silence reduced

2011-08-03T08:41:00.003-06:00

Oh poor blog, I have neglected you.

It has been a very busy and exciting time at the Field Law Libraries this spring and summer. Research projects, summer and articling student arrival, a OneLog research tracking software rollout, email software upgrades, preparing for more software upgrades, new rules of court amendments, knowledge management projects and so on, and so on, and so on.

I have also been diligently working on the Slaw Tips blog. It is my job to collect and post a research tip every Wednesday. Feel free to help me out with this task by suggesting a research tip. An example of a research tip:

Today’s Tip: Learn what you have access to.
This pity statement could be read a couple of different ways in the context of legal research.

One meaning is to remember to search your library catalog – in your firm, at your local courthouse or law society library, at your nearest public library, at your local law school. Even law librarians who help fill the shelves should remember to look in the catalog. Favorite sources are great, but other sources should not be overlooked. Searching a library catalog will remind you that there are additional sources to refer to.

Another meaning is to remember to look at the database content of your electronic resources. If you don’t know that a particular source stopped being added to in 2009, you may think that you are finding everything when there is a great big gaping hole in your gathering strategy.

What do you think of when you read the phrase “learn what you have access to”?

For the Field readers, link to our library catalogue. And don't forget the Alberta Law Libraries collection and the University of Alberta J. Weir Law Library

Happy discovering.

CALL Conference 2011

2011-05-13T16:13:00.002-06:00

Look out Calgary, the law librarians are descending.

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference and annual general meeting is being held May 15-18. Because the conference is in our backyard, all of the Field Library Staff will be attending, and thus we will not be in the office.

The Receptionists have my cell if you get stuck.

Canadian Federal Legislation on LEGISinfo

2011-05-06T09:08:00.003-06:00

I have referred to the Parliament of Canada's LEGISinfo site a few times here and it has also been discussed by Library Boy and at Slaw.ca. This valuable site has recently undergone a visual and usability transformation.

You can do some really cool things with the new tool, including checking up on your MP to see if they have sponsored any bills and what they were. Use the Refine menu on the right panel to narrow Check it our before you vote next time :-)

One particular new feature that I want to highlight for any lurking Fielders is the Legislation at a Glance tool. This allows a one page-ish overview of the status of evey bill before the Senate or House and hovering over the bill number gives you the title and a short status visual.

Well done App. Devs. at the Parliament of Canada.

Expired regulations

2011-04-21T11:37:00.002-06:00

Jane Symons expressed an interesting event this week as a mystery rolled up in a conundrum.

She provided a regulation to somone and it was later discovered that the regulation expired. Jane's search was appropriate - she had the cite and was looking for a specific document which she found. Regulations in Alberta frequently have expiry clauses in order to fulfill Premier Ralph Kleins promise, I believe in the 90s, that government red tape would be reduced and government policies would be regularly reviewed. At least that is what my memory of the time is telling me.

Regardless, when you are looking at a regulation, check for an expiry date clause. These should be at the end, where you would otherwise find special in force dates (other than the usual "when filed with the registrar of regulations" silent default).

In this case, the regulation was the Surface Rights Act Rules of Procedure and Practice Alta. Reg. 190/2001. after investigating the expiry of this regulation, Jane determined that there is a new procedure on the boards website that takes over after the expiry of the regulation.

There is a legislative trail for this in the act where the board was given the power to make its own rules (section 8, Surfact Rights Act, RSA 2000 - amended by SA 2009, c.31, s.5). Another clue is the list of regulations made under the act in the most recent Index of Regulations - this old regulation is no longer listed there.

These tricky bits of legislative research are always interesting to share

Improvements to SSRN

2011-04-15T09:26:00.003-06:00

SSRN - the Social Sciences Research Network is a host site for in publication and published academic content - including some really great legal articles. I am happy to share this note that came from SSRN today:

SSRN's CITEREADER™ REFERENCE AND CITATION PROJECT

We have been working on extracting references from all SSRN papers for 5 years as part of the CiteReader™ project that SSRN has undertaken with our development firm, ITX Corp. We have created a system to extract references and footnotes from PDF files on SSRN and to have that extracted data proofread by human beings. While this project is not yet complete, we are now announcing the release of over 6.7 million references extracted from the reference sections of over 182,000 papers on the SSRN site as well as over 4.2 million citations that we have linked to SSRN papers.

– The references from each SSRN paper (where we have been able to extract them) can be found on the REFERENCES tab on the public abstract page for each paper.
– The citations we have matched to each SSRN paper are available on the CITATIONS tab on the public abstract page for the paper.
– These reference links provide an excellent way for any reader to go back in the literature in any area, and the citation links provide an excellent way to go forward in the literature.

Data on the Current State of SSRN's CiteReader™ Project

– Papers with Resolved References: 182,645 out of the 270,109 full text papers on SSRN
– Total References Resolved: 6,689,847
– SSRN Papers with Resolved Citations: 180,339
– Total Citation Links between the Cited and the Citing Paper: 4,277,354
– Papers with Resolved Footnotes: 60,721 (we are giving footnote extraction priority to papers with no reference section)
– Total Extracted Footnotes: 6,899,585

NOTE: References in those papers on SSRN that do not have a Reference section have not been fully extracted as yet. We are working on this. These papers (primarily law papers) have their references in footnotes. This means that citations from law papers are currently dramatically undercounted in SSRN citation statistics.

SSRN is now extracting footnotes from all papers while giving processing priority to those papers with no reference section. We have extracted over 6.9 million footnotes from over 60,000 papers with no Reference sections thus far. These footnotes and the references we extract from them will also be appearing in tabs on SSRN's abstract pages. SSRN is now perfecting the algorithms for extracting references from these footnotes. The undercounting of citations from and to law papers will be resolved over the next year as our algorithms are perfected and references from papers with no reference section are extracted from footnotes and linked to the papers being cited.

Sincerely,

Michael C. Jensen
Chairman
Social Science Research Network

CanLII subject query RSS feeds and other search improvements

2011-03-31T08:31:00.005-06:00

Back in January I wrote a Tip at the (then) newly launched Slaw Tips blog titled Monitoring a case law subject with CanLII. There were a lot of great comments on the tip. I also heard that CanLII was working on a built in solution to subject Query RSS feeds.

I am extremely pleased to pass on the news that CanLII has made some improvements to their search tools this week and Subject Query RSS feeds is one of them.

Way to go CanLII. Hat tip to Steve Matthews and Susannah Tredwell for tweeting this.

Along with faster results rendering CanLII has also added the ability to more specifically target your hit results based on the query.

Thank you to CanLII for the innovations and for the fabulous example of what a well organized and reasonably funded free access to the law movement can do in 10 short years.

CALL Conference coming up soon

2011-03-25T15:14:00.002-06:00

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference is quickly approaching. The Conference is in Calgary this year and the Conference Planning Committee, of which I am a member, has been working diligently to make sure that attendees will have a enjoyable education and networking experience.

The conference website is a worthy visit for anyone interested in law libraries, law librarianship, or legal information generally. Special thanks to all those who have agreed to sponsor the conference.

See you in Calgary May 15 to 18th, 2011

For Fielders: all library staff will be attending this event so library service will be limited.

Good ideas to share

2011-02-28T08:42:00.003-07:00

Sharing...the cornerstone of librarianship and knowledge management. There are some excellent sharers in the legal community! I have a couple of sharing sites to share that you should know about.

Slaw Tips
tips.slaw.ca

advice you can use — short and to the point — every Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday

Slaw Tips offers a technology tip each Tuesday, a research tip each Wednesday and a practice tip each Thursday.
I edit the Research Tips section of this blog and am very happy to accept suggestions. If one of your 2011 goals is to build a social media presence, a short tip submission on this site is a great place to start.

Attorney at Work
www.attorneyatwork.com

"Attorney at Work promises you one really good idea every day."

The Daily Dispatch from this site is available by email. Examples of good ideas include this post from February 28, 2011 on starting your Outlook in a for followup folder.

Both of these sites offer a regular dose of professional development. Think of it as a desktop vitamin. It is a quick way to learn new things, or be reminded of good practices that will make your work life a little healthier.

AALL webinar on KM for law librarians

2011-02-18T07:59:00.003-07:00

Continuing education is very important. Unlike lawyers, law librarians do not have a professional regulatory body requiring professional development credits or intention. Law librarians do face a continual learning cliff. Changes in technology, library best practices, economies, publishing, and all of the changes that affect our lawyers have impact on our jobs and our success in them.

For all of the good reasons to "keep up" the Field libraries staff practice continuing professional development regularly. We try to attend annual law or library association conferences, we take in seminars from local legal and library associations and we attend webinars for the Canadian Association of Law Libraries and other organizations.

Yesterday, the American Association of Law Libraries Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section offered the 2nd in a 4 part webinar series titled "Moving Beyond the Library Walls to Support Strategic Knowledge Management". This session happily affirmed the approach that I have taken with the marriage of Libraries and KM at my firm.

Benefits of KM that I was reminded about in the session included the idea that KM "Improves client/customer service by streamlining response time". The session reminded me that even though KM uses library jargon, what we are really dealing with from the organizational perspective is categories, directories, and synonyms to help our lawyers work smarter. 'New to me' ideas that were addressed included using intelligent computer analysis software to help wade through the terabytes of information that we have at our fingertips.

The session was moderated by Greg Lambert, Library and Records Manager, King & Spalding and Steve Lastres, Director of Library & KM, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP and presented by Julie Bozzell,Chief Research and Knowledge Services Officer, Hogan Lovells US LLP and Toby Brown, Client Teams/Alternative Fees/KM Manager, Fulbright & Jaworski LLP. Thanks to all of them for the excellent presentation.

Criminal Justice Failures

2011-01-19T10:22:00.003-07:00

The Center for Court Innovation (US) has produced a new book that anyone advocating for justice reform, on either the political right or left, should read.

Daring to Fail: First-Person Stories of Criminal Justice Reform. A collection of interviews with leading criminal justice thinkers and policymakers, Daring to Fail offers valuable lessons about leadership, management and innovation.

and from page 3

Recognizing this, the Center for Court Innovation and the U.S.
Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance have launched
a multi-faceted initiative designed to promote innovation at the
grassroots level by encouraging criminal justice agencies to engage
in a process of trial and error – much the way a scientist would.
A large part of this effort has been devoted to studying criminal
justice reform efforts – both successes and failures – in an effort
to identify lessons for the innovators of tomorrow. By fostering a
more open and honest public discussion of failures in particular,
the project seeks to encourage self-reflection, transparency and
thoughtful risk-taking among criminal justice agencies.

Well done, well done! Learn from mistakes. Canadians, learn from the mistakes of our neighbours.

My favourite line from this book, though I haven't finished reading yet, is from page 11:

The other big failure is incarceration

Critical, honest thinking is crucial, especially at times like this.

Reminder, this blog expresses my personal opinions

Crash and reboot

2011-01-07T08:44:00.002-07:00

I had a little crash on my iPad this week. Once with Kobo and then another little crash with the factory email app. I was thinking it was the OS upgrade that I finally got around to doing over the holiday break. Thanks to Steve Matthews for reminding me that Software Apps Crash Too.

