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TECH SUPPORT per cent of legal treatises available in electronic format. For law libraries, he points out, there are obvious advantages, including the ability to hyperlink and cut and paste electronic content, and to access content at the same time someone else is using it — not possible with print books. Tjaden speculates Apple Inc.'s iPad with its innovative multi-touch user interface, which more closely simulates the print book reading experience, may push forward the move to e-books in legal publishing. The new CLB e-book title will sell for the same price as the print edition, $32, despite widespread perceptions that e-books are, or should be, less expensive. But as Jones points out, there are ongoing costs associated with any online service, including even more or less static con- tent such as this. "This is just the first of many titles that are coming," he says. "There may be variations along the way based on what we learn from this one, but digitization is not going to go away, it's just going to accelerate." CLB also made its first foray into mobile publishing with new online ver- sions of Ontario Annual Practice, 2010- 2011 Edition and British Columbia Annual Practice, 2010-2011 Edition formatted for smartphones such as the BlackBerry and iPhone. The online services are bundled with the print subscriptions at no addi- tional charge. "We thought this kind of content fit well in a portable format," says Jones. "These are not [titles] you read cover to cover. If you need to know what Rule 36 says, you flip open the book and read it and see what commentators say about it." Now lawyers can access the information anywhere they have their BlackBerrys or iPhones and can connect over a cellular or Wi-Fi network. Meanwhile, savvy lawyers are also learning they don't always have to pay for quality research on the Internet. The CanLII web site (canlii.org) from the Canadian Legal Information Institute, for example, offers easy, free online access to federal and provincial statutes and cases as well as board and tribunal cases. Law firm web sites, legal blogs, and journals offer a wealth of free commentary. Tjaden has developed a custom Google search (tinyurl.com/canadianlawfirms) that makes it easier to get at such sources. Users enter search terms as they would in any Google search, but the results are confined to pages from the 79 top Canadian law firms (by size), 205 Canadian law blogs, and 20 Canadian law journals that Tjaden selected. A similar U.S. search, which also includes British sites, is at feefiefoefirm. com. The Internet can also help keep lawyers up to date on regulatory mat- ters, case law, and other areas through "current awareness" sites and services, some of which "push" relevant news to subscribers as it breaks. Linex Legal (linexlegal.com) and Lexology (lexology. com) offer free services mainly of interest to law departments. The Ontario Court of Appeal offers RSS (really simple syn- dication) feeds of its latest cases direct to your e-mail or RSS reader. Rulings from a number of Canadian courts, including the B.C. and Ontario courts of appeal, are also available on Twitter. "You're getting alerted right away whereas you might have to wait days or weeks [for the same information to show up in com- mercial research services]," says Tjaden. Doing due diligence on sources is more important than ever with free legal research, and it hardly needs mentioning that informal sources such as blogs and Twitter streams are just that — informal, sometimes ephemeral. But this not to say free content is necessarily less reliable, says Tjaden. It's just free. Gerry Blackwell is a freelance technology writer based in London, Ont. Read his blog at http://afterbyte.blogspot.com. FIRST LOOK — OFFICE 2010 T his is a very preliminary look at Microsoft Offi ce 2010. So far? We're underwhelmed. There are some good new features to be sure, but not enough for most users to be able to justify the cost of upgrading — $120 to $500, depending on the edition. The big news is Offi ce 2010 supposedly embraces cloud computing, the use of ap- plications and other resources and services residing on remote Internet servers. Microsoft Corp. has built simplifi ed web versions of three of the Offi ce applications, Word, Power- Point, and Excel, which Offi ce 2010 users can access online. They can also create online "work spaces" on Microsoft servers to store and share documents, and they can move documents back and forth between the online work space and their own computers. How useful might any of this be to law fi rms? Not terribly in our assessment. Unlike subscription-based cloud computing services such as Google Apps, the Offi ce web applications merely extend the computer-based programs, not replace them. Micro- soft intends them to be used for light editing of documents that have been posted to the Internet for sharing or collaboration — to correct spelling or add an image, for example. The programs themselves, the ones on your computer, have been improved. The ribbon interface that annoyed many when Microsoft introduced it with Offi ce 2007 because it radically altered how the programs worked without delivering much in return, has been refi ned. One key complaint, that it wasn't possible to customize the ribbon, has been addressed. It is now possible to select which buttons and icons appear where. Users upgrading to Offi ce 2010 will still be annoyed by the diffi culty — or impos- sibility in some cases — of moving settings and macros from earlier versions of the product to the new one. All applications now have a new built-in graphics capability that makes it possible to do light editing to prepare images and video for insertion into a document, eliminating the need to launch (or buy) a third-party graphics application. Offi ce 2010 introduces new features that make it less susceptible to security breach- es. There is a new paste preview feature that lets you see how something you've cut from another document or application will look before you paste it into your document. This is a highly selective and abbreviated summary of what's new in Offi ce 2010. We'll return with a more considered assessment in a future issue. — GB www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com JULY 2010 29 Gadget Watch