Case Research

I have been doing sessions on researching case law in Australia for our legal team this week.

These are the topics I am covering:

Finding cases by citation
Finding cases relating to a specific section of legislation
Finding cases by phrase, party or search terms
Case citators vs full text
Unreported, reported and authorised cases
International caselaw

I am demonstrating different searches using internal, subscription based and public access legal databases such as LexisNexisAU (CaseBase), LegalOnline (Firstpoint), Westlaw, TimeBase (Legislation with Case Link), AustLII and LawLink for Court sites.

This sesion has been popular and I have received good feedback which is nice. I don't think clients realise how great it is to get positive feedback (or any at all in fact, positive or otherwise)!! I have been using NetMeeting software and teleconference facilities to offer these classes to those in our offices around Australia, it is working well.

The end of lawyers?

I just got my hands on the new book by Richard Susskind. It looks like an interesting read, but I will have to skim through it and pass it on to the legal peoples. It would be interesting to hear their thoughts on the book, but I doubt they will have time to enter into a conversation about law and technology.

Executive renumeration Australia

I noted recently that Barack Obama was considering legislative action against company directors who are still taking huge executive salaries even while the government is bailing the business world out of trouble and employees are losing their jobs. I was wondering if Australia would follow and it appears that Kevin Rudd and Lindsay Tanner are considering something similar. Public opinion on this topic is pretty clear at the moment with the news that Sol Trujillo will leave Telstra and Australia $40million (untaxed), richer, as if he needed the money.

Mallensons Stephen Jaques has released Executive Remuneration: Guidelines and Developments - 19 February 2009.

Jureeka

I came across this at the RIPS Law Librarian blog and I love the concept. Eureka for Jureeka?

It's a new Firefox add-on that "transforms legal citations in web pages into hyperlinks that point to online source material."

How many times have I come to the end of an assignment or paper and dreaded the task of creating footnotes for everything I have referenced within the paper? It would be great for online publishers and authors, depending on the ability of the system to find the best source to link to. If you could select sources such as legislation on ComLaw, onlne commentary from LexisNexis, book references to Google Books or cases on Austlii it may actually work? If not and it is completely random, searching acoss the www for anything with that citation, it could be a dangerous tool.

This is actually how I imagined wikis to work, before I used one. I thought that every word in a wiki article that corresponded with an article title would automatically become a hyperlink. I didn't realise that you had to identify works as hyperlinks.

I'll give it a go when I get a chance at home using firefox.....

Catching up

I finally found time to do a bit of catch up on my current awareness reading via RSS Feeds today. This is what I found:

CCH has released a White Paper called Professionals and web 2.0. It provides the results of a survey of Asia Pacific professionals including legal and accounting and their use of web 2.0 technologies.

A list of 250 Top Australian Blogs. I am looking forward to visiting some of them at home over the next few weeks....

The RBA has reduced the interest rate to 3.25% - yeah and the government has announced a further stimulus package and most of us get $950 - yeah again!!

Legal Research blog

I came across this new blog written about legal research in Australian (yeah)! This is how the author (Lauren) describes it

Legal Research Rescue (LRR) is a place for legal research tips and tricks for junior (and not-so-junior) lawyers, law graduates and law students

I subscribed straight away and recommend it for librarians to use as a resource when conducting legal research training or doing research themselves. She has also created a delicious account for legal research sites and articles.

Lawyers and Web 2.0

I have noticed a particular aversion or apathy to new technologies amongst the legal staff where I work. My, the library and the organisation's attempts to introduce web 2.0 tools and education have invoked comments such as - "blogs, wikis, RSS: I have no idea what they are, maybe some of you younger ones do" chuckle chuckle.... Until these tools are seen as being more widely accepted by the legal community, the lawyers here won't invest time and energy to investigate them and the possible benefits. Let's face it, they are busy and are bound to be more so this year with the fallout from the economic downturn. Unless there is a valid reason for them to become involved, there is no impetus, especially in government/public sectors. A few Australian law firms are introducing RSS Feeds, blogs and wikis, though mainly for internal use, as they have a commercial reason to 'keep up with the Jones's' and to engage with their clients. These initiatives are often driven by the IT or Library/Information areas within the firm rather than by the Partners.

I am currently tracking several US Legal Blogs or Blawgs and their numbers are increasing, in stark contrast to the lack of blawging going on here in Australia. There are US blogs on different practice areas as well as general discussion on court decisions, proposed legislation, judicial appointments and other topics of interest to practitioners. Lawyers in the US are also embracing the use of Twitter to communicate with colleagues and to debate and discuss legal issues. This blog entry from Real Lawyers Have Blogs summarises my thoughts on why lawyers have been slow on the uptake of web 2.0 technology.

Digital Darwinism?

Older lawyers running law firms fight change.

Lawyers in general feel they are above the fray - 'others may be harnessing innovative technology, but we're dealing with the law. Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn? We're proud to say we're a non user.'

Courts have not adopted ways to cite free case law and blogs as secondary sources.

Businesses in the legal industry who do not understand Web 2.0 and social media support with advertising moneys hard copy legal periodicals.

Though legal blogs are flourishing, there may not be the quality of legal content online we see from the general publishing industry.

Facebook

Interesting to read about the lawyers who managed to get an ACT court to agree to let them serve papers via Facebook. Apparently this is the first time as far as anyone knows and the story has had press coverage internationally as well as in Australia.

Australian court serves documents via Facebook

“Today in what appears to be a first in Australia and perhaps the world, Master Harper of the ACT Supreme Court ordered that a default judgement could be served on defendants by notification on Facebook” Sydney Morning Herald 12th December 2008

Power to the people?

Evidently there are high hopes for social networking in the future. I have recently come across two blogs discussing whether social networking may replace (respectively) lawyers and 'some government functions'.

1. This topic has also been raised by the Gartner group, releasing a press release stating, Gartner Says Citizen Social Networks Will Complement, and May Replace, Some Government Functions.

From eGov

2. Legal futurist Richard Susskind's sequel to his 1996 best-seller The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology (Oxford UP) will be published in December. The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford UP, December 2008) continues the author's focus on the effect of advances in information technology upon the law and legal practice, providing fresh perspectives and analysis of anticipated developments in the decade to come. In particular, he aims to explore the extent to which the role of the traditional lawyer can be sustained, in the face of the challenging trends in the legal marketplace and the new techniques and technologies for the delivery of legal services.

Among Suskind's predictions: (1) legal advice will be recycled by clients in social networking communities just like knowledge management recycles attorney work product internally and (2) client communities will push law firms to come together and form their own social networks to hold down costs by not reinventing the wheel.

From Law Librarian Blog

Australian Library Industry Twitter Users List

I just came across this post on Libraries Interact by Neerav. Great idea!
Australian Library Industry Twitter Users List

I was wondering if I could use Twitter for something useful.... I have also been reading about a debate happening in the US among Lawyers on the value of blogging and twittering, from the Legal Blog Watch