These two little blips on my device (in the short 8 months of enjoying its presence in my life)are NOTHING compared to the number of desktop/server/laptop bonks that I have suffered through over the years. We are living in a world where device dependence is rapidly increasing.

With very few exceptions, 'computer' problems in my life have been software driven. Everything is software. Apps, operating systems, the code that makes your email work, the telephone server, the thing that makes your cell phone voice mail message arrive a week later than when it was recorded, everything. Software is written by humans. Humans err.

My anxiety over the Kobo app crash was a bit extreme. Or maybe not. It was like dropping 30 books in the bathtub, all at the same time and knowing that you don't have room in the freezer to do a freeze dry repair. I just finished reading a bunch of older Suzanne Brockmann novels and a new Jayne Ann Krentz, all on the crack pad.

Reboot, reboot, phew.

P.S. If you leave your iPod in your jeans and put it through the washer. If you listen to your Mom, and put it in the freezer for a week before doing anything else (like trying to turn it on to 'check it') your iPod will be just fine. You headphones are hooped though.

CLawBies 2010 Nominations

2010-12-23T08:18:00.003-07:00

It's CLawBies Season - Canadian Law Blog Awards. Time to reflect on my go to resources for insight into Canadian Law.

Law21.ca Jordan Furlong offers deep and thoughtful insight into Law as and industry, trends, and law practice management. Jordan's blog makes me think about where the industry is going. More importantly, at least to me, he makes me think about what I can do as a knowledge manager and law librarian to make sure my organization is prepared for the future.

I am surprisingly intrigued by ipblog.ca, my new colleague Richard Stobbe's blog. Richard joined our firm in 2010 and I confess that I was unaware of his blog until this year. I say surprisingly intrigued, becasue until I started reading Richard's blog, I didn't have an engaged personal interest in Intellectual Property. I am nominating Richard for a CLawBie because I find that I don't skim his posts, I read them.

All About Information by Dan Michaluk is another of the "read rather than skim" blogs on my favourite go to list. Dan offers great case summaries and his engaging personality comes through in his posts which always makes me read to the end to see if there is a surfing reference or a note about his family.

I find CLawBie nominations really difficult. There are so many great reads in the Canadian legal blogging scene. Thank you to all of the lawyers, librarians and technologists who take the time to share their knowledge with Canadian law blogs, especially Simon Fodden at Slaw.ca, Connie Crosby, and Steve Matthews.

Ordinary meaning

2010-12-21T08:32:00.005-07:00

I've been following the Dalai Lama on Twitter for a few weeks now. A little inspiration and a reminder that we live in a world with others is never a bad thing. I had a chuckle over todays message:

Achieving genuine happiness may require bringing about a transformation in your outlook and way of thinking.

I chuckled because I read "outlook" as Microsoft Outlook. I will not opine here on how welcome a transformation of my inbox would be.

Have a little fun

2010-12-09T16:25:00.006-07:00

As Bozo the Clown would say "just keep laughing".

Those of us in law firms are very aware that what we are working on is often a persons largest problem. The worry, that if untended, that can consume all energy. Sometimes, knowing the impact of our work on our client, law firms have an over serious tone. I believe that worry can make people counter-productive.

Jane Symons, Library and Payroll Assistant at Field Law in Edmonton made a great sign to help "lighten the load" this week.

The note says:
Temporary library cart
People: You may return your books here
Books: Don't get used to having leather to sit on

It is Jane's birthday on December 10. Feel free to send her a happy birthday note. jsymons at fieldlaw dot com.

My birthday wish for Jane: "just keep laughing"

Digital Archives

2010-12-01T08:19:00.003-07:00

I am comforted this morning by an email cross posted to a number of email list services. The message that digital content specific to my industry is being preserved is something that is too important not to share.

December 1, 2010, Bloomington, IN – Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) and Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) are pleased to announce that they have partnered to create the Law Review Preservation Program: the first comprehensive long-term archiving solution for law reviews published online.

With funding and support from LIPA, law reviews published on bepress’s Digital Commons platform can be automatically archived in CLOCKSS, an international dark archive for long-term preservation. Law reviews will join thousands of journals in CLOCKSS, from publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, and Nature, as well as all Berkeley Electronic Press journals. The first law schools to join the program are American University, archiving American University International Law Review, The Modern American, and Sustainable Development Law and Policy, and Boston College, archiving Boston College Law Review.

Margaret Maes, Executive Director of LIPA, said “We are pleased to support the preservation of electronic law review content in a dark archive through this partnership with bepress and CLOCKSS. This is another step in our efforts to find long-term solutions to the problem of digital preservation of legal information, and we hope that Digital Commons subscribers will take advantage of the program by making their law reviews available through the Digital Commons.”

Content in CLOCKSS is preserved with award-winning LOCKSS technology. In the event that a law review is no longer available from any university or publisher, it will be triggered from CLOCKSS under an open-access Creative Commons license, guaranteeing that law review articles will remain in the public domain forever. The CLOCKSS archive is distributed across twelve geographically and geopolitically diverse archive nodes, located at major libraries across North America, Europe, and Asia, and is governed by the community of participating libraries and publishers.

Berkeley Electronic
Press CEO and President Jean-Gabriel Bankier said, “We feel strongly that law reviews deserve the same state-of-the-art preservation as all digital publications, and are very pleased to partner with LIPA and CLOCKSS on a program that brings preservation within the reach of all law reviews.”

About LIPA

The Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) is a non-profit consortium of academic, federal, state and public law libraries working on projects to preserve print and electronic legal information. It provides the opportunity for libraries to work collaboratively on preservation projects at lower cost and to take advantage of the partnerships created by the organization.

http://www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa

About Berkeley Electronic Press

Founded by professors in 1999, Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) publishes peer-reviewed electronic journals and develops software for the next generation of scholarly publishing. The bepress journals collection, ResearchNow, redefines what scholarly journals can do today, with fast and high quality peer review at sustainable prices. The bepress open-access institutional repository platform, Digital Commons, is the world's leading hosted IR, featuring an innovative suite of publishing and software services that empowers scholarly communities to showcase and share their works for maximum impact.

http://www.bepress.com/

About CLOCKSS

CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a not for profit joint venture between the world’s leading scholarly publishers and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community.

http://www.clockss.org/

My sincere personal thanks to all those in academic and public institutions (and others) around the world who work toward preservation of knowledge.

Copyright Act Bill C-32 passed 2nd reading this morning

2010-11-05T08:41:00.004-06:00

November 5, 8:43 a.m.. WDT
Bill C-32 passed 2nd reading in the House of Commons this morning.
How do I know about this?

Not through any 'traditional' information source. Or perhaps Twitter has become a traditional information source.

cippic cippic
RT @sarah_schmidt_: #copyright bill just passed 2nd reading in
#HoC: let the lobbying of MPs on #INDU cmttee begin #cdnpoli (h/t @kismith)

If you are reading this post some other time than the morning of November 5, you can look to the C-32 LEGISINFO page on the Parliamentary website for details of this bill's progress through the house.

What is the point of this post? If you need to know something about what is hapenning NOW look to the sources of immediate knowledge, like (who would have guessed it) Twitter.

On citation of legal information

2010-10-05T11:39:00.003-06:00

As you may know, the McGill Guide - actually titled the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation - has a new 7th edition for 2010. This edition makes some significant changes to citation, and oh, change can be painful.

The lastest pain in change is that the editors of the 7th edition forgot to ask the courts that adopted the 6th edition if they wanted to adopt the 7th. Things happen. There is a reason for the "amend the pleadings" rules in the Rules of Court.

My take:

If you ware writing a paper, use the McGill 7th for your citation guide.
If you are writing for court, use The Preparation, Citation and Distribution of Canadian Decisions

Interested in the McGill discussion in the legal community?

Note Re: Adoption of the McGill Guide by Saskatchewan Courts Friday, October 1st, 2010 by Eva Warden
Citation Technology and the McGill Guide 7th Ed. Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 by John N. Davis
Citation Clarified? Tuesday, September 14th, 2010 by Shaunna Mireau
More From the McGill Guide Thursday, September 9th, 2010 by Shaunna Mireau
McGill Guide – New 7th Edition – What’s Different? Friday, August 20th, 2010 by Ted Tjaden
New 7th Edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (McGill Guide) Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 by Ted Tjaden
The Full Stop in Legal Citation – Has Its Time Finally Come? Monday, August 3rd, 2009 by Gary P. Rodrigues

Fabulous advice from a U of A Law student

2010-09-28T10:21:00.004-06:00

Graham Purse, a 3L writing at the U of A Faculty of Law Blog, has some great advice about looking for specific documents with Google:

I can often phonetically enter a style of cause in Google and return the right case. Best of luck trying that on Westlaw or Quicklaw.

Here is an example:

1) On Google.ca, I type in "Dunsmur" and the first thing I get is “Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick”. Simple!

2) On Westlaw, I type in "Dunsmur" and get the dreaded "Results: 0 Documents". Fail!

3) On Quicklaw, I type in "Dunsmur" and get the equally dreaded "No Documents Found". Fail!

I had some great luck looking for a Texas State Bar CLE paper cited last week by our Supremes in their recent Progressive Homes decision. (Why the SCC is looking to non-peer reviewed papers from Texas as authority for Canadian legal principles is something to think about, even if it is a really great paper). Graham describes this journal search with Google process eloquently:

As long as you've got the author's last name and a couple of words from the title, you can find almost anything. The most technophobic and marginally-intellectually-enfranchised Luddites could surely find almost any source, even if it didn't conform to the rightfully-maligned McGill guide.

Way to go Graham.

McGill Guide - the new citation rules

2010-09-14T09:57:00.008-06:00

A former Field summer student wrote this on my Facebook Wall:

"I read your post on Slaw, but I can't tell: what do you think of the new McGill changes? Are they retroactive-- should we cite old cases with the new style? Won't that make it difficult or impossible to do effective Westlaw citation searches? Do we *have* to follow the dumb 'no periods!' suggestion despite it being totally ridiculous? I've noticed the new AB courts judgments haven't changed their style. If the SCC doesn't start using the new guide suggestions (esp. the periods thing) in the upcoming term, does that mean I can ignore it? Plus, you're right about persistent URLs. The McGill guide editors have apparently never looked up anything. That's like citing an article title and then, instead of the publication name, just writing ": Books."

This is such a good topic for discussion that I had to respond with a blog post.

Ted Tjaden wrote a great example for case citation in an earlier Slaw post:

Former: Gould Estate v. Stoddart Publishing Co. (1998), 39 O.R. (3d) 545 (C.A.)
New 7th edition: Gould Estate v Stoddart Publishing Co (1998), 39 OR (3d) 545 (CA) [i.e., no periods after the "v" or after "Co" or for the abbreviations for the Ontario Reports Court of Appeal]

My friends comments are exceptionally relevant. If we are sending off a case to the SCC today (notice no periods in the court abbreviation :-) how do we cite cases?

The McGill Guide is officially adopted by a long list of journals, including the Alberta Law Review. It is only officially adopted by the following courts:

CA for NB
CA for Saskatchewan
QB of Saskatchewan
SC of the Yukon Territory

For the Supreme Court of Canada, the SCC Rules say nothing regarding citation in the section about books of authorities. Neither do the Alberta Courts discuss specifics of citation in their practice notes.

