Oh legislation.  How I love the odd and interesting and esoteric nature of delving into your secrets! Today’s Tip is a reminder that legislation passed by elected members can be amended by others if they are given the authority to do so.

I have an example from Alberta, but I have seen this phenomenon in British Columbia legislation as well:

The Fatal Accidents Act at section 8 says:

Damages for bereavement

8(1)  In this section,

(a)    “child” means a son or daughter;

(b)    “parent” means a mother or father.

(2)  If an action is brought under this Act, the

What is the most meaningful point of value that lawyers and other legal professionals are able to bring to our clients?

In What do Lawyers Sell?, Law 21’s Jordan Furlong addresses this crucial question from a  client’s point of view, and really hits it out of the park.

I’ll let Jordan do the talking from here:

Almost every client, when he first contacts a lawyer, is legitimately anxious about something important. He’s worried, he’s not sleeping well, his emotional well-being is compromised. ”Peace of mind” is what that client gets in that blessed moment when he can say

CanLII has added “See Also” references! No, I am not talking about references within CanLII to other things on CanLII, like the growing Commentary section on the site.  In this case, I mean See Also references to case comments linked to outside sources as in the image below for Sumner v PCL Constructors Inc., 2011 ABCA 326 (CanLII),
http://canlii.ca/t/fnws8.

Commercial services like Westlaw Canada and LexisNexis Quicklaw offer excellent lists of case commentary in their noting up services. This is a new feature for CanLII. I like the way that it links out to the web.…

If you do a lot of writing or editing in Word, you will often find yourself wanting to change the case of selected portions of text – perhaps to upper case or to title case. You can do this manually of course, but there is a much faster way.
First highlight the text you want to change the case of, and then press Shift+F3. Pressing this keyboard shortcut once will convert the highlighted text to upper case. Pressing it a second time will convert the text to all lowercase. Pressing it a third time will give you title case (first …

When it comes to Google Reader, the world is pretty much divided into two camps.

There are the power-users, for whom this soon-to-be-expired RSS service has long been an indispensable lifeline to the news of the day. And then there is the rest of the world, known primarily (in this regard) for uttering bewildered phrases like “what’s Google Reader?”

I suspect that a disproportionately high percentage of SlawTips readers, being so unusually sophisticated, informed, curious (and unabashedly good looking), will fall into the first camp – legal-information junkies who can’t imagine the world after the Black Monday ahead when …

Every year on April 25th, my daughter Dominique comments that it is the “perfect date”.  She is referring to the movie Miss Congeniality, and if you haven’t seen it, there is a YouTube clip. Makes me giggle every time.

Dates are often important for litigation research.  Occasionally you may need a perpetual calendar source to quickly identify what day of the week a date in the past fell on.

I like the perpetual calendar in the binding ends of the Canadian Almanac and Directory print version.  There are lovely tools and apps at timeanddate.com that do the trick as …

Any way you slice it, there is a lot of junk on YouTube. And 72 hours of new junk is uploaded every minute of every day. It would take you 6,400 years to watch all the videos on YouTube. Doubt you have time for that.
Devour.com comes to your rescue. This site sifts and sorts the junk to find best videos and a well-curated collection is posted every weekday. Fewer cute kittens, fewer nutshots, fewer laughing babies, and best of all – no crazy comments. Awesome! Visit Devour.com to watch some great videos.…

Prism, the National Security Electronic Surveillance program operated by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) has caught a great deal of press lately.  This surveillance program has raised questions as to how individuals can protect their data from being snooped upon.  These revelations have led to discussions on ways that allow people to use encryption for protection.

I have been advising lawyers to use encryption technology for some time. When contacted by a lawyer who has had a laptop stolen from a car or elsewhere my first question to them is:  “Did you have the laptop …

The library team at Field Law uses the word blink all the time.  We use it in the context of Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; i.e. What is your Blink on a starting point for this legal research question?

To back up our blink, we also document common questions and processes within a Library Procedures Manual. We also publish how to guides on our Intranet for common research tasks: How do we note up a case; how do we search for judicial consideration of a statute section; how do we check for coming in to force dates; what are the amounts …

With our camera-equipped smartphones, most of us are snapping more pictures than we ever did before. And while not quite the same as working with a digital single-lens reflex camera, the cameras on today’s smartphones can take amazing pictures.
Among the many features they now have, most smartphone cameras offer a zoom function. Nice to have a zoom, but you shouldn’t use it. Why? Unfortunately, smartphones don’t have fancy lenses. This means they have a digital zoom, not an optical zoom. When you use a digital zoom, the camera is “extrapolating” what is really there. Essentially this means the firmware …