It's SLAW-tastic!

Introducing Slaw! A uniquely Canadian legal research and IT blog, featuring an All Star Lineup of Canadian research and tech gurus, and some tag-along named Steve Matthews.

Introducting Slaw!

Slaw is a co-operative weblog about Canadian legal research and the impact of technology on it. Our audience includes practicing lawyers, legal librarians, legal academics and students - anyone, in short, who uses IT in researching the law. The aim is to share information, offer advice and instruction, and occasionally provoke.

Slaw was founded by Simon Fodden, Professor Emeritus of Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, and already prominent in the blogging sphere with Xanada. Slaw operates with a core of regular contributors and a quickly expanding group of occasional contributors.

Things are just getting started, so keep checking back. The dialogue among the members of this group has a ton of promise, and should be fascinating. Keep an eye on us Canadians Eh! :-)

RSS Feeds for Alberta QP Website &QP Source Professional

Thanks to Teresa Gleave, Fasken's Library Director here in Vancouver, for redirecting this notice from Sheldon Staszko (via the Calgary LL Group Listserv):

"Dear CLLG Members,

I am pleased to announce that Alberta Queen's Printer has launched its RSS (Really Simple Syndication) service to provide the public with the ability to receive updates to legislation directly to their desktop.

Users can subscribe to receive all legislative updates or only those updates to legislation of individual government ministries. The service is also provided to subscribers of QP Source Professional.

For more information on the RSS service or to subscribe to receive legislative updates, please visit the Queen's Printer website and click on the XML RSS link under "What's New".

If you are a subscriber to QP Source Professional, please select your RSS feeds on QP Source Professional.

Have any questions or comments on RSS? Feel free to contact me at the information below.

Thanks,

Sheldon

Sheldon D. Staszko
Director, Alberta Queen's Printer"

Teresa also comments, "this is something something many of us have been waiting for, to help law librarians push current information to our users instead of having to go look for it. Now if we can just get B.C. and Canada to start doing this." Wouldn't that be nice! And wouldn't it be interesting if Legislative updates beat our Courts & case law to the RSS punch. I never would have guessed it.

Long Time No Blog?

Well I'm finally back and sort of dug out. 563 post-spam-filter emails later, and I'm almost back in the land of the normalcy.

A couple of notables, from while I was gone...

The Internet Marketing Attorney is at it again. Micah Buchdahl reviews the AMLaw 250 websites, plus a ton of International and Small/Mid Sized law firm websites (toot toot on the International Category...). Law firms have until September to get their entries in. I've got a couple of more feature additions before I make our submission. :-)

Cindy Chick has also dug up an interesting article - Critical Issues in Legal Records Management. I've just skimmed, but RIM is one of the topics that first drew my interests towards KM (and I also think it's one of those core competency things), so I'll be having a nice read on the train ride home tonight.

Finally, Joy London points to an interesting article in Managing Partner magazine. And the best quote (IMHO) was from a Canadian KM practitioner - Marcia Cooper from Blakes:

"The early initiatives tended to focus on discrete legal know-how needs, such as establishing model precedents and a collection of research memoranda. These objectives have broadened to address a wider range of explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge capture. KM is more than legal know-how, comprising client and firm information. We aim to leverage our information and knowledge on a global basis for reuse in practice and application in business development, client service, risk management and the firm’s operations."

It's nice to see anyone pushing a very broad vision of KM like this. Way to go Marcia!