The Canadian Judicial Council does have a Canadian Citation Committee. In 2009, this body created a standards document titled The Preparation, Citation and Distribution of Canadian Decisions. The references to citation in this document are to the Neutral Citation Standard. There is no punctuation in a neutral citation. This document supercedes the Neutral Citation Standard, but more information on Neutral Citation, now adopted by all Canadian Courts, is available here http://www.lexum.com/ccc-ccr/neutr/index_en.html

The Canadian Citation Committee has not specifically adopted anything from the latest McGill Guide. Their reference to case citation is described as:

4.3 Citation to Case law
[61] When citing a case, include its neutral citation, if it has one. If you add parallel citations place them after the neutral citation, which should immediately follow the case name.
Example
Smith v. Jones, 2006 NBQB 435, 87 D.L.R. (4th) 334, [2006] N.B.J. No. 198 (QL).
[62] Add pinpoint references to paragraph numbers where available, preceded by "at para." or "at paras."
Example
Smith v. Jones, 2006 NBQB 435 at paras. 34 and 36-39.

On another note, if you ever wondered how cases are named, here is the guide.

So, to sum up.

You MUST use the new McGill guide to cite materials to journals listed in the "adopted by" list in the guide including the Alberta Law Review.
You MUST include a Neutral Citation at least as a parallel citation when submitting something to the courts.
Until the Canadian Judicial Council's Canadian Citation Committee says otherwise, I would cite cases as they do when they write judgments.

Finally, in the immortal words of Tony Fell, my cataloging instructor at Grant MacEwan University:

It is better to be consistent than correct.

Cross posted to Slaw.ca

The Latest at WorldLII

2010-09-08T09:02:00.002-06:00

Thanks to a tip from Library Boy, I learned about some new offerings at WorldLII. Check out his post:

WorldLII Launches International Law Library
from Library Boy by Michel-Adrien
WorldLII (World Legal Information Institute) yesterday launched the International Law Library , a free online collection of decisions of International Courts and Tribunals, treaties and international agreements, and international law journals and law reform materials.

Acting on information - a Westlaw Canada bulletin

2010-06-23T09:16:00.005-06:00

It is important to act on information.

With the conscripted assistance of Dave Stam, a civil litigator with Justice Canada, I did a very short session for the students at the Head Start program on memo writing and research output. A huge thank you to Dave who agreed on the spot, with no preparation and having never met me, to share with the students about what he expects to see in a research memo from the practitioners perspective.

Dave acted on the brief bit of information that students from his department were in the room, an opportunity was presented to share his expertise, and carrying out the proposed activity would not take much of his time.

I am glad I had a good example of acting on information when I got back to the office to see a customer alert from Carswell about Westlaw Canada. Carswell, very appropriately and in a timely manner, informed users about a glitch in one piece of functionality on their platform. It was already repaired, but they felt customers should be aware as it could have an effect on items that had been retained. Following Dave's good example, I acted on the information.

This notice went in our daily email bulletin to all members of the firm:

Westlaw Canada Notice: We received a notice that for a brief period, between the afternoon of Wednesday June 9 and the morning of Saturday June 12, there was a malfunction in the print, download, fax and email functions of Westlaw Canada. This resulted in omissions of quoted text in an undetermined number of case law documents.
This issue has been repaired and everyone who downloaded cases to worldox has been alerted. This malfunction affected printed cases as well which the library staff are unable to identify from our usage reports. Please double check the date stamp on any printed cases that you use that may have been retrieved during this time period. The Library staff are happy to re-gather these materials (at no cost) to the firm if needed.

I also did a quick check of our document management system and identified items that had been downloaded from Westlaw Canada and emailed a link to them with the message above to each person affected. It was pretty simple to do a creation date specific search of our client files with additional full text for

"end of document" & (westlaw or carswell or reuters)

to see if cases for the affected time period had been saved.

Several had and in each case users were glad to know of the problem. In one instance much of the material gathered was outside our subscription and the research support team at Carswell sent us fresh copies of everything we requested in a very short turn around time.

I really appreciated the customer alert. My confidence in a technology is always more inspired when problems are reported to customers. We all know things break and are fixed and I would rather know what and when so that I can act if necessary. I hope that other firms took action when they saw this notice from Carswell.

Richard Susskind and I love the iPad

2010-06-03T15:34:00.007-06:00

According the Richard Susskind, legal thought leader from across the pond and author of "The End of Lawyers?" the iPad reeks of hassle for the legal world. I didn't make that up!

This post from the Times Online (quoted here and here if you hit a pay wall) suggests that the iPad will not be the must have tool for the legal market.

The big problem for lawyers, however, is that neither Microsoft Word nor PowerPoint runs on the iPad.

Admittedly, various work-arounds are available, notably conversion through Apple’s equivalents (Pages and Keynote) but most legal practitioners will find this reeks of hassle.

I disagree that the work-arounds for PowerPoint are a hassle. I use Google Docs to store things like presentations (created in ppt and converted by Google) in the cloud. They display just fine on the iPad with the free Memeo app which syncs to a users Google Docs account. I have a wifi only iPad and if I display a presentation through Memeo while online, it stays in the iPad memory until I next sync with iTunes so I don't have to be connected to the net to see a document in the cloud. My presentation slides are advanced with a swipe of the touch screen.

Another way to connect to a presentation via iPad is through Slideshare. The mobile version of a Slideshare presentation even includes a next slide arrow for convenience. This method requires a live internet connection.

It is true that Pages isn't MS Word, but as a consumption device I think it will be well received in the legal market.

For the iPad loving early adopter lawyers out there, here are some useful sites:

Legal iPad Blog
iPad4Legal Blog
iPad posts at Slaw.ca

If you want to see what the US Code looks like on an iPad, drop by my desk, or invite me to lunch!

Cool Google Gadgets

2010-05-21T10:00:00.005-06:00

Today, the Google search page image has a playable Pac Man. To Quote the tweet that came across my feed:

mike_elgan Playable PacMan on http://www.google.com is easily the coolest thing Google has ever done.

Some of the other cool - for work productivity - things that have come out of Google lately:

iGoogle - adding gadget boxes to personalize a Google start page, including tweet streams and my Google Reader RSS feeds:

Searching for US case law with jurisdiction filtering at Google Scholar (advanced search)

The modified Google Accounts page which lets you jump off to things like Buzz and Wave:

And the latest thing that I just noticed (probably old news, but new to me)...Web history

From the page:

All the web sites you visit, at your fingertips.
View your web activity. You know that great web site you saw online and now can't find? With Web History, you can.
Search the full text of pages you've visited. Web History allows you to search across the web pages, images, videos and news stories you've viewed.
Get personalized search results and more. Web History helps deliver search results based on what you've searched for and which sites you've seen.
Web History relies on Google Toolbar to associate the web pages you visit with your Google Account. See the Web History and Toolbar Privacy Policies. Learn more."

Web history could be used by individuals to track research projects, to search across web pages you have visited, and to track your research sources.

Most of these tools require a Google Account, which also lets you deal with privacy settings.

Why are some good at getting new business

2010-04-16T09:15:00.003-06:00

There is an interesting post on the Legal Marketing Blog about Nature vs. Nurture and rainmakers. It links to an article by Ed Poll on the same topic.

The point of these articles (my take anyway) is that people successful at getting new business are visible where their prospects are. This is why the Field library team hand deliver requests - so that other users of our service see us.

Fielders can always phone or email to gain access to library services, or use the many self serve research options that we provide, but it is still our job to make sure our users know we are here and ready to help out. This blog and other social media tools are one more way to be visible to potential clients (internally for me and my team, or externally for our lawyers).

Great reads in the link above. Lots of food for Friday thought.

Pat Schwarzenberger, 1930-2010

2010-03-18T12:36:00.002-06:00

PATRICIA MARIE SCHWARZENBERGER
September 15, 1930 - March 15, 2010

Mrs. Pat Schwarzenberger of the Botha area passed away on March 15, 2010. She is survived by her loving husband of 43 years Ronald, sons Alex and his wife Trish and their children Brittany, Dakota and Danny, son Grant and his wife Anita and their children Chelsey and Jacob and daughter Shaunna and her husband Patric Mireau and their children Genevieve and Dominique who will all miss her very much. Pat is also survived by her sisters-in-law Fern Janssen and her family, Charlotte Nemes and Vicki Werner and Kathleen Schwarzenberger as well as many, many friends. Pat was predeceased by her parents Kingsley and Olive O`Beirne, her in laws Julius and Nettie Schwarzenberger and Lillian Schwarzenberger and her brother-in-law Uwe Janssen.

Born a city girl, Pat made a great farmers wife. She enjoyed raising her kids and driving them to hockey and music and other activities. She enjoyed raking hay and hauling bales, traveling with Ron to shows and plays, Las Vegas and many other wonderful holidays. Pat also enjoyed camping of course in the comfort of the fifth wheel and volunteered countless hours at the Stettler Food Bank. Her boisterous humor will be remembered by her many friends from the community. At Pat's request no formal funeral service will take place. As an expression of sympathy and in loving memory of Pat, memorial contributions may be made to the Diabetes Association, the Alberta Heart and Stroke Foundation, STARS Air Ambulance or to a charity of your choice in care of Brennen Funeral Home and Cremation Services P.O. Box 193 Stettler, Alberta TOC 2LO who are entrusted with the care and arrangements.

My child is my child forever

2010-02-22T15:20:00.006-07:00

I am on a short leave from work at the moment, and since I just can't help myself, I went to have a look at the Alberta Legislature to see what is happening in the current session. I was very pleased to see Bill 3 Fatal Accidents Amendment Act, 2010. This short little amendment to clean up the language of the FAA and make it more consistent with other legislation. The bill removes references to whether a child is 'legitimate' or not.

Hansard, Feb 16, 2010, 1:25:

Distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate children is no longer appropriate in
legislation. It is also out of step with modern-day family structures and dynamics. All children should be considered equal regardless of the marital status of the children’s parents.

As the Mireau Giggles might say: "No duh!"

The bill also removes barriers for parents to receive bereavement damages if their child is married. I am positive that whatever their age or marital status, if the Mireau Giggles expire before me I will be bereaved.

I am pleased that our legislators see the good sense in this.

Be careful with your abbreviations

2010-01-25T08:56:00.002-07:00

This tweet caught my eye:

LawTimes

Commentary: Prorogation an issue of law, not just a technicality, writes Queen's ass. law dean Mark Walters. http://bit.ly/8GyUXf

I would rather see assoc. as a Twitter abbreviation for "associate". Mr. Walters probably would also.

Bad use of Twitter. Good article.

What do those library people do all day?

2010-01-08T10:37:00.005-07:00

A conversation sample:

Person at party, "What do you do for a living?"
Me, "I work in a law library."
Person at party, "Oh."

Sometimes the response will be "Interesting", and occasionally I get a "That sounds cool". Once in a while the response is "What do you do all day?"

Jane Symons, most excellent and wonderful Edmonton office Library Assistant is doing this today:
Processing the 39" of mail that came in.

Processing mail - is that more than opening it? Yes! It involves tracking items received in our database, making sure that we have a record if the item comes with an invoice and entering the invoice data so that I can track our budget properly and send them for payment, filtering the new items that people want forwarded to them as part of their current awareness services, and much more.

