LegalAve - Alberta family law information

Marsha Guthrie, Manager, Implementation and Partnerships with the Alberta Legal Information Society and Julie Rainey of Alberta Law Libraries for sending the following my way:

New free website for Albertans dealing with family law issues: LegalAve

LegalAve is a free website that brings together existing public legal information under a single virtual "roof" to help people in Alberta dealing with family law issues such as separation and divorce, child support, custody, guardianship, parenting time, partner/spousal support, property division, family violence, and more. The plain language website describes the law in Alberta, the process to follow (such as court forms and court hearings), and common questions about family law issues. LegalAve also has general information about navigating the legal system, including out-of-court resolution options, working with a lawyer, community legal resources, and legal aid. The "Guided Pathway" feature allows users to answer a series of questions about their legal issue and be directed only to the information that applies to them.

Visit legalave.ca as a starting point for family law resources in Alberta.

The website was created by the Alberta Legal Information Society (ALIS), and links to resources from organizations such as the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta, Alberta Courts, Legal Aid Alberta, Native Counselling Services of Alberta, Calgary Legal Guidance, Student Legal Services of Edmonton, and many more. All resources are reviewed and approved for accuracy and currency by the ALIS staff lawyer.

Survey: Alberta Law Libraries

Attention: Law librarians

The Law Society of Alberta is seeking input from the legal community on our future involvement in funding of Alberta Law Libraries. The consultation will solicit input from practicing lawyers, the judiciary, law librarians and other stakeholders on library usage patterns, emerging trends in use of online resources, and how the libraries support professional competency.

Please take five minutes to complete the following survey

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PKQ8TFR by Friday, June 27th. Your feedback is appreciated and will be used to inform future decisions regarding the governance and funding of the Alberta Law Libraries.

My perspective: As a law firm librarian, I rely on the expertise of the staff at Alberta Law Libraries, the currency and breadth of their collection, and their presence in Courthouses where my lawyer team members have immediate access to resources.  

There is no way that a law firm, even large firms, can maintain a 'just in case' collection.  Institutions like Alberta Law Libraries are an extremely important industry partner to law firms with in house library staff, just as they are to small and solo practitioners, self-represented litigants and the judiciary.

I hope that stakeholders will take the time to answer this survey.  

If you think that you only use your law firm collection, remember the times that your law firm library staff have "zipped over to the courthouse library" or "called the courthouse library" to retrieve an essential piece of the legal research puzzle. Perhaps you remember attending a Head Start event. Maybe you popped in to the Alberta Law Libraries to use on of the research tools that they license for your benefit. Perhaps you selected a research guide on their website. Maybe you follow their blog.

As for me, I will be hanging out at the Edmonton site of Alberta Law Libraries for the next two days as we partner, through the Edmonton Law Libraries Association, to offer the Head Start legal research training program to 48 articling students and use the essential expertise of ALL librarians and the collections and services they offer as a resource. 

Environmental Law Centre blog

One of the areas I don't often have an opportunity to research is environmental law.  Infrequent review of a subject area is one of the things that can make for inefficient research, especially in a regulatory rich subject like environmental law.  To combat symptoms of inefficiency, it is a grand idea to preface your research with a look at specialty commentary in the form of well crafted legal blogs.

Check out the Environmental Law Centre blog for your next brush up on this area of law.  Well written commentary, posts rich with relevant links, and excellent and consistent use of categories.

Link to other Canadian law blogs by topic or writer type at Lawblogs.ca. Law blogs are free, available at your desk or mobile device, they link to publications and other sources, and often written by people with expertise to share.

Legislation in force

There were three proclamation orders in today's Canada Gazette Part II. These are also three examples of short names of acts that you may need to follow up on to ensure that legislation you are interested in is either ameded or not.

Order Fixing November 1, 2013 as the Day on which the Act Comes into Force
Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act SI/2013-111
23/10/13    
This is chapter 21 of the Statutes of Canada, 2013 originally Bill S-8.
     
Order Fixing October 18, 2013 as the Day on which Certain Sections of the Act Come into Force
Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act
SI/2013-113
23/10/13
This is chapter 24 of the Statutes of Canada, 2013 originally Bill C-15
Order Fixing October 24, 2013 as the Day on which the Act Comes into Force
Increasing Offenders’ Accountability for Victims Act
SI/2013-112
23/10/13    
This is chapter 11 of the Statutes of Canada, 2013 originally Bill C-37
Wouldn't it be nice if all these connections were hyperlinked in the proclamation? Check out my Slaw post on Hyperlinks and Sercher Expectations or today's Slaw Tip on noting up legislation without handy tools.

Date sorting and the Alberta Courts Judgment database - UPDATE

I wrote about problems with the Alberta Courts Judgment Database in a July 25 post. The webmaster was responsive to the problem and had contact with myself and others at the firm letting use know that they were working on the problems. Today, I got some welcome news from Strater Patrick letting me know that the judgment database date sorting is working as it has in the past..

