• Lawyers and Web 2.0: what are the implications?
  Published: July 10, 2009
  Source: KM Librarian
  Today I started work on my paper for the ALLA Evolution Conference. The topic is Professionals and Web 2.0, and will to some extent be a presentation of the results from our Professionals and Web 2.0 whitepape...
• Legal Professionals and Web 2.0 - ALLA presentation
  Published: September 11, 2009
  Source: KM Librarian
  I have loaded a copy of my conference presentation up to Slideshare - there are notes for relevant slides too.Professionals and Web 2.0: Findings from the CCH whitepaperView more presentations from Linda Moore....
• Removing Our Inherited Blinders: Thomson Reuters CEO on the Next Generation of Westlaw
  Published: December 1, 2009
  Source: Law Librarian Blog
  Tom Glocer has been CEO of Thomson Reuters since 2001 and has been a blogger for the last couple of years. His blog came to my attention because I was so utterly bored over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend that...
• Free Political Lectures Available Via the Web
  Published: December 2, 2009
  Source: Law Librarian Blog
  Online College has posted a collection of of links titled 100 Awesome Open Lectures for Political Minds. Some specific lectures include American Political Thought, The Supreme Court, Civil Liberties, and Civil...
• Vote For Your Favourite Legal Blog
  Published: December 1, 2009
  Source: House of Butter - practicesource.com
  The shortlist (or should we say long list) of 100 selected finalists has now been published by the ABA and they want you to vote for your favourite in each of their 10 categories. Unfortunately the list isn't q...
• Wikipedia in Court: When and How Citing Wikipedia and Other Consensus Websites is Appropriate
  Published: December 2, 2009
  Source: Legal Research Plus
  “Wikipedia in Court: When and How Citing Wikipedia and Other Consensus Websites is Appropriate” HANNAH B. MURRAY, affiliation not provided to SSRN JASON C. MILLER, Government of the United States of America...
• Screenjelly: Record and Share your Screen Activity at Twitter
  Published: July 7, 2009
  Source: Web Apps on Go2Web20
  Screenjelly records your screen activity with your voice so you can spread it as a video via Twitter or email. Use it to quickly share cool apps or software tips, report a bug, or just show stuff you like. S...
• Plugin by C. Murray Consulting

Sorry for going AWOL from the blogosphere for the last couple of months – I won’t bore you with the details but I will say “I’m back!” and have plenty of new articles up my sleeve. Actually, they’re in my Drafts folder, but you knew what I meant.

I'm back!

For now though, let me say thanks for the following LRR mentions – I get excited when I find proof that people actually read this blog!

Thanks #1 – The New Lawyer recommended my Twitter feed as one to follow! Thanks @thenewlawyer! Always a great read for Aussie legal news.

Thanks #2 – LRR got a mention in Kayleen Wardell’s ALLA conference presentation “From Caveman to CaseBase: 
the evolution of legal research through the technological age” - unfortunately I didn’t get to Darwin for the conference, but this definitely looked like a presentation I would have liked to see. I’m just hoping that as the LRR mention was toward the end of the presentation, it was being likened more to the “CaseBase” end of the spectrum and not the “Caveman” one…!

RSS Feed

One final note – I’ve had a couple of people mention that their RSS feeds aren’t working – it’s because LRR has changed to its own, new, domain. If you’ve still got the old feed in your RSS reader, please update it to http://www.legalresearchrescue.com/?feed=rss2 or use the subscribe button in the right-hand menu.

For some great subscription-based services that you can use to stay up to date with legal and industry developments, feel free to check out my previous article on developing your current awareness strategies to beat the legal-market downturn. If, however, the research budget has been cut and your firm won’t be signing up for any new resources for a while, fear not – this article is all about the best free resources available for keeping up to date with legal, client and industry developments. I’ve been looking forward to writing this article and sharing some of these resources with you – in my opinion, the free resources listed below often beat their subscription-based counterparts on quality of information and timeliness. Thankfully, it turns out you don’t always get what you pay for – these free resources are worth your time and much more!

Know your clients and their industry – for free!

Google News and web alerts

If you have not used Google News alerts to monitor mentions of clients, topics and people in the press, you have been missing out on the single most useful news monitoring tool available, free or otherwise. From an inconspicuous link in the left hand column, you can set up either email alerts or an RSS feed based on any word, phrase or crazy-complex-Google-search-string you can think of. Check out my article on using Google for legal research for some tips and tricks on operators and connectors to really narrow down what you want to monitor. 