And Jane is smiling...go figure. We library types think that most of our work is interesting and even fun.

For those readers interested in learning more about what Library Technicians do, visit the Alberta Association of Library Technicians website and watch video clips of job profiles from different library types.

Do YOU use a checklist?

2010-01-06T09:51:00.004-07:00

There is a very thought provoking article on the Value of Checklists by Mary Abraham at Above and Beyond KM. Mary's blog is excellent and I would highly recommend it for your RSS feeds. This post talks about surgeons using checklists for both routine and complex tasks.

We had a new associate start today, and of course we have pulled the "new lateral hire" checklist out of our Library Procedures Manual to make sure we share all of the relevant need to know info as well as do all the preparatory steps to welcome a new person (personalize the sign out rotunda, get a Westlaw Canada password, etc.)

What about legal research checklists? I admit, I fail miserably at using a checklist except for the brain stumper questions, even though there are good checklists available. We put checklists for research sources and noting up processes in the student's Head Start packages. Is a checklist instructional material or is it something we SHOULD use as a practice tool?

I look forward to reading the comments here or where this is cross posted at the ELLA blog.

P.S. Welcome to Field Michelle!

CLawBies

2010-01-04T08:09:00.003-07:00

Happy New Year! I hope that 2010 will be a rewarding, fulfilling and productive year for all of us.

I am thrilled to share that this blog has been honoured with a CLawBie in the Law Librarian Blog Award category. I am also thrilled that Slaw.ca was recognized as Best Canadian Law Blog.

Congratulations to all those recognized and nominated. The Canadian legal blogging scene is a deep well of rich content. Thanks to Steve Matthews and the Stem team for continuing the tradition of these awards.

How do you seek information

2009-12-22T11:31:00.004-07:00

There is new research on How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age reported on at thought leader Stephen Abram's blog Stephen's Lighthouse. The report says that college students generally use the same trusted sources no matter what their research needs. I hope that people with research problems in my organization are not in that same rut.

Escape the rut:

Unfortunately not everything is available through Google, even though I love it and wish I had bought shares when the IPO launched.
There are other search engines too
Use more than the first page of search results
Remember to use a defined legal research process - while you use the same method, the specific tools will change (see also W. Berkenbosch Practical Strategies slides from the ELLA Head Start Program)
Wikipedia gets cited in court and sometimes it is not a positive cite
You need a password for much of the good stuff
Textbooks are your friend
Speed up your gathering by calling the library

Merry New Year

Wikipedia used in Canadian judgments

2009-12-07T09:31:00.002-07:00

The Stream which is a new blog from the BC Courthouse Libraries has some excellent coverage on Wikipedia used in Canadian judgments, and the relevance of Wikipedia as a legal research source.

There are also some very recent academic articles on this topic posted on SSRN.

I recently spoke to the CBA Research Lawyers South subsection on the topic of Social Media for legal research. My slides and the handout are available.

Tribunal decision sources

2009-11-24T08:44:00.004-07:00

It is hard to know the best source for judicial and administrative decisions. The Library Staff at Field keep the Internet links portion of our Intranet up to date with the current sources for the usual suspects (Alberta Courts, SCC, the OIPC site for Alberta, etc.).

One collection of material that is important to us is decisions from administrative bodies and tribunals. Historically, the best source for tribunal decisions was Quicklaw. LexisNexis Quicklaw is still a good source of decisions from tribunals, but it is no longer the sole source for this material.

In our digital world, it is easy for tribunals to publish decisions on their websites. It is not difficult to have a search function for the decisions. If the function doesn't exsit on their site, an advanced google search for keywords within the domain is often successful. An example:

order "employee" "personal information" PIPA site:oipc.ab.ca

In Canada, we are extremely lucky to have CanLII. CanLII has a growing collection of tribunal decisions and they frequently add new collection sources. For Alberta, the list of tribunal sources includes:

The Alberta Law Libraries maintains a link list that includes tribunals as well:

One benefit of CanLII or a tribunal website as a source for decisions is that there isn't a cost for the material. Commercial sources for tribunal data are available. Some of the sources available to Field (passwords required) are:

Happy hunting

The Kindle is here, the kindle is here!

2009-11-17T09:05:00.002-07:00

Well, it isn't the new telephone book, but I can understand the excitement. After waiting, as we often do in Canada, for new technology to be released above 49, the Financial Post reports that Canadians can finally buy a Kindle so that we can download eBooks from Amazon.com.

I have to say that I am personally not jumping up and down with excitement. I would much rather haul around a plethora of softcover items. I am on the road in Calgary today and tomorrow and my laptop bag has room for the laptop, some papers, my clothes, a hairbrush and 3 novels. The current novel (just finished on the plane this a.m.) the next (which will become the current in the hotel this evening), and the just in case (just in case I can't sleep and I burn through the current).

Just to be clear, I have read all three of these novels before, and it was very easy to pull them off my shelf to toss in the overnight bag.

Redefining viruses and the value of social networking

2009-10-01T18:55:00.008-06:00

No this isn't a post about H1N1, though Field has a great seminar on pandemic planning. This is another post about Twitter.

Thanks to a CBA webinar delivered by Doug Jasinski on Social Media for Law Firms that I attended on September 30, I now have a really good measuring strategy to show social media use from a value perspective. Let me explain...

Last Thursday I posted to Slaw.ca about an Alberta Masters order that allowed for substitutional service via Facebook. This is new territory for litigation and the post generated quite a bit of interest. There were 5 comments though one was me clarifying the unreported citation. Slaw has a significant following as it is an important and popular place to read about Canadian Law and Technology. I feel very privileged to be a contributor.

My contact information is available on the Slaw Contributors page so when I offered to email copies of this 3 page order, there were several people who requested a copy - a quick review of my sent items shows that I emailed it to 10 people outside my firm...one of which was Doug who mentioned the decision in his presentation and referenced Field Law as the source. Thanks Doug!

Another person who showed some interest in the decision was Ellen Henry, Counsel with the Law Society of Manitoba. The Law Society sent an eLaw - Litigation Update to their members about the decision and it was forwarded to me by Karen Sawatzky, librarian at Pitblado LLP.

As of today there were 14 Retweets about the Slaw post. Retweets are links to a blog post from a twitter account or copying a tweet from someone you follow that references the item to alert your network of something you read. One of the tweets was me of course, since one of the ways I use Twitter is to share my work. My tweets also update my Facebook status (I hope this became useful cocktail party conversation for my school friends).

As Doug displayed in his seminar, you can quantify Twitter. I counted up the number of followers for everyone who mentioned my post using twitter. I was astonished to see that 10,491 people (give or take a few duplicates) received a short note about the Masters order I shared through Slaw.

If even 10% of the people who were notified were interested enough to read my post, that is over 1000 individuals who might recognize my name. They may connect me with Field LLP and if so, my firm just got some great, positive, attention. If one percent of those people remember my firm name when they have a legal issue in Alberta, that could lead to 10 new clients.

While working out these numbers, I could not help but think of the word virus. I might define virus like these molecular virology folks:

The concept of a virus as an organism challenges the way we define life:

viruses do not respire,
nor do they display irritability;
they do not move
and nor do they grow,
however, they do most certainly reproduce, and may adapt to new hosts.

There is no doubt that reproduction has occurred. New hosts include Gary Wise and Pamela Pengelley to name just a couple of bloggers covering the story themselves.

I think there is new meaning of virus that is certainly not negative. I rather like being part of this little pandemic.

Oh Twitter, my Twitter

2009-09-11T10:57:00.003-06:00

Twitter is NOT my Captain, and it is also not lying dead on the deck of this particular ship. I have always found Whitman's poem stirring and its rhythms seem to come to me whenever I am of two minds about something. On one hand, Twitter is becoming extremely valuable for filtering, but especially for identifying delicious bits of useful data (no, not del.icio.us/fieldap, that is another story).

For instance, several years ago I was asked if there was some kind of judges training manual. This was not a facetious question, or anything that came out of a percieved 'bad' decision, just curiosity. Today, among the many blips that floated across my screen was this via Twitter:

CanLawMagCan. Judicial Council releases manual for appellate court judges. Could be some interesting reading. http://bit.ly/1aklq9

Twitter has proven very useful over the past few months for in the moment delivery of those "wow, I am glad I saw it" tidbits. Is it useful because I follow a few reliable sources? Would I glean this info some other way if I didn't monitor Tweets? Is it the timeliness that is the value, or the serendipity that shows interesting items among my community of practice on Twitter that happen to coincide with current thoughts/problems/issues we all have?

The question now is, what amount of time should I devote to monitoring instant media.

I am still thinking about these time+value issues. Any insight in the comments would be appreciated. Or follow me on Twitter and share your thoughts @smireau

Good news for legislation researchers

2009-09-02T10:49:00.003-06:00

Good news is coming from all over!

Alberta - the folks at the clerks office at the Legislative Assembly responded to a data need (AB bills no longer on LNQL as of April 1, 2009) by adding copies of historical bills. See my ELLA blog post for specifics, but here is a link: http://www.assembly.ab.ca/net/index.aspx?p=bills_home
and follow the Bills from Previous Sessions link.

And From the CanLII blog:

Wednesday, September 2 2009

Additions to point-in-time legislative databases

Today CanLII launches point-in-time legislation databases for three provinces: Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island.

Users of these provinces' consolidated Acts and regulations now have access to versions as they came into force since 2004 or so, as well as to current versions updated weekly from governments' websites.

Only about six months after having launched its new legislation publication system, CanLII now publishes point-in-time legislation for the Federal level as well as for all Canadian provinces. Legislation from the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut is currently being prepared and will be migrated to the new system by the end of September.

Wow!

As bold as our imaginations will let us be

2009-07-27T08:08:00.002-06:00

Why I admire Simon Fodden in 56 words:

For me, the answer to the latter question is dead easy: we should be as bold as our imaginations will let us be. And we should work to stoke the fires of our imaginations as much as we can, because our ordinariness of vision is if not a professional deformation then at least a common handicap.

Simon was writing about publishing legal texts in his recent ed hoc column at Slaw. I think stoking the fires of our professional imagination can apply to everything.

3 Geeks and a Law Blog: Your Most Important Brand Ambassadors: Your Staff

2009-07-22T09:53:00.000-06:00

3 Geeks and a Law Blog: Your Most Important Brand Ambassadors: Your Staff

If you ever see me filling in for the fabulous Field Law receptionist, this post explains why!

Twitter searching

2009-07-15T14:15:00.003-06:00

I am so glad that I follow Greg Lambert @glambert on Twitter! He blogs with some colleagues at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog and his recent post on searching for people on Twitter is extremely valuable. Step by step Web 2.0 competitive intelligence in a nutshell. Thanks Greg.

Happy 4th Birthday Slaw

2009-07-09T15:05:00.001-06:00

Slaw.ca turned 4. Happy Birthday.

An example of poor legal research?

2009-07-03T08:35:00.003-06:00

There is an interesting post on the Law Librarian Blog about research surrounding the definition of torture. Have a read.

