Canadian Lawyer

July 2010

The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers

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TECH SUPPORT Legal research in a digital world BY GERRY B LACKWELL G reybeards may remember when online legal research first became widely available — with snail-slow dial-up connections to Quicklaw. How much has changed in 30 years! New developments in online and electron- ic legal research seem to come faster every year now: new products, new for- mats, new alliances, and new modes of gathering research. The Internet, the great aggregator, has, of course, swept all before it. Given the general expecta- tion that web content will be free, it's no surprise that one clear trend is grow- ing availability of high-quality free legal research online. But legal publishers also continu- ally refine their Internet strategies. At the recent Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference in Windsor, Ont., every major publisher announced new or updated electronic products and/or new ways of delivering them. Most we polled for details declined or neglected to respond, but LexisNexis Canada, for example, announced enhancements to Quicklaw including new links to, among others, Halsbury's Laws of Canada encyclopedia (which will be complete in 2010), and all-new content such as France's JurisClasseur. LexisNexis Canada is also now on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Westlaw Canada announced new content, includ- ing expert profiles, quantum services, and updated court rule annotations in the Litigator product, as well as new e-book products. Canada Law Book, a sister company of Canadian Lawyer, was more forth- coming, having unveiled its fourth new online service, Employment Spectrum, a subscription service combining expert commentary, case law, and legislation. CLB began a systematic overhaul of its online offerings two years ago with the introduction of BestCase, a subscription service containing law reports and unre- ported decisions. This was content previ- ously available through Quicklaw (itself part of legal publishing giant LexisNexis) but now only available through CLB. With BestCase and the compa- ny's other online offerings, Criminal Spectrum and Labour Spectrum, CLB has emerged as "probably the third- place" provider of online legal research, says Ted Tjaden, national director of knowledge management at McMillan LLP. It trails longer-established online rivals Quicklaw/LexisNexis and Westlaw (with Carswell). "The other two can claim to be comprehensive," Tjaden says. "CLB is not quite there yet — although it could argue that it focuses in on quality rather than on quantity." CLB also announced first steps into new modes of electronic legal publish- ing. It launched its first PDF e-book, Finding & Managing Legal Information on the Internet by David Whelan. The e-book is designed to be used on a variety of devices, including dedicated e-book readers such as the Sony Reader and Kobo eReader from Chapters Indigo. E-books are of course nothing new in publishing — a recent count of e-book holdings at the University of Toronto topped 700,000 — or even in legal pub- lishing. Most other legal publishers have at least some e-book titles. Carswell's eReference Library (www. carswell.com/ereference), for example, offers more than a dozen of its major multi-volume research products in both print and online versions for one price. Irwin Law Inc. and other legal publishers make many of their titles available online using the ebrary (ebrary.com) technology and service. Michael Jones, CLB's director of prod- uct and business development, says there is not a lot of demand yet from lawyers for e-books designed for portable devic- es. "We're trying to anticipate where the market is going," says Jones. Tjaden calculated as far back as 2007 that the legal publishing industry had reached "a tipping point" with about 10 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com JULY 2010 27 MATT DALEY

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