Happy 148th birthday Canada.

There is a nice history of Canada day outlined at this federal government website that was updated in June of 2014.  It reminds us of some facts.  I share those blow that relate to finding the law of Canada Day:

• July 1, 1867: The British North America Act (today known as the Constitution Act, 1867) created Canada.
• 1879: A federal law makes July 1 a statutory holiday as the “anniversary of Confederation,” which is later called “Dominion Day.”
• October 27, 1982: July 1, “Dominion Day” officially becomes Canada Day.  The

When someone does or says something nice to, for, or about you, it is appropriate to express your gratitude.

This holds true for someone who goes out of their way to assist you with your legal research problem.  I am not especially advocating a regular contribution to the wine fridge of your local law librarian who helps you all the time – I leave that to you.

Today’s Tip is particular to those (unexpectedly) wonderful public servants who call you back with information in a timely fashion, the colleague down the hall who saves you with a precedent, the partner …

Last week I posted about Legal Research Technology Skills. After reading Sarah Glassmeyer’s post on Slaw about The Future of Legal Practice and Technology for Law Professors. Today’s Tip is about technology concepts that I think are necessary for legal researchers. Concepts are things that a legal researcher should understand and have a rough idea of how they apply to legal research.

1. Document automation (including software and word processing tools like fields and macros)
2. Document management (what is kept within your organization) and content management (how are web sites, intranets and other content rich sources built)
3. Open source

Sarah Glassmeyer recently posted on Slaw about The Future of Legal Practice and Technology for Law Professors. Her opening salvo:

One of my pet peeves is when people throw around the word “technology” as a catch all to mean anything that can or will involve a computer. A common pattern is “In X number of years, this task will be replaced by TECHNOLOGY.” The speakers very rarely get into specifics as to when technology they mean. Personally, I like to amuse myself by replacing “technology” in these statements with “magic fairies.” Actually, I think fairies are more likely to

I despise long deadlines for legal research projects. Give me a complex project that has to be completed by the end of the week over a complex project that I must pick away at over a month or two any day.  Why? With a longer project I must use formal project management – on myself.

Project managing a short deadline individual research question is easy to mentally manage by scripting the activity as “the research process”.  To be clear, I am speaking of the type of legal research that is often assigned to junior lawyers, law students or law librarians. …

A post from the daily blog from Harvard Law Schools Program on Negotiation offer this advice regarding when negotiators assume too much:

One pitfall is that decision makers often overlook others’ viewpoints. When we do take others’ thinking into account, we tend to assume that they know as much as we do. For this reason, marketing experts are generally worse than non-expert consumers at predicting the beliefs, values, and tastes of consumers.

Similarly, individuals who correctly solve a problem overestimate the percentage of their peers who will be just as successful solving the same problem .

This advice resonates for …

I’ve been travelling in the Maritime this pas week. Like many places, if you are unfamiliar with the particulars of a place, sometimes signs make absolutely no sense.  For instance, the subtle differences in Sydney River, North Sydney, Sydney Mines and Sydney can be just a bit confusing when viewing a map that shows New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, and Quebec.

One of the best ways to navigate is to ask directions. It helps put the scale and scope into proper perspective.

This works for legal research too.

Happy travels.…

Today’s Tip, with thanks to Michel-Adrien Sheppard for the idea, is a reminder to lawyers looking for CPD opportunities to look to law librarians.  We can help with identifying interesting opportunities that cross our desks via publishers blurbs, calls for conference papers, media and social media monitoring.  In addition to those indirect, guide on the side types of aid, we are also offering CPD credits to lawyers at OUR educational conferences.

The final Keynote Session at the recently concluded Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference was an address on cyberbullying by Wayne Mackay.  An excellent discussion with lot’s of additional  …

Yesterday at Slaw, I wrote about preparedness. Today’s Tip is to be perfectly prepared before you start your legal research question.  I think that there are two steps to perfect legal research preparedness. Please comment if you agree or disagree!

Preparedness Step 1 – Understand the question.

• put the question in context by review text books, loose-leaf services (or – my preference – eBooks that started out as loose-leaf services) and other secondary sources of words you should be using
• check for legislation by reviewing the footnotes of those secondary sources
• look for key cases referenced in those same footnotes

I was reminded that sometimes you can find a decent review of the history of a piece of legisaltion within written decisions.  For instance, a discussion of the Election Act for Alberta was published in Engel v Alberta (Executive Council), 2015 ABQB 226 and includes a bit of legislative history.…