Importance of noting up using a variety of sources

2009-06-15T12:31:00.003-06:00

Because this is such an excellent explanation, I am copying in it's entirety a post from the Law Librarian Blog. This post reminds us to look everywhere. For a good noteup checklist, contact me.

Maybe Westlaw thinks Scalia was wrong, but…

On May 26, 2009, the United States Supreme Court decided Montejo v. Louisiana, which overruled the Court’s 1986 decision, Michigan v. Jackson, 475 U.S. 625 (1986). To be sure, Justice Scalia in his majority opinion in Montejo stated on page 21 of the slip opinion “Michigan v. Jackson should be and now is overruled.” Also, on May 26, 2009, my colleague, William Gaskill, planned to use Michigan v. Jackson as a Shepard’s/Keycite example in his Legal Research Bootcamp course. He sent his class an email asking them to determine whether Michigan v. Jackson was still good law by class that evening. I opined that students’ answers would be different depending on the time of the day they verified the case. I was wrong. The next morning, William had informed me that according to Keycite, Michigan v. Jackson is still good law.

We’ve been keeping track of the case over the past two weeks and as of today at 3:30 p.m. EST, according to Westlaw, Michigan v. Jackson is still good law. West did enter Montejo into its system, but someone must have read over Nino’s quote or maybe they just figured the majority was wrong. In any event, I hope for sake of criminal lawyers everywhere that this will be remedied soon.

By the way, West, Shepard's picked up the change in Michigan’s status.

David C. Walker, Reference Librarian, Charleston School of Law

Alberta Legislative session adjourned until the fall

2009-06-04T09:37:00.002-06:00

The Alberta Legislative session has adjourned until 1:30 p.m. on October 26. A great list is available of the status of the session's legislation at the Legislative Assembly website.

Congratulations to Slaw.ca

2009-06-02T16:34:00.002-06:00

Slaw.ca received the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing from the Canadian Association of Law Libraries. I am very proud to be a Slaw contributor.

Swine flu notice and resources

2009-04-29T15:37:00.003-06:00

This came across my email today:

Wed April 29th

Earlier today Brookfield Properties was advised
of a rumour involving the swine influenza in the Bankers Hall Complex. Upon
investigation we have discovered that the child of an employee in the building
has a confirmed case of swine influenza contracted while in Mexico. This
employee has no symptoms but has been sent home by the employer as a precaution,
until further notice. Janitorial staff will be conducting extra sanitising of
this employees work area, floor, and washrooms this evening - again as a
precaution only.

Please be reminded once again that the Public Health Agency of Canada
advises vigilance and good common sense sanitary practices. Good health habits
to help prevent the flu include:
1. Avoid contact with people who are sick
2. Stay home when you are sick
3. Cover your mouth and nose when
coughing or sneezing
4. Wash your hands frequently
5. Avoid touching
your eyes, nose or mouth as much as possible

Symptoms usually include those similar to seasonal influenza (flu)
including headache, chills and cough followed by fever, loss of appetite, muscle
aches and fatigue, runny nose, sneezing, watery eyes and throat irritation.
Nausea, vomiting and diarrhea may occur in
adults as well as in children. In
more severe cases, or in people with chronic conditions, complications such as
pneumonia may develop.
(Source: The Public Health Agency of
Canada)

Some other good resources for information on Swine Flu:

Free vs Fee Legal Research

2009-04-21T08:08:00.003-06:00

There is a web version of a Lawyers Weekly article on the interesting topic using free legal resources for legal research. This article was cited by the Library Boy blog with the following interesting bit highlighted:

"Cost-conscious lawyers may ask themselves: Can we get by using only freely available research tools?"

"Chances are, the answer today is no. But free legal research tools continue to improve as new ones emerge and legal researchers everywhere are better off for them."

The ELLA Head Start program will once again highlight cost effective case law retrieval as part of the seminars on the legal research process. Free resources and for fee resources will be covered as they have been in past programs.

As the web evolves, free resources emerge, disappear, and sometimes reappear. It is important for researchers to stay current with what is happening in the legal information landscape.

The purpose of the library

2009-04-06T08:34:00.002-06:00

This lovely purpose statement articulates the why of a library:

The Purpose of the Library

The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.

The Library has a moral obligation to adhere to its purpose despite social, economic, environmental, or political influences. The purpose of the Library will never change.

The Library is infinite in its capacity to contain, connect and disseminate knowledge; librarians are human and ephemeral, therefore we must work together to ensure the Library’s permanence.

Individual libraries serve the mission of their parent institution or governing body, but the purpose of the Library overrides that mission when the two come into conflict.

Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will.

A clear understanding of the Library’s purpose, its role, and the role of librarians is essential to the preservation of the Library.

From The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians
Written and endorsed by John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, and Cindi Trainor

How does this apply to our library? It is my job to ensure that continuity of policy is possible through documentation of the why of procedures, not just the how. It is also my job to ensure that the library remains woven deeply into the fabric of this firm so that its value is always transparent, its service is always exceptional, and its staff is always valuable and valued.

Ada Lovelace Day - Cynthia Beuselinck

2009-03-24T08:16:00.003-06:00

It wasn't very difficult to come up with female technology role models for Ada Lovelace Day. The difficulty for me was paring my list down to one person. Since I am sure that others will be writing about some of my favourite folks (Connie, Sabrina, and too many others to mention). I decided to write about someone who stays just a little under the usual radar.

Cynthia Beuselinck, a long time members of the Alberta Association of Library Technicians, is definitely an inspiration to my interest in technology. In 1994, Cynthia developed a team, and the first AALT website. Working as a Library Technician for the Calgary Board of Education in a technology role, she undertook to learn HTML when most others in our organization had not heard of it, weren't connected to the web, and had no idea of the impact that it would have on our professional, and personal lives.

Cynthia continues to inspire library techs in Alberta by thinking and working outside the box. Recognizing a market need for technology training, and her own entreprenurial skills, she founded Inet Toolbox. Cynthia continues to inspire others through seminars, conference presentations, and mentoring in the Alberta library community.

Thanks for the kick in the pants Cyn. I will continue to try and keep up.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.

To see a list of all Ada Lovelace Day 2009 blog posts worldwide, see: http://ada.pint.org.uk/list.php.

Survey on McGill Guide citations for the 7th edition

2009-03-18T09:36:00.001-06:00

Hat Tip to Vancouver Law Library Blog and Library Boy for the alert about the McGill Guide (Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation) survey.

The editors of the Guide are asking for user input for the 7th edition. Please help them out.

(Cross Posted to the ELLA Blog)

Glad to be in the Canadian legal services industry

2009-03-06T15:44:00.003-07:00

Friday's are for number crunching. A fast browse through the Layoff Tracker at Law Shucks paints a pretty dismal picture for those in the US (and some UK) legal services industry. These are the reported numbers - there are probably more layoffs that are not quite so public.

	staff	lawyers	month totals
31-Jan-09	846	694	1540
28-Feb-09	1604	1084	2688
6-Mar-09	809	371	1180
YTD	3259	2149

My heartfelt best wishes go out to all those in the breadline.

Your facebook is my evidence

2009-02-26T14:40:00.004-07:00

Dan from All About Information posted on an interesting Ontario case:

On February 20th, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice granted leave to cross-examine a plaintiff in a motor vehicle accident suit about the nature of content he posted on his Facebook profile.
If defence of a claim for compensatory damages for loss of enjoyment of life, the defendant sought production of all content in the plaintiff’s Facebook. It did not examine the plaintiff on whether he had any photographs revealing of his post-accident lifestyle in oral discoveries, but learned of his Facebook’s existence after discovery and developed a theory that it would contain such photos.

As Dan states in his post a party should ordinarily be granted a right to cross-examine on an affidavit of documents where it does not have a right of discovery (as in Simplified Rules actions) when a plaintiff who makes a claim that puts his or her lifestyle in issue produces “few or no documents” from his or her Facebook.

The challenge to individuals who value the openness that technology provides to our lives is that your life is open. Take responsibility. Be accountable. Your life is an open book, because you make it that way. Live with integrity.

This is not a personal statement about the parties in any litigation, but rather a statement about the information economy in which we live.

Law reviews in print

2009-02-04T08:06:00.002-07:00

An interesting article from Inside Higher Ed on the decline of print subscriptions to law reviews crossed my inbox today.
The article points to a paper posted at SSRN. The paper discusses the declining print subscriptions and interested methodology used to collect this statistic in the US. It also says:

On the other hand, while our tables do show declines in law‐review circulation, they do not account for any rise in web‐based consumption that might roughly correspond to, and at least partly explain, those declines. Westlaw, Lexis, HeinOnline, Findlaw, etc. — and more recently even the law reviews themselves — have made it easy to read journals without a subscription. Perhaps the net consumption of law reviews is actually on the rise, along with their influence and status. Who knows?

Here at Field, we still subscribe to some Canadian law reviews in print. We also have access to law reviews through WestlaweCarswell's "Law Reports and Journals" search template. Journals and law reviews are available from LexisNexis. All members of the Alberta Bar have access to HeinOnline by walking in to their closest Courthouse library, and the Internet has tons of commentary - not necessarily peer-reviewed, but still a valid source of commentary.

Unlike some of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed article I think that looking at new law review articles for emerging trends and historical law review articles for a picture of how the law evolved is a useful research method for practitioners. What do you think?

This topic is also covered at Slaw.ca

Legal Resource Centre podcast

2009-01-25T16:05:00.003-07:00

Often there are scheduling conflicts that are bound to disappoint. Such was the case at noon on January 22nd. I posted about a session over at Slaw.ca that conflicted with an Edmonton Law Libraries lunch on the reorganization of the Alberta Law Society and Alberta Courts Libraries into the new Alberta Law Libraries. Thankfully technology has come to my rescue via a comment from Kirsten Wurmann of the Legal Resource Centre at the U Alberta Faculty of Extension.

The Legal Resource Centre has just posted the podcasts of the presentations from yesterday’s session. It was very informative and we had a terrific turnout (over 100 people showed up.)
You can listen to the podcasts here: http://www.legalresourcecentre.ca/ (
We will post the Q & A session as well but it needs a bit more work to clean it up - so we won’t get to it until next week.)

I appreciate technology letting me do two things at once :-)

Lifelong learning

2008-12-23T09:29:00.003-07:00

I feel very strongly about the importance of learning new skills on a continual basis. This might be the case since I often ask to be the 'teacher' and would like 'learners' to participate. Another reason for my learning passion could be the direct and positive impact learning choices have had on my career.

Those of you who went to (library) college before the Internet existed in a common business way, and who chose to be early adopters of technology innovations will immediately understand my position. The folks in my Grant MacEwan 5 week night class on HTML editing in 1993 will also be aware of the impact of what we learned.

It isn't enough to welcome change, I believe we have to anticipate it, prepare for it, and embrace all of the potential chaos and turmoil that change brings. Chaos and turmoil are the harbingers of opportunity for those glass half full types like myself.