Google News with "News Alerts" circled in red

Google News alerts are completely customisable. As well as allowing you to use all of the Google operators and connectors in your search string, you can specify what the alert is to search across – news sources, blogs, the web generally, video, groups or “comprehensive” being all of the above – and how often you wish to receive the alert – once a day, once a week or “as it happens”. Tip – don’t select “as it happens” unless you have a very specific search set up or you like having a whole tonne of email alerts clogging up your inbox. Choose your email address or RSS to set the mode of delivery. You can change and delete alerts really easily via the “manage my alerts” link. This makes it a great resource to set others up with – they can manage their alerts in the future without involving you. Easy for you and for them. 

Create and manage alerts quickly and easily

 It’s important to note that Google News only searches across the last 30 days worth of news. This isn’t an issue when setting up alerts (no time warping here, you can only be alerted to new news) but it is something to be aware of when running a search. You can access older news via the archives, but they’re a little hidden – jump into the Google News Advanced Search screen and you’ll see a link to the “archive” about down the page. Why it is tucked away in there I have no idea – the news archive is an amazingly powerful tool, complete with its own advanced search options.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Google News searches across the online versions of hardcopy newspapers and publications. This usually isn’t an issue when using the alerts to monitor updates in certain areas, but can be an issue if you are using the search function to find old newspaper articles. While hardcopy and online versions or articles are often the same, they are not always the same – I’ve seen headings change, articles shortened or lengthened and sometimes articles disappearing altogether between online and print versions of publications. If this is an issue for your research task, talk to you librarian or leave me a comment for info on searching across hardcopy press only.

Business Spectator 

I still cannot believe this resource is free – but am sure glad it is! Business Spectator is another free resource that puts many of its costly subscription-based counterparts to shame. It is a “24-hours-a-day business news and commentary website” written by leading Australian business commentators Alan Kohler, Stephen Bartholomeusz and Robert Gottliebsen (who are backed by an absolute powerhouse of journalists, editors and professionals).

I find that the easiest way to use Business Spectator for client and industry monitoring is to set up customised email alerts. Alerts can be personalised so that you receive news/commentary on a particular company (enter the ASX code or company name), industry sector (currently 27 to chose from) and so that you receive them at particular times of the day or week.

Use Business Spectator's email alerts for monitoring clients and industries

Read about legal developments – for free!

Fee Fie Foe Firm

Fee Fie Foe Firm is one of those “I wish I had thought of that!” ideas which has taken the legal research world by storm. Use FeeFieFoeFirm to search across thousands of law firm websites for articles, bulletins, press releases and  legal experts. Because the site uses the powerful Google search technology (complete with the connectors, operators and modifiers that go with it) and includes separate sites for so many jurisdictions (Australia, UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand and South Africa) this site is your one shop stop for case notes, legislative developments and other legal and regulatory updates. An added bonus of law firm website publications is that they tend to be very client focussed, so searching for legal updates here means you’re likely to find practical, to-the-point and commercially focussed articles – and not the interesting-but-a-bit-pie-in-the-sky articles you often get in legal journals. 

Part of what makes me love this resource is its inclusivity – law firms don’t have to pay to be included on this site (as is the case with similar products like Mondaq and Linex Legal) which means this is the most comprehensive law firm search out there. As long as they’re on the web, they are pretty much guaranteed to be covered. If you know of a law firm site that’s not on here (I challenge you to find one!), be sure to let the site’s creator @damienmacrae know.

LexisNexis Daily Unreported Judgments Notifier

Perhaps the only product LNAU doesn’t try to charge us for (now that Lawyers Weekly is no longer free), LexisNexis’ Daily Unreported Judgments Notifier is an email alert for all cases that come out of the Australian courts as soon as they are made available to the publisher (usually within a day), which means this is a great resource when you need to know about the latest cases as soon as they are decided. Whilst the DUJN is quite basic in content and design, what sets it above other free daily alerts, such as legal publisher CCH’s, is its simplicity, full text coverage and the fact that it doesn’t rely upon a LNAU subscription to make use of many of the links. However, I find that the CCH daily email alert is a good option if you do have a decent CCH subscription and want links to legal news and case summaries. 

