Today’s Tip comes from Melanie Bueckert, Legal Research Counsel, Manitoba Court of Appeal. Melanie shared a story about looking for citing cases:

I wanted to know if the Supreme Court of Canada had ever cited its decision in F.H. v McDougall, 2008 SCC 53. So I headed over to Quicklaw, pulled up the QuickCite record and filtered it by “Supreme Court of Canada”. There was one result from 2011.

Just to be thorough, I thought I would check Westlaw to see if there was anything more recent. This is not an easy task, as you likely know. I found the

One of the things that we are careful to do in the Field Law Libraries is to make sure that the output of research is the way that it is needed. There is no sense in providing a printed copy of something if the requester wants to send a tweet about it. Likewise, there is little use in sending someone a short URL if they need to attach something to a printed brief.

Today’s Research tip crosses into technology: Try using Storify to capture information where your research sources are from social medias or the web.

To see a sample …

I confess to being a skim-a-holic. I find personal satisfaction in having a really good idea what people in the legal industry are talking, thinking, and writing about.

The problem is that there is a ton of new information. If 3 hours of video is uploaded per minute to YouTube just from mobile devices, how do you determine what to pay attention to? If there are 500,000 new blog posts each day, which are the most meaningful to your work?

My method for narrowing the flood of information to the most succinct and ‘important to me’ trickle is to …

I usually talk about currency from the “the quality or state of being current” perspective. Today, I used the Bank of Canada Currency Converter to look at the exchange rate which leads me to today’s tip that deals with another definition of currency:

Look to the Bank of Canada site for money issues.

• The Currency Converter offers exchange rates, current and historical.
• The Inflation Calculator is an excellent tool to determine what the present day value of a monetary award from a past decision is equivalent to in today’s dollars
• Canadian interest rates are available using a 10 year lookup

Today’s Tip: Consider how you need a decision to help determine where to get it.

An announcement from the SCC last week inspired this tip:

Major addition to the Supreme Court of Canada decision’s website

The Supreme Court of Canada and Lexum are proud to announce that the Court’s decision website now contains all decisions back to 1907. Moreover, all the PDF versions of decisions up to 2010 are identical to the official version available in the Supreme Court Reports.
This major content addition has been made possible thanks to the support of the Supreme Court of Canada. The Court

Are you the most busy lawyer in Canada? Do you still need to know what is going on in the legal industry in our country?

The US Legal Market offers busy lawyers a 5 minute daily visit of the RSS feed for the legal gossip blog Above the Law to keep up to date on what is happening inside the legal industry. Associate bonuses, policies from big law firms, law firm mergers, layoffs and closures.

Here in Canada, we have 140Law – a daily offering of legal headlines offered as a roundup post on the Wise Law Blog by Garry …

I was looking at the Interest Act (Canada) recently which reminded me to remind Tips readers to look carefully and closely at coming in to force information when researching legislation.

The Act at section 4 reads:

Marginal note: When per annum rate not stipulated

4. Except as to mortgages on real property or hypothecs on immovables, whenever any interest is, by the terms of any written or printed contract, whether under seal or not, made payable at a rate or percentage per day, week, month, or at any rate or percentage for any period less than a year, no interest

A note about an infographic was delivered to me by email yesterday. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation website www.fightspam.gc.ca. The infographic touted in the email was titled “Worried its Spam? 5 Things to Look for”.
Sharing the infographic was encouraged in the email. Sharing is what infographics are all about.

Gyi Tsakalakis has a fantastic collection of Law Infographics on his Pinterest channel. Gyi has jsut started contributing to Attorney at Work. Gyi’s byline for his Optimize!column:

Gyi Tsakalakis helps lawyers put their best foot forward online because clients are looking for them there. He is a co-founder

My browser is crowded with so many links in my favourites bar that sometimes it is faster to type a known URL than scroll for my link. Typing “parl.gc.ca” in the address bar of my browser inspired today’s tip. My shortcut to the parliamentary website skips directly to English, my sadly unilingual preferred language. As you can see below though, the beginning of the site has “important notices“…something that could be overlooked.

Click the image to enlarge.

Today’s Tip: Start at the beginning. …

As the shelf sign says, not all tips are online. Remember to read the notes provided by your law library.…