Today’s Tip was inspired by an email exchange with Anne Bowers of the Northumberland County Law Association Library. Anne and I were discussing how we stay current on trends that affect us as law librarians. As we chatted about our personal current awareness activities, I realized that many lawyers rely on the librarians in their circles to help them stay current.

Consider your options for engaging with librarians for current awareness activities. If you have an ‘in house’ library team, let them help you with:

• monitoring websites
• helping you choose relevant RSS feeds to subscribe to (and showing you how

I like baking.  You gather all the ingredients, put them together according to a recipe and then, if all goes well, you share a tasty treat.  Starting a legal action is a little bit like baking:

• you start with the facts provided by your client (ingredients)
• you put them together according to accepted rules (recipe)
• you serve your claim on the other parties (share)

The recipe for a claim can be tested with a precedent for a pleading.  I was reminded today of how challenging finding a precedent can be. Sources of pleading precedents can be internal to your organization: …

Updated:

A question and some answers came across the CALL-L listserv this week about sources for BC Utilities Commission Decisions.  Like some other tribunals, the commission decisions are not available for searching on CanLII, LexisNexis Quicklaw or Westlaw Next Canada. There is a basic index function on the Commission website, but it was not adequate for the needs of the person posting the question.

Today’s Tip is thanks to the members of the CALL-L list who shared their knowledge with the crowd.

Anne Whelan of Mercer shared British Columbia Utilities Commission Online Document Library – a source that reports …

Movie enthusiasts may recognize that the title of Today’s Tip is a quote from my personal Disney favourite: Mulan. I much prefer this modern interpretation of the Admonitions Scroll. Reflect before you act is excellent advice for many things, including legal research.

Cathie Best at her Best Guide to Canadian Legal Research agrees that “Plan and organize your research” is the first step in the legal research process. How can your reflect before you act on your legal research question?

Start your research memo by writing the facts as you understand them and then skip to …

Often, I write with too many commas.  A comma is a beautiful thing, in fact, all punctuation is necessary for readers to understand a piece of text. Just ask the  Associated Press who sent this punctuation-less tweet:

Then there was a clarification:

Today’s Tip: Think about your legal research responses.  Are you missing a comma?…

First let me say that I really like reading on screen for business purposes.  Second, let me contradict that by complaining about my aged eyes and how I keep pulling my monitors closer to my face. Third, let me tell you how much I enjoy reading novels in print when that is a viable alternative (not traveling, my public library has a print copy without waiting for an inter-library loan). Fourthly, let me give a hat tip to John DiGilio who noted a post on Lawyerist.com that inspired Today’s Tip.

Scientific American looked at some studies comparing paper vs. screen …

Some of the high use items linked from our firm’s intranet are calculators.  I am not talking about the e-quivalent of a device that helps find the square root of 9*, but rather tools that help calculate things for context.

We have tipped you previously on calculating present value and currency calculators but we haven’t talked about date calculators.

Time and Date AS is a Norwegian LLC that gives people free time and date related information and services via timeanddate.com.  This site offers multiple points of assistance including a date calculator that lets you add or subtract days, weeks,  …

A Slaw.ca post by Lynn Foley last week provided the inspiration for today’s tip.

Lynn asked Slawyers to consider what their clients perceive as value using the lens of the ACC Value Challenge. I ask Slaw Tips research readers to consider how the discrete piece of legal research they are doing adds value for the client.

One of the most important skills a legal researcher can bring to a project is the ability to focus on the question they are trying to answer. There are a ton of information sources available that any question can be filtered through, so the …

I like to think I know about all kinds of sources – partly because I usually remember what I share.  Sometimes I just miss things though. Today’s Tip could come with the Beatles as the background music:

I get by with a little help from my friends

Thanks to my new colleague Josette McEachern, who posted on the Edmonton Law Libraries Association Blog, I now know that there is an open and free version of the Income Tax Act Annotated provided by Lexum.

Check it out…

Today’s tip is a quick reminder to think about the British/Canadian and US spellings and how that might affect your search string.

offence = offense

Offense in CanLII finds 227Alberta Appeal court decisions.
Offence in CanLII finds 4433 Alberta Appeal court decisions.

Happy Wednesday!

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