On this topic, I’d just like to put one of my nerd-wish-list items out there – an alert service from the AustLII advanced search screen. If I could select which AustLII case law/journals/other databases to search across and could use its boolean search strings to narrow the search significantly, this (currently fictional) alert service would be a lifesaver for legal researchers and lawyers needing judgments on particular topics as soon as they are released. Go on AustLII, do it. You know you want to.

Comlaw email service for legislative updates

The Comlaw email alert service is very basic, but if a Lawlex or Timebase subscription is not for you, then at least there is something you can use to monitor legislative changes. Type in a search term (no complex search strings here – computer says no) and select which database to monitor (I usually stick to Acts, Act Compilations and Bills). Although I haven’t used it for this purpose, it could be a great way of monitoring some of those trickier to find/follow legislative resources such as Legislative Instruments etc. Please let me know if you use it this way, I’d be interested  to know how well it works. 

More free alert services and current awareness tools

Other free resources that I’ve found useful in the past include:

• ASX Company Research page (find info such as current and historical share prices, company announcements, dividends and more for ASX listed companies).
• Libraries Australia catalogue and industry body websites (associations, societies etc) to locate print and online journals and magazines.
• Twitter for breaking news from legal, knowledge management and business professionals. 
• Itpints for realtime searches across social media sites such as Twitter, blogs, Flickr and more. See what people are saying about your clients, firm, competitors or you as soon as it happens (and not when other search engines get around to indexing the relevant pages, which can take hours, days or even weeks).
• The Legal Affairs RSS feed from The Australian is a great way of keeping up to date on the issues affecting the Australian legal profession generally. You will need an RSS reader such as Google Reader in order to view this.
• LinkedIn has a plethora of groups in just about all categories – most produce email newsletters or at least have discussion boards where you can keep an eye on relevant developments. 

If you can recommend any other free products that you use for current awareness, please share! Leave a comment, find me on twitter [@laurenaustinLRR] or share a link on delicious [legalresearchrescue].

These guys find tonnes of great legal blogs and collate them all in one place – which makes it so much easier for the rest of us to find great reading material in a flash. They also publish Internet Legal Research Weekly – a valuable e-newsletter with handy tips, sites and publications for anyone interested in legal research.

Like most self respecting bloggers these days, you can of course follow @TomMighell and @denniskennedy on Twitter too.

There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that in some way or another, the global financial crisis has affected law firms in the same way it has affected many other businesses – work might be a little quieter, jobs a little less secure and clients a little harder to attract or retain. 

Believe it or not, there might be some good to come out of all this doom and gloom. If you find yourself with a little extra time on your hands, resist the temptation to steal files off colleagues’ desks and instead use this time to develop your current awareness strategies – know you clients, their industries and the legal developments that affect them.

Relax! Keeping up to date is easy!

Investing a little time and effort in setting up strategies to remain up-to-date on client, legal and industry developments now will make you that much more valuable to your firm and clients – which is important now, when times are tough, and even more so when work does pick back up again. You will be the one with the impressive list of articles and papers to your name,  a solid understanding of current industry and legal issues and strong client relationships. 

There are some amazing free resources out there, many of them as good or better than the services made available by commercial providers. However, for the sake of brevity (I know, it’s not that brief an article at all!) I’m focussing on one or two specific alert services within a few commonly used paid/subscription legal research services. The other focus for this article (and the one to follow on free services) is on resources that can be used to monitor specific areas of the law or industries and not simply general “news” resources (these are of course useful, but most readers would already be familiar with them).

Read about legal developments before anyone else

Alert services provided by commercial suppliers are valuable tools for monitoring developments in specific areas of law. The ones I find most useful (because of their ability to be customised and/or the targeted ares of law they cover) are:

Lawlex’s legislative alerts -  the ability to set up alerts for changes to legislation based on targeted areas of law, or specific Acts and Regulations, or a combination of both (selecting certain pieces of legislation that have already been identified as falling within a particular category) is really useful. The lists of legislation under each category are almost as exhaustive as you can get and a great way to make sure you’re keeping up to date with all of the relevant legislation, not just the one or two obvious Acts. The summaries provided by Lawlex when a piece of legislation is introduced or amended are also valuable as brief, plain-english descriptions of the effects of the amendments.

Lawlex’s regulatory newsfeeds - Rather detailed summaries of regulatory, legal, legislative and news developments in certain areas of law such as Environment, OH&S , Building & Construction and Financial Services. The Corporate Law newsfeed is one of the more valuable alert services available.