Thank you to all the long suffering technical folk who have to deal with problems like this.

Date sorting at the Alberta Courts Judgment database

Someone at the Alberta Courts is going to be very unhappy.  I was asked to write a letter to share how disappointed (stronger phrasing will likely be used) that the Alberta Courts Judgment Database is no longer applying their "recent First default to the Quick Search results. 

For those of you not in the know, the Quick Search function provides the previous 30 days of judgments and it often used by lawyers to review new case law.  Remember the days when you walked into the Alberta Law Libraries and looked at the recent cases pile on the side reference desk (in Edmonton). The Quick Search function is the virtual equivalent of this process - an important tool for lawyers.

Not only is the Quick Search function not applying the default sort order, this seems to be broken for all searching. The search template shows a Sort by option of Recent First by default, but the results are not matching that criteria.

Fast forward to this morning when I was asked "What were they thinking?"

A very good question I hope to find an answer to. Even better, a return to the previous - successful - functionality.

The vagaries of case law language

I was at the CBA Alberta Law Conference last week and attended the Labour and Employment session on Friday afternoon.  The discussion was about restrictive covenants: non competes and non-solicitation clauses mostly in employment law.

 It was an interesting session, as was the whole conference. I used Storify to collect all the tweeted notes from the event (see my Slaw post yesterday for a link). You will see that a bulk of the discussion talked about injunctions and tests .

 Today, I was reading a newly posted case on CanLII Lia Sophia Canada, LP v Parklane Jewelry Limited, 2013 ABQB 53 (CanLII),

http://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2013/2013abqb53/2013abqb53.html

This is a matter which is on point for restrictive covenants signed by employees and injunctions.

This interlocutory decision has no mention of the following words:

• Employee
• Employer
• Competition or (non-competition)
• Restrictive
• Covenant
• Trade

I point it out to you as a warning that relying on keyword searches for case law can sometimes fail.  I expect that if this decision proceeds to a reported completion, it may have those key terms included.  I suspect a case comment or digest would reveal the essence of the case that this short interim decision relates to, but the trick is an interested author finding it in the first place.

I do remember the presenters suggesting that most of the cases in this area were settled after injunctions were sought.

Conduct Money

For years, as long as I can remember actually, the Alberta Rules of Court have referred to the
Public Service Subsistence, Travel and Moving Expenses Regulation for calculating the appropriate mileage reimbursement and costs for meals that are paid to witnesses as conduct money.

Don't bother clicking the link above, because this regulation no longer exists.

The Subsistence, Travel and Moving Expenses regulation was published on the Government of Alberta Corporate Human Resources website. Likely because it is frequently changed and 'only' applies to the Alberta public service, this regulation, like all regulations made under the Public Service Act, are exempt from publication in the Alberta Gazette.

The big 'however' is that the regulation in question is used by reference in the Alberta Rules of Court at Schedule B s.19 to calculate conduct money.

There is a new portion of the site that contains:

Relocation and Employment Expenses

Public Service Relocation and Employment Expenses Regulation For Travel Expenses, please refer to the following:

 

For GoA Employees: Travel, Meal and Hospitality Expense Directive

Public Disclosure of Travel and Expenses Directive

Unfortunately, the mileage and meals allowed expenses amount is now only available to the Government of Alberta Employees visiting this site. Your Field Librarians will work on updating our links and seeking out an alternative source for this necessary information.

UPDATE: Corporate Human Resources will email you a copy of the directive on request to GoAExpensesDirective@gov.ab.ca.  I have written to ask that they make this document accessible to the public.

Annotated Alberta Rules

Fielders may have heard me complain about my perception that not enough cases on the new Alberta Rules were making it in to the Fradsham's Alberta Rules of Court Annotated text/search template on Westlaw Canada's Litigator service.

Content is extremely important from the perspective of the Field Libraries, and I am very happy to report that 33 sections of the Fradsham's Annotation have citations to cases from 2011. There were also some 2010 cases added bringing that "hit" total to 12. There is still only one 2009 case in the annotations, but given the in-force date of the new Alberta Rules of Court is November 1, 2010, I can let that go.

Researchers should remember that there are other sources of information about cases considering the Alberta Rules of Court, including the excellent material available from Jensen Shawa Solomon Duguid Hawkes LLP in their Rules newsletters. There is also an online version of the Alberta Civil Procedure Handbook which is linked from FieldNet for our internal folk. More information on that Juriliber product is available.

Happy rules consideration searching.

Wolfram Alpha

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.

Searching for journal articles

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

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.

Expired regulations

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

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

Fabulous advice from a U of A Law student

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.

Do YOU use a checklist?

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!

How do you seek information

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

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.

Twitter searching

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.

An example of poor legal research?

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