Today’s tip: Know what you are looking for…use a dictionary.

I didn’t take biology in high school. The thought of having to disect something just wasn’t my cup of tea. I regret that decision sometimes, usually when someone sends me a request to quantify an injury to a body part that I have never heard of.

I once was asked to get a rush quantum for a musculo-ligamentous strain of the neck. Foolishly, and because the requestor gave me the confirmed spelling, I plugged the phrase into a paid legal search tool. I got an answer, but probably not the …

This tip comes from Ted Tjaden, , Slaw contributor, and National Director, Knowledge Management at McMillan.

For the last 15 years or so I have customized an HTML page sitting on my local C drive containing a 2 x 2 or 3 x 3 table of Internet links I most frequently use on a daily basis for conducting research.

This is quicker than trying to organize and subsequently use Browser bookmarks or favorites. Depending on which computer I am on, this page is either my home page (on my personal laptop) or the top “Favourite” in my browser’s …

You can have too much information. Not surprisingly though, you can often not have enough. It is important to know what is going on in the world, even if the knowing is a simple scrath of the surface. There is a reason children are encouraged to monitor current events in social studies.

A quick way to monitor current events is to quickly browse a current events source. One of my favourites is the Google News page. Though this is a search engine starting point, you can monitor trends and see broadly what is happening in the world just by viewing …

Today’s tip: Use what you have.

Knowledge is always useful, especially when it can be used more than once. This tip is a simple reminder to look first to what you (or your colleagues) have already done when you have a research question: you organization’s document management system, your binder of research memos, your personal precedents.

Yesterday I saved a client a few dollars by updating a past memo that we had written for them. Even though the context of their question was different, the information was something we already knew.…

Today’s Tip: Check with the media.

If you’re trying to find the text of a judgment that has just been released and it is not on the relevant court’s website, check the websites of the Globe and Mail and National Post. They will quite often scan in the court judgment (assuming the case is important enough) and link to it from the relevant news story.

Globe and Mail
National Post

This tip is from Susannah Tredwell, Library Manager, Lawson Lundell LLP in Vancouver, BC. Follow her on twitter or come and see her speak at the Canadian Association of Law …

Today’s Tip: research with an eye to time relevance
OR
talk about today’s dollars.

When you are reading case law with a monetary award, you might want to look at that award in today dollar values.  The Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator is a great link to put in your favourites as it can quickly give you a present value for a historical figure.

How significant is inflation? $10000 in 1969 is worth $61,354.17 today.…

To make your legislation investigation or monitoring task easier, check out the Canadian Legislation Table of links from the Lederman Law Library at Queen’s.

This organized resource offers links to current and retrospective legislation, usually from the primary source (i.e. Queen’s Printers).

A link to a jurisdiction’s statutes and regulations page on CanLII will also give their source of information.

Today’s Tip: For legislation, remember to go to the source.

For some extra info on the Why of a legislative change and some sources for that information, check out my post at Slaw yesterday and read the excellent suggestions in …

Today’s tip is simple.  Ask for help.

There is too much information in the world to have an expertise in all but the most narrow of subjects.  It is better to ask for assistance than to try to explain to someone why you expended unnecessary time and energy and might not have the ‘best’ answer.  Ask for help or advice – from your partners, from your associates, from your students, from your network, from librarians in your organization or another. 

There is no such thing as a dumb question.…

I was asked to retrieve list of cases recently which reminded me about CanLex. As I wrote on Slaw a couple of years ago, CanLex is a website that hosts some Open API’s which offer tools that marry CanLII’s Content with LexUM’s Technologies. 

I like using the Reflex-API which lets you plug in a list of neutral citations and create an HTML output file with links back to CanLII.  It is a quick way to gather a hyperlinked list of material to then download or print.

This week’s tip is to use tools to make research gathering tasks faster …