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 …

As summer arrives, so does a new articling season throughout the nation.

The future of articling has been subject of much debate over the last year.  With the dust now settled on those deliberations,  Canada`s law offices will, over the next few months,  begin to welcome their new crops of eager and talented students-at-law.

For many students, it will be the best of worlds and the worst of worlds. And since articling rarely comes with a user manual, here are a few SlawTips for Students-at-Law on succeeding and navigating through the many challenges ahead in your new articling gigs:

1. There

Welcome news from David Whelan of the Great Library – Law Society of Upper Canada:

You can now print and download articles older than 18 months free of charge from the Law Society’s CLE collection, powered by the Great Library.

The service – AccessCLE – has been 100% pay-per-view since its inception in 2007 and contains over 6,000 PDF articles going back to 2004.  The articles represent the individual presentations from CLE/CPD seminars put on by the Law Society.  Our partnership with the Law Society’s CPD team is ongoing and we continue to receive and add metadata to articles from

PDF documents are great when you want to make it easy for anyone to view or print a document. But what happens when you need to alter a PDF? You can, of course, do it with Adobe Acrobat or other expensive PDF Editors, but you can also do it for free with Google Docs! It’s easy.
First, take the PDF you want to alter and upload it to Google Docs. Next, check the Convert text from PDF and image files to Google Documents checkbox. This converts a PDF document into a rich text document you can edit. When you are …

There are at least two types of realization that comes to play in the financial management of a law firm. In this context we are speaking of Billing Realization and Collection Realization.  Both of these represent potential ‘leaks’ in the financial boat of the firm if the firm is not properly attentive to these numbers.

Billing realization is the percentage of recorded lawyer or paralegal time that actually ends up on the bill sent to the client. For example, if $1,000 worth of time is recorded on the time sheet, but is whittled down and billed out for $900, the …

Most law firms have an orientation program for articling students.  I am certain that ‘legal research’ is part of the program – if not, my tip is to add it!

An look back at the conference site for last weekend’s Law and Society Association conference showed a Methods Cafe as part of the program.

Scholars experienced in using different research methods each sit in a large ballroom at different tables, which are prominently labeled with the method about which that expert is prepared to talk. The experts then act as a consultant to anyone who shows up to talk with