The very first Research Tip on this blog was about reading the URL.  That advice is the same today as it was back in January 2011.  Understanding ‘where’ on the web you are getting information from is a useful skill.

Dan has written about phishing and there is a a good twist on Lifehacker that discusses how to boost your phishing detection skills.  The skill set boils down to reading the URL and being aware of where you are vs. where you want to be.

What does this have to do with legal research? Reading a URL and understanding …

One of the things that we teach at Head Start* programs is how to limit searching to the most relevant set of data that will lead quickly to an answer. Today’s Tip is to remember that a data set limit might be a jurisdiction, court level or date range or it could be deciding to look first to digests of cases rather than a full text source.

A student recently asked how many cases to use in a memo to illustrate his research findings.  My response: only as many as you need to show binding or if not binding then …

With Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation coming into force on July 1, 2014, you may have noticed an increasing number of “confirm your email” opt in messages. Though there is a transition period where consent to receive commercial electronic messages is implied, most organizations are getting their express consent ducks in a row.

Today’s Tip is to be list conscious…or more practically, think really hard before you decide to unsubscribe.

Personally, I am making sure that legal publishers I deal with are able to send me email. Though there are plenty of ways to stay up to date on new publications and …

When you are citing a web resource, provide the URL – the whole URL that links directly to the document you are referencing.

What am I talking about? As an example, when you cite a federal regulation, you identify it with the SOR number not the page  number of the issue of the Canada Gazette that the regulation came from. The URL reference should be equally as direct in my opinion.  A hyperlink or URL that points to the SOR – in this case the HTML version of the individual regulation from the Gazette website – not the PDF link …

The librarians in our firm library often have questions on topics that are outside our experience.  This is no big deal.  As well trained and experienced legal information specialists we know the steps to follow to gather information on whatever topic comes our way.

One of the things that we have to remind ourselves to do, most especially this decade, is to constantly reorient ourselves to texts and other commentary that we have access to in our constantly changing and growing web based research tools.  I am not talking about how Google grows or new tools like CanLII Connects, but …

Whenever we give legal research training to law students one of the sources of valuable up-to-date commentary that we emphasize are papers from continuing legal education seminars. This type of material provides valuable local commentary, often on changes to the law, that is specific, succinct and to the point.

In Alberta, we are lucky that the cataloguers at the Alberta Law Libraries create a comprehensive search of the table of contents for material in their catalogue.  In addition to finding tools from the publishers of conference papers, a keyword search of the library catalogue will find the title or author …

I have to confess that I am a reader.  Go figure! Being a reader is trait that has been particularly helpful in my practice as a non-lawyer legal researcher, and given the high volume of use in my law libraries text collection (both print and online), I am not alone in this.

Often texts used in the legal research process are simply skimmed. The index points you to a place of interest, you skim a few pages, and valuable footnotes or embedded citations lead you out of the text to other resources.

Today’s Tip – pick up a textbook and …

Headnotes – a brief summary, comment, or explanation, often prepared by an editor and pladed at the beginning of a court decision. In the opinion of this librarian – the value added information about a decision that quickly and succinctly gives a hint of it’s relevance to an immediate legal research question.

Today’s Tip is a pointer that the definition of headnote applies to CanLII in a new and useful way.

What happens when you select “show headnote” for this decision from the SCC? In addition to the court prepared summary that is embedded in a Supreme court of Canada …

I really want to ty Google Glass. I am not kidding.  I think there is excellent potential that this tech – or something like it – will be an innovation bump that directly impacts legal research.

On Monday, a message from Google told me:

As we mentioned this past weekend, we’re opening up a few spots in the Glass Explorer Program this week. One thing we want to clarify is that spots in the program are for US residents only.

While we’d love to bring Glass to our friends around the world (we promise we are working on this), the

It may be a rare Slaw Tips reader who has not plugged a website URL into the Wayback Machine offered by the Internet Archive.  We have mentioned Internet Archive in a couple of previous tips here and here.

Today’s tip is a reminder that Internet Archive is more … much, much, more than just an archive of the web.  For a small slice of discovery, check out the Texts portion of this amazing collection. Did you know this collection has the 1906 Revised Statutes of Canada? It also has the RSC 1970.

There is a ton of cool …