As 2008 comes to a close, I would like to share the list of things I learned this year. The list is in no particular order. In 2008 I learned:

that blogging about something is a good way to remember it;
how it only takes 5 hours of development time to make a 3 minute screencast;
that I like making screencasts of training tips and that people like having them available;
that BC acts can be brought into force by a Regulation;
that gathering statistics with Acumin is easy and of great assistance for reporting;
that I can keep more accurate time without a paper time sheet;
that I should have bought stock in RIM;
that weekly blogging is more difficult than writing six articles a year for a paper magazine;
that my theories on law firm knowledge management are not too unique;
how to transfer my library catalogue data from MS Access to MySQL and then the Intranet;
that a little patience goes a long way - and too often, I don't even a little;
that Goof Off is the best solvent for removing ugly labels from books;
that my children are mysteriously technologically adept;
that a Wiki is a pretty great way to collaborate on a conference presentation;
that there is a short line for Calgary passengers through security at the Edmonton International Airport;
how to save formatted cases from Canadian Labour Law Library;
that not everyone is as excited as I am about Cntrl' being the shortcut for pasting todays date in a field in MS Access;
that a backup laptop is a handy thing to have if you are giving a presentation;
that I should have drafted this post in January and added to it as the year went on;
that feeding my Facebook status with Twitter annoys some of my Friends, but others find it useful;
how to set up a wireless network;
how to install VoIP;
that chickens don't appreciate anything;
restart is a good strategy for many things, including creme caramel;
that you can write a pretty long blog post while waiting for Word to process your copy and paste of a long list of NRS hit results.

Merry New Year everyone.

Costs, online legal research, and blog searching

2008-12-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

Nina Platt at Strategic Librarian wrote a nice summary of the benefits to a client for their lawyer performing online (disbursable to the client) legal research. Her post was in response to an unfortunately worded costs award by U.S. District Court Judge Willis B. Hunt in Fulton County. This little nugget, which was not widely posted about at the time denigrated high fees by counsel in a class action suit, including legal research.

I read the decision a couple of weeks ago, thanks to a post at the Law Librarian Blog, and dismissed it from my mind as punitive comments from one judge about the particular firms involved in one litigation file and their fees.

Nina's approach to this issue is much better. Rather than dismissing the comments as one-off, she takes a permanent approach to the issue. She reminds us of the importance of using technology tools effectively to save time, and money, for clients in the research gathering process. She also allows any future researcher to plug "class action coca-cola hunt costs" into Google and see commentary on the judges costs decision in the context of legal research.

Nina has assisted in the use (or not) of this case law as precedent in costs awards. Thank You.

This scenario is also an excellent reminder to think about using 'public' sentiment and social media tools like blog and wiki searches as we would have used mainstream media along with scholarly legal work in the past.

Blogs provide an excellent source of commentary about the law. Consider the excellent legal blog content represented in the ABA Journal Blawg 100 list or the sites nominated for CLawBies.

Live blogging

2008-12-05T12:52:00.000-07:00

The U of A Law Faculty blog has a great post of live blogging from the debate on constitutionality on prorougation.

It is interesting that information from this session could be read by me, in Edmonton, shortly after it happened in Ontario. Thanks for posting Ubaka Ogbogu - Moin may call you a super-nerd, but the payback was awesome! Hope the lamb sandwich was tasty.

Topic: Was the Governor General’s Decision to Prorogue Parliament Constitutional? Canada’s Leading Scholars Weigh in on this Historic Ruling
Where: University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Faculty Lounge
When: Today, 12 – 2pm

Surviving Law School

2008-11-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

I did not survive law school, never tried it. I tease my children that I will go back to University with them. They pretend to be suitably horrified. I do know that it would be a significantly different experience today from 1987 when I went with my brand new Canon typewriter with correction tape.

If you are in law school today, you have access to help from a really wide network. Not only your small section for your constitutional class, or the people you meet at FABS. Consider this site http://www.wikihow.com/Survive-Your-First-Year-of-Law-School-(USA). A Wiki, with global contributors, a world wide audience, and a very specific goal...sharing tips on being a first year law student.

Law students also have access to things that I wish I had in university. Websites of all of the reading material for a class, the ability to e-mail a prof or TA, University Librarians with Internet access to more than UseNet and listservs, full text of journal articles easily retrievable, citation creation tools. I try hard not to be jealous, but confess, I am not nostalgic for the good old days.

ICE Campaign

2008-11-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

A good plan came through our company e-mail bulletin today:

ICE - 'In Case of Emergency'

We all carry our mobile phones with names & numbers stored in its memory but nobody, other than ourselves, knows which of these numbers belong to our closest family or friends.

If we were to be involved in an accident or were taken ill, the people attending us would have our mobile phone but wouldn't know who to call.

Yes, there are hundreds of numbers stored but which one is the contact person in case of an emergency? Hence

'ICE' – In Case of Emergency Campaign.

The concept of 'ICE' is catching on quickly. It is a method of contact during emergency situations. As cell (mobile) phones are carried by the majority of the population, all you need to do is store the number of a contact person or persons who should be contacted during emergency under the name 'ICE' (In Case of Emergency).

The idea was thought up by a paramedic who found that when he went to the scenes of accidents, there were always mobile phones with patients, but they didn't know which number to call. He therefore thought that it would be a good idea if there was a nationally recognized name for this purpose.

In an emergency situation, Emergency Service personnel and hospital Staff would be able to quickly contact the right person by simply dialing the number you have stored as 'ICE’. For more than one contact name simply enter ICE1, ICE2 and ICE3 etc. A great idea that will make a difference!

Let's spread the concept of ICE by storing an ICE number in our Mobile phones today!

It won't take too many 'forwards' before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life, or put a loved one's mind at rest.

ICE will speak for you when you are not able to.

Alberta Bills awaiting Royal Assent

2008-11-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Did you know that you can look in the Order Paper on the Legislative Assembly of Alberta website to see the list of bills that have passed but are not assented to? You can also see what is scheduled to be discussed in the session for the day. Just because it is on the schedule does not mean that the legislators will attend to the matter, however it is a great way to see what is coming up.

Here is the list of Alberta bills that have passed third reading but are not assented to yet as of 7:30 a.m. November 4, 2008 MST:

Bills Awaiting Royal Assent

Bill 7 Post-secondary Learning Amendment Act, 2008 — Mr. Bhullar
Bill 8 Climate Change and Emissions Management Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Mr. Renner
Bill 9 Land Agents Licensing Amendment Act, 2008 — Mr. Mitzel
Bill 11 Insurance Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Ms Evans
Bill 14 Court of Queen’s Bench Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Ms Redford
Bill 15 Family Law Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Ms Redford
Bill 16 Municipal Government Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Mr. Danyluk
Bill 19 First Nations Sacred Ceremonial Objects Repatriation Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Mr. Blackett
Bill 20 Agriculture Statutes Repeal Act, 2008 — Mr. Griffiths
Bill 21 Heating Oil and Propane Rebate Act — Mr. Griffiths
Bill 25 Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Ms Redford
Bill 28 Jury Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Ms Redford
Bill 30 Alberta Evidence Amendment Act, 2008 — Mr. Bhullar [Alberta's new apology legislation]
Bill 31 Financial Administration Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Mr. Snelgrove
Bill 34 Employment Pension Plans Amendment Act, 2008 — Dr. Brown
Bill 35 Government Organization Amendment Act, 2008 — Hon. Mr. Hayden
Bill 36 Land Titles Amendment Act, 2008 — Dr. Brown
Bill 37 Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (Holodomor) Memorial Day Act — Hon. Mr. Zwozdesky
Bill 38 Securities Amendment Act, 2008 — Mr. Fawcett

Other great things on the site include a fully searchable Hansard back to 1988, status of bills and a handy activity report, and contact information for the very knowledgable Legislature Library.

Connections, social networking and library service

2008-10-29T08:59:00.000-06:00

Stephen Abram gave a great talk to the U of A School of Library and Information Science on October 28. He is out and about in the west talking about SLA - the Special Libraries Association. Every time I see Stephen speak, I am re-energized about librarianship. SLA is doing some very cool things to enhance the role of librarians and all library workers in the steadily emerging information economy that is our current world.

Stephens talk included discussions on connecting with our clients and potential clients using social software. One tool I use, although not consistently enough, is LinkedIn. Doug Cornelius, who blogs at KM Space, has a post today about new features that have been added to this tool. You can see my public profile on LinkedIn to get an idea what this tool is all about.

Stephen reminded me that the Field Libraries serve people from all generations and technological literacy as well as personal preference for connecting to friends and colleagues. The librarians at Field will happily connect with you however you choose, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, our Library INFO phone line, email, SMS Messenger on my Blackberry, cell phone, work phone, and of course in person.

Tough as a $3 steak?

2008-10-23T09:19:00.000-06:00

God Bless Eugene Meehan for his wonderful Lang Michener Supreme Court of Canada LawLetter. The October 23 issue quotes a faboulous piece of writing, from a court decision no less. I reproduce the quote here for your reading pleasure:

Here's Chief Justice Roberts' opening paragraph in his U.S. Supreme Court judgment - very much a film noir/crime novel/Lord Denning opening:

"Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He'd made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood. "Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn't buying bus tokens. He radioed a description and Officer Stein picked up the buyer. Sure enough: three bags of crack in the guy's pocket. Head downtown and book him. Just another day at the office."

This lovely prose is from is the opening paragraph of Chief Justice Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court in a (dissenting) judgment in Pennsylvania v. Nathan Dunlap, that came down on October 14, 2008. Just in case you are thirsting for more.

Where are all the women in the Legal Blogosphere?

2008-10-06T08:25:00.000-06:00

Hat tip to Joe Hodnicki for the link to this interesting article. As October 18 approaches, I challenge you to write or post or blog (used as a verb like that annoying guy on TV).

Cheers, Shaunna

Wallace damages by any other name

2008-09-02T09:23:00.000-06:00

The September 5, 2008 issue of the Lawyers Weekly has an interesting article titled Damages formerly known as Wallace. The article's first sentence states:

The Supreme Court marked a new era in labour law in a recent decision which repeatedly referred to bad faith damages as being “formerly” Wallace damages.

This is a great reminder to computer assisted legal researchers to use thesauri and alternative terms in their searches.

Policing library fines

2008-08-21T15:35:00.000-06:00

The Smoking Gun (a guilty pleasure) had this little tidbit. I would love to have a 'charity' jail and bail for all those in my firm with books in their office that are not signed out to them. My charity of choice is a new book cart :-)

Thank you to RIM

2008-08-19T13:35:00.000-06:00

I took a vacation this year. Three weeks in a row for the first time ever in my life. From July 25 to August 17 I was out of the office. Part of the reason that I haven't taken large chunks of time off in the past is due to the multi-day catch up with work life on a return to the office.

I would like to thank RIM, and my wonderful firm, for allowing me to work just enough to feel rested, re-energized, and rejuvenated without having a radical ramp up on my return to the office.

What is next?

2008-08-05T10:26:00.000-06:00

Check out the KM Librarians blog to see http://callkm.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/next-5000-days-of-the-web/

The world as we know it is constantly changing, and I hope that Kevin Kelly's suggested direction in the video linked above is good for this planet and the living things on it.

I'm feeling a little chilly

2008-07-14T08:49:00.000-06:00

I try to keep up on law library issues from abroad. My favourite source from the US, the Law Librarian Blog, alerted me to the recent changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Wikipedia has a good summary of this

Video Tutorials on Legal Research

2008-07-07T09:02:00.000-06:00

The British Columbia Courthouse Library Society, compilers of the wonderful Canada Legislative Index, have some very cool video tutorials on their website. These tutorials cover topics on researching legislation and finding precedents.

Please contact the Field library staff if you would like to view these videos at the office, remember we have a firm policy about band-width heavy materials.

Definition of persistence

2008-06-25T11:27:00.000-06:00

Persistence, thy name is Senator Tommy Banks.

Those of you who attended the CALL/ACBD 2006 conference in Edmonton may remember Senator Banks' plenary session on a bill he introduced called: "An Act to repeal legislation that has not been brought into force within ten years of receiving royal assent"

This bill, originally introduced in the Senate on December 11, 2002 will finally become law on June 18, 2010.

Here is the path of this bill from LegisINFO:

39th Parliament - 2nd Session (Oct. 16, 2007 - )
S-207
An Act to repeal legislation that has not come into force within ten years of receiving royal assent(Statutes Repeal Act)
39th Parliament - 1st Session (April 3, 2006 - Sept. 14, 2007)
S-202
An Act to repeal legislation that has not come into force within ten years of receiving royal assent(Statutes Repeal Act)
38th Parliament - 1st Session (Oct. 4, 2004 - Nov. 29, 2005)
S-5
An Act to repeal legislation that has not come into force within ten years of receiving royal assent(Statutes Repeal Act)
37th Parliament - 3rd Session (Feb. 2, 2004 - May 23, 2004)
S-11
An Act to repeal legislation that has not come into force within ten years of receiving royal assent(Statutes Repeal Act)
37th Parliament - 2nd Session (Sept. 30, 2002 - Nov. 12, 2003)
S-12
An Act to repeal legislation that has not been brought into force within ten years of receiving royal assent(Statutes Repeal Act)

Yes - this did die on the order paper 4 times.

The concept of this legislation is that unproclaimed acts, if suddenly brought into force at a much later date than when the legislation was introduced could have a serious and negative impact on the act of today (as opposed to the act when the amendment was passed). This house cleaning law is a very interesting addition to our pantheon of legislation. I remind you of this list of statutes not in force that Senator Banks discussed at the conference

Congratulations Senator Banks.

Are we stupid?

2008-06-16T11:57:00.000-06:00

Interesting link today on SLAW by Cecillia Tellis on Nicholas Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

I admit it. I don't read at work, I skim. Like many of you, I scroll through databases for nuggets of judicial wisdom. I plough through my RSS headlines, only gathering what seems relevant in the instant. I answer the buzz of my Blackberry with the unobtrusive, yet still public, glance. I Blink through much of my day.

I hope I am saved from getting stupid by the daily "practice being retired" novel reading and cappuccino habit that my husband and I enjoy every morning. Yay to the public libraries that feed my habit.

Web 2.0 Plenary session by Darlene Fitcher at CALL 2008

2008-05-26T14:11:00.000-06:00

This morning, I was absolutely inspired by listening to Darlene Fitcher talk about web 2.0 and law libraries. Darlene was speaking at the first plenary session of the 2008 CALL/ACBD Conference in Saskatoon.

The session inspired me to blog today, and to make a firmer plan for managing the integration of emerging technology into my life, most importantly my work life.

Step 1 - share!
Did you know that there is a set of tagged Field Libraries bookmarks on del.icio.us

2008-05-15T08:46:00.000-06:00

Just in case you don't monitor SLAW or Library Boy...

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has launched a new website called A Nation's Chronicle: The Canada Gazette:
"Often referred to as 'the official newspaper of the Government of Canada,' the Canada Gazette has been an important instrument in the Canadian democratic process for more than 160 years. It has served to inform Canadians of the operations of government and to involve them actively in the legislative process. With this site, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), in co-operation with the Canada Gazette Directorate, Public Works and Government of Services Canada, will make the Gazette available online, in its entirety, for the first time (...)" Approximately 30% (almost 300,000 pages) of the total Canada Gazette content is now online. This includes:

Part I - 1983-1997
Part II - 1950-1976, 1983-1997
Part III - 1985-1997

And, of course, everything from 1998 onwards has been available online for some time now.By the fall of 2008, LAC will be adding the earliest issues of the Gazette, from 1841 to 1950. By spring 2009, all issues of the Canada Gazette will be available online.

The database will allow keyword searching of all issues dating back to the very first one.

Huge thanks to Michel-Adrien Sheppard who posted the above.

New ways to access the same old stuff

2008-04-08T07:59:00.000-06:00

I recently learned the value of current awareness service.

Usually, I am on the sending end of current awareness services. The Field Libraries send out copies of contents of our recently acquired paper material; we watch legislation for status changes and make sure that practice groups are alerted when there is something relevant to them; I spontaneously forward bits of judicial or eclectic wisdom from my RSS feeds to colleagues who (hopefully) are interested in the topic. Most of the material that I regularly monitor is of specific interest only to me...I use my feeds for organizational reasons, and to cut down on the reviewing time for picking up relevant bits of information to pass along.

Something that crossed my virtual desk recently brought home to me how much I get out of monitoring things for others.

Way back in September 2007, I posted about the QL Tips Wiki. When I started contributing to this wiki, I set up the notification feature (see the bottom of this PBwiki page for the notification settings link). What a boon that simple setting has made to the work flows at Field Law!

Alicia Loo, from the Supreme Court of Canada Library posted some direct links to databases and their search templates that were given to her by LexisNexis. By reading the format of the links and running some tests, I figured out links to a few more databases that are frequently used here and posted them to the wiki as well. The user id, password, and client identifier are all collected when these links are selected.

This valuable information reduces the number of steps for users zipping into LNQL for a specific type of search. Monitoring the wiki was a fabulous way to learn this information that I didn't know I wanted to know!

US Court Documents recycled

2008-03-12T08:35:00.000-06:00

The limited access to Canadian court documents available for decided cases on WestlaweCarswell's Litigator is pretty cool. I have to say though, that the US courts PACER system is even better.

The PACER Service Center is the Federal Judiciary's centralized registration, billing, and technical support center for electronic access to U.S. District, Bankruptcy, and Appellate court records.

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is the go to site for extremely cost effective electronic access to the procedure cards, and often, the digitized content of the ongoing court record for a small fee of 8 cents a page. Very Cool! Even more cool is notice from the Law Librarian Blog about a PACER recycling site.

Now the cool stuff that others have gathered for a fee can be retrieved for free through digital recycling. This service is organized by public.resource.org an a memo about this service can be read here. It is always nice to read about people sharing.

2008 Already?

2008-01-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

Ah, January. The time of New Year's resolutions. So many new things happened in 2007, I don't really feel the need for a resolution, except to post more often of course.

What's new? Field LLP is renovating. Several phases of preparation for our transformation are complete. The stacks are now closed temporarily, with delivery on demand for our physical materials available to the library users.

Preparation for a change like this is the key to current and future happiness of library users, and staff, and to the construction crew (this I know from being married to a carpenter-thanks H.)

What did we do to prep?

Determined what we could discard (based on our philosophy that ours is a working collection with the only archival responsibility being to our clients potential needs)

Hired a recycling company to come and remove the weeds

Moved a Case reporters to on site, non-accessible storage (piles in a storage room laid out in order so that they can be retrieved to fill the beginning of the shelf layout - no boxes; we are not retrieving physical cases from our reporter collection using WeC, LNQL, MLB, CanLII, and interlibrary-loan instead - two months in storage - no ILLs yet)

Moved materials on shelves to be relocated onto their permanent new homes (except for stored materials, every book is only being moved one time)

Here for your enjoyment is our plan in it's multi-staged visual extravaganza

A virtual leap to new sources of valid secondary content

2007-11-01T15:48:00.000-06:00

A Field student asked a question today that made me think about which sources I point people to. The question was about anton piller orders.

Anton Piller Orders are a form of injunctive relief, so I naturally thought of the book by Sharpe titled Injunctions and Specific Performance which we have in looseleaf form in both our large office libraries. I pointed the student in this valid and traditional direction.

Then, out of curiosity, I Googled 'anton piller order'. I learned that there is a Wikipedia page for them, they are frequently misspelled as anton pilar orders and that there was a blog post about a 2006 SCC decision at The Court. Some links to potentially valid CLE material also appeared in the first page of Google hits.

Although I would never suggest that someone base a short timeline legal opinion on Wikipedia, certainly a supervised blog of comments on SCC cases based out of Osgoode Hall Law School, like The Court, is a fabulous starting point for legal research which I am very comfortable recommending.

Does this mean I can no longer discount a poke into Google as a valid form of legal research?

Does this mean that in addition to all of the traditional sources (texts and looseleafs, encyclopedias, journal articles, Canadian Abridgment, WeC and QL) I should have inexperienced legal researchers Google their client's question?

Do I Google for them so that I can vet the results?

Comments greatly appreciated.
A note to Field Students - If you only look on Google I will hunt you down :-)

Thoughts on Groups and a Wiki tip

2007-10-15T08:42:00.000-06:00

I have been thinking a lot lately about groups. Groups in general and practice groups specifically. All of the practice groups at my firm have slightly different library and research needs. My goal as a law firm librarian is to help all the groups in my firm work efficiently and cooperatively with the knowledge they need and have.

To help meet my lofty goal, I am heading off to central Canada to the NE2007 - Libraries Without Borders conference on Wednesday. The conference has an excellent program and I look forward the learning and networking opportunities. An interesting thing about this conference is that there is both a Wiki and a Blog that work at communicating information about this conference to 'the group' in addition to the conference website. The Blog offers news about the upcoming event from the conference committee to its readers. The Wiki offers the ability for attendees, and others, to collaboratively communicate.

This is one of the first wiki that I have contributed to, along with the QL Tips Wiki. The ease of use of the pbwiki tool is putting many ideas for group communication in my head! I hope to figure out how to put wiki to work for the best interests of my firm groups.

A great post on the Libraries Without Borders Wiki shows how to make a new linked wiki page. I am counting this in the 'cool things I didn't know until now' category. I also didn't know that the plural of wiki is wiki (until I looked it up)!

Law Library of Congress

2007-09-19T07:50:00.000-06:00

The Law Library of Congress has redesigned it's website. This website is a great place to go for valid US legal sources including the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), Guide to Law Online and the Global Legal Monitor. New services offered include:

Congressional Hearings Project: Full-text access to selected historical Congressional committee hearings on a variety of topics.
http://www.loc.gov/law/find/hearings.html

Foreign and International Law Guides: Provides a starting point for researching foreign, international, and comparative law with analysis and references to official printed and online resources.
http://www.loc.gov/law/help/foreign.html

Pakistan: Crisis in the Judiciary
Find information and analysis of the suspension and subsequent reinstatement of the Chief Justice of Pakistan.
http://www.loc.gov/law/help/pakistan-justice.html

Happy surfing.

QL Tips Wiki

2007-09-12T08:26:00.000-06:00

The summer of 2007 is one of the busiest in my memory. Not only the daily challenges of work in a busy law firm where two of our three office locations moved and a major renovation of my home office to plan for, but my family has undertaken a major project in the "off" hours. My vacation days - few and far between - have been totally devoted to family this year, the last two for insulating my new farm building, on my new farm. I am also preparing to sell my strawbale house. Exciting stuff let me assure you.

Exciting times on the legal research front as well! There is a new wiki (think Wikipedia) devoted to tips and tricks for the new LexisNexis Quicklaw interface. In the best wiki spirit, this tips wiki will allow anyone who has some great information about using new Quiklaw to share their expertise with the world. Check it out!

Time flies

2007-07-20T08:14:00.000-06:00

There is never enough time, especially in the summer.

Although I have an excellent sense of direction (except for that one orienteering incident - no laughing people), I have a problem with figuring out what time it is where I am calling people.

I have a tendency to NEED people in Toronto right when they have gone for lunch or left for the day. The Greenwich Mean Time site linked above can help with this. Simply select in the place you want to call (or be) and you get the time there accurate within one second.

Canadian Legislative Research Table from Queen's U

2007-06-20T09:14:00.000-06:00

Slaw should be on every Canadian Law Librarian and Legal Resercher's blog roll. I am often amazed by the depth and breadth of postings. It is a very worthwhile read.

A recent posting informed me about the Canada - Laws research link from the Queen's University Law Library site. This table gives a link for web available access to Statutes and Regulations, Bills, Gazettes, Hansard, Orders in Council, Government and Legislative Assembly Sites, and Court sites.

Thank you Queen's for providing this excellent resource to the community.

My del.icio.us new laptop

2007-05-16T09:51:00.000-06:00

I have finally entered the realm of the wired and purchased a laptop. At the very same time I got a new computer on my desk at work. Field has moved to a virtual server system and I have one of the new access points. This new hardware mostly looks the same, although, in the quick switch, none of my Internet bookmarks, shortcuts, and special software was initially installed.

A year ago, I would have been VERY unhappy not to have my special set of organized web links. Today, I do not care. Why? Web 2.0 of course.

I have often been asked to share my Favourites. Last fall, I decided to try out del.icio.us as a social bookmarking test. I took all of my good and valid favourites, annotated them, and organized them with Del.icio.us. Not only was it a very good review of the material I had flagged, it was also pretty fast. I created an annotated list of 80 bookmarks in about 2 hours.

The best news about using this del.icio.us site is that I don't have to worry about my now empty favourites folder on two new computers. I can simply use del.icio.us/fieldap and have searchable annotated access to my own favourite files. And so can anyone else for that matter.

Congratulations to BCLA 2007 President's Award winner Rob Golbeck

2007-04-23T08:45:00.000-06:00

Steve Matthews at the Vancouver Law Librarian blog congratulated hi colleague Rob Golbeck of Clark Wilson LLP on receiving a very prestigious British Columbia Library Association award. As a fellow Library Technician in the legal field, I throw in my congratulations too!

Edmonton Law Libraries Association

2007-03-09T13:33:00.000-07:00

The Edmonton Law Libraries Association website now has HeadStart 2007 information available. You may notice that there is a completely new design for the site as well as an updated Member Directory. I had a lot of fun recreating this site.

Web 2.0 video: The Machine is Us/ing Us

2007-02-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

The Digital Ethnography group from Kansas State University has posted a YouTube video explaining and provoking thought about Web 2.0. This excellent video is being widely discussed and talked about. It came to my attention through Blawg, a collection of legal blogs, podcasts and news by Bill Gratsch.

Not only is this an informative piece about current technologies, it is a very interesting experiment in the power of social networking. It was posted on YouTube on February 7 and when I became aware of it on February 8, the statistics that YouTube provides said the following:

Views: 448,078 Comments: 1689 Favorited: 6564 times

Imagine nearly half a million people being aware of what you have to say less than a week after you say it.

Here is a link to the YouTube video so that you can view it at home in compliance with the firm's IT policy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Cheers, Shaunna

Statute consideration searches with New Quicklaw

2007-01-31T15:55:00.000-07:00

Searches for judicial consideration of legislation are often puzzling to construct, especially when you are looking for consideration of a subsection or sub-subsection. New Quicklaw makes this easier.

The broadest case law search for judicial consideration of 74.1(1)(c) of the Competition Act can be entered as in the search below using the General search tab on New Quicklaw:

Note that you must have the quotation marks around the section reference for QL to recognize the round brackets as a text string.

The search strategy is
Name of Act /15 "numbers for the section and subsection with no spaces"
or
competition act /15 "74.1(1)(c)"

This brings up one very on point case (at Jan 31, 2007) which is actually an administrative decision from the Canada Competition Tribunal. Note in the image above, rather than choosing a specific source, I have checked the box beside Cases to search within the judicial and administrative decisions in QL's data.

Searching through the broad "Cases" selection and the easy to format judicial consideration search are both nice new features of New Quicklaw.

Cheers, Shaunna

Statutes in force ?

2006-12-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

Simon Chester's SLAW post about the Statute of Westminster being in force (or not according to the Globe and Mail prompts me to remind Field researchers about discovering in force dates of statutes.

Steps to identify the in force date for a particular Alberta law:

Check the Coming into Force provision in the act (usually the last section). The act itself may come into force on a named date.

If the act is silent, the in force date is on Royal Assent, check the Royal Assent date by looking in the Alberta Parliamentary Digest or on the Alberta Legislative Assembly website.

If the coming into force section refers to proclamation, check the white pages at the beginning of the last volume of the looseleaf Statutes of Alberta - there is a table with dates for Public Acts Brought Into Force By Proclamation. This will give you page references to the official proclamation which is published in the Alberta Gazette Part I.

In Alberta the CIF (coming into force) choices for statutes are on assent, on a named date, or on proclamation. Remember that our Table of Public Statutes (AKA pink pages) will give you in force dates as well.

See Fieldnet - Library for checklists and details about legislative research.

Cheers, Shaunna

Noting Up

2006-11-17T10:35:00.000-07:00

I like to use “best practices” for specific recurring research tasks. Yes, I am talking about noting up since it should be done (case history at the least) for every case you look at for every research task.

Checklists are good tools for noting. I made one for judicial decisions, one for administrative tribunal decisions, and a special checklist for noting up statutes referenced in cases.

These checklists are formatted so that they can be attached to a decision and the results of the search, like a report card. There is a column with check boxes, a column with the information source, and a column with the method used for noting up with that source.

The noteup checklists are also linked on the Field Library Intranet for the Field Lawyers, however since I am mentioning them in a future Online Law column in Law Now magazine, they are provided above for anyone to use.

Happy research trails, Shaunna

Old to New Quicklaw Search Translation

2006-10-11T09:00:00.000-06:00

New Quicklaw works differently than old Quicklaw! Fortunately, for gathering material on a semi-regular basis, there is a fairly simple way to translate your searches. The confusing part is knowing what old v. new database collections are equivalent. LexisNexis Quicklaw has produced a searchable concordance for the database codes and names. There are also searching cheat sheets to assist you.

The following search is performed periodically collecting cases for a publication. In all of the CJ, INSQ, CTSQ and DLR, enter the following search strings, repeating for each database:

surety /5 bond & @4 2006 & July August [substituting the names of the two previous months]
bond /2 construction & @4 2006 & July August
"indemnity agreement" & @4 2006 & July August
labour /2 material /5 bond & @4 2006 & July August
fidelity /5 insurance bond coverage & @4 2006 & July August
performance construction surety /5 bond & @4 2006 & July August
lien maintenance warranty /5 bond & @4 2006 & July August

This process performs 7 searches in 4 databases, a total of 28 searches. With 1 search in 2 sources on new quicklaw, you can gather the same data. You will also be able to identify duplicate material very easily using the sorting of results by judgment date feature.

Here is how it works:

1. Go to the Court Cases search tab.
2. Enter this string in the Seach terms box

(bond /5 (surety OR construction OR performance OR lien OR maintenance OR warranty OR fidelity OR labour /2 material)) OR (fidelity /5 insurance OR coverage) OR (indemnity agreement)

3. Click on the Index Term Lookup link and mark the check boxes beside Construction Law and Insurance Law
4. Select the source All Canadian Court Cases from the drop down list [this includes the DLR's] 5. Specify the date range using "Date is after..."

Your search will look like this:

Once you have performed this search and dealt with the results, MODIFY the search and change the Source to All Canadian Digests. This will capture the digest sources from the old topical collections INSQ and CSTQ.

Please contact me if you would like us to assist you with this type, or any other type, of Quicklaw transition.

Digital phones and call recording

2006-09-20T10:15:00.000-06:00

As the Field Systems training team is wraping up our IP phone Unified Message (voice mail integrated with Outlook e-mail) project, questions are being asked regarding a feature of the software - Recording a conversation. The federal Privacy Commissioner has a great fact sheet on best practices for recording customer telephone calls. The meat and potatoes is this:

In order to comply with the PIPED Act, organizations should take the following steps when recording conversations:

The individual should be informed that the conversation is being recorded at the beginning of the call. This can be done by an automated recording or by the customer service representative.
The individual should be informed of the purpose. The organization must be clear about the purposes; an organization should not state that it is recording the conversation for quality assurance purposes if, in fact, the recording might be used for other purposes. This could be done in a variety of ways - verbally, by pressing a number on the keypad (in the case of automated messages) or with clear messages on monthly statements. (For example: If you have any questions about your bill please call 1-800-XXX-XXXX. Please note your call will be recorded for...) If the individual proceeds knowing the conversation is being recorded and the purpose of the recording, consent is implied.
The organization should offer alternatives if the caller objects. The alternatives might involve not taping the call; visiting a retail outlet; writing a letter; or, conducting the transaction over the Internet.

Abbreviations

2006-09-06T10:32:00.000-06:00

Finding cases is difficult enough without having to decode citation abbreviations.

The Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations is an excellent resource that allows you to search by the title of a publication or part or all of an abbreviation. It is available at http://www.legalabbrevs.cardiff.ac.uk/index.jsp and includes legal materials from nearly everywhere, Canada, the United States, Luxembourg and Pakistan included. If you only remember one website for abbreviations, this would be your best choice.

Grey Literature

2006-08-10T10:57:00.000-06:00

SLAW is burning up the blogosphere with law librarians focusing on Grey Literature. The link above is to the 'finding grey literature' post.

What is that? As reported in D.J. Farace, Introduction, 22 Publishing Research Quarterly 3:

"Information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing, i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body."

Why should you pay attention to Grey Literature in your legal research? Here are some sources of Grey Literature that should convince you:

The Alberta Law Reform Institute
Alberta Law Society Libraries Research Guides
WTO GATT documents collection
Government of Alberta publications
Government of Canada publications

In the Google age, there is every reason to search widely. Call the library INFO line if you want us to look for you (x.4636)

Cheers, Shaunna

WeC beef's up content with new product

2006-07-25T13:02:00.000-06:00

Carswell has added a new set of data to WeC. The Litigator product - we are currently exploring flat rate options - is a tab that can be added to WeC whic has some interesting primary and secondary content, including:

quantum digest databases on interesting topics including defamation, wrongful dismissal, personal injury (yes - Goldsmith's at your desktop), and more quantum topics...
pleadings, motions, and argument documents for cases in the 2003 or newer CCELs, CCLIs, CCLTs, and CPCs.
Expert witness directory, including linked cases evidence was given in and CVs
Fradshams Annotated Alberta Rules of Court full text with links in the footnotes.

Call me if you want to see or use this on the Library INFO line (4636)