LexisNexis’ case law alerts – These are my favourite alerts for monitoring Australian cases when you are only interested in monitoring a relatively specific aspect of new cases. Once you have set up a personal profile within LNAU, simply run a case law search from the red “Cases” tab (using as many of the available search fields as you wish) and save the results as an alert. I use this one to monitor how certain judges treat particular issues, to see whenever a client or their competitors are involved in litigation and for monitoring many other issues, words/phrases and topics. Be sure to set your initial search to “last week” or some relatively short period as the alert has the effect of running that same search every morning (or whatever other time of day you set) and sending you the results list. Thus, if there is a new case in an area of interest, it gets sent to me each morning for a week. Kinda annoying (any longer than a week and it would be unbearable), but worth it for the level of personalisation afforded. 

Thomson’s Alert 24 – This is another combined alert, providing details of legislative, case law, regulatory, policy and news developments for particular areas of law. I find the coverage really comprehensive and commercially focussed, which is what most of us are after. Once you’re within the “Current Awareness” > “Alert 24″ section and have had a look at the type of information covered under each of the subject areas, jump into “preferences” to set up your email alert. I find “Court Practice and Litigation” the one I get the most out of – good general updates on procedural issues. I know that the Bankruptcy and FSR alerts are both also popular with people I work with. Of course, the relevancy of the topics will be based on your prractice.

Know your clients and their industry

When it comes to monitoring clients and their industries, the free services (such as Google News and web alerts, Business Spectator and others) are some of the best services out there. Some of the subscription based alert services that I find useful include:

Dataanalysis - The Datanalysis alert service is a nightmare to navigate, but once you get through the set up process, the result can be very useful. Use this tool to receive an alert any time an announcement (or a particular type of announcement) is made by a publicly listed company (ASX only). Monitor clients, their subsidiary or parent companies, and other companies operating in the same spheres.

Merger Market – This isn’t one that I use regularly, but I have colleagues that swear by it. News about potential and definite mergers, takeovers and deals is provided and categorised based upon how reliable the source is. While they are admittedly very fast to market with validated information, it’s the rumoured deals that set this product apart – who the MM people have to, er, have dinner with to get some of this gossip, I’m not sure – but it must be some great, er, dinner…

These services are just the tip of the iceberg – the free resources you can use for keeping up to date with legal developments and industry news will blow you away – but I have to leave something for next time, don’t I?! If you’re interested in free tools you can use to monitor these kinds of developments, come back in a week or 2! I don’t have to move house, celebrate a birthday and visit everyone I know for Easter between this post and the next (unlike last time… eeeek sorry!)

If you have any other subscription based products that you use for current awareness, please share! Leave a comment, find me on twitter [@laurenaustinLRR] or share a link on delicious [legalresearchrescue].

Sick of piles of results when searching AustLII? There's a better way!

The reason you get sooooo many results on AustLII – all v any

Anyone who uses Google or any of the major Australian legal databases will be familiar with the idea of adding search terms to limit results. The more search terms, the more focussed and less numerous the results. Multiple search terms means you want to look for results with “all of these words” right? Well, usually…

Apart from the fact that AustLII is a full text database (unlike Casebase, FirstPoint and LawCite), the reason this is the case is because most search engines assume that you would like to put the boolean operator “and” between your results. So, it would not be too silly to search for expert evidence and expect to turn up results that contain both expert and evidence somewhere in the document. Indeed, that’s how most search engines tend to work, it would seem. Most, but not all – the Powers That Be at AustLII decided that AustLII should be different. Maybe one of the PTB was a middle child. 

The main search box on the front page of AustLII assumes you want to search for “any of these words“. So, if you put expert evidence into the search box, AustLII is going to give you any document that has the word expert or the word evidence in it somewhere. If you tried to “limit” your results by adding a further search term, say checklist, then your results would include any document that mentioned the term expert, or the term evidence, or the term checklist. It soon becomes easy to see why seemingly specific searches across AustLII return so many results that don’t appear to be on topic.

The second reason for the vast number of results is that AustLII has a a whole lot of info to search across – cases, legislation, articles and more. The search box on AustLII’s front page assumes that you want to search across them all. Ew. Any mention of expert, evidence or checklist across any Act, Regulation, judgment, article – that’s a whole lot of reading to do.

How to fix it in one easy step

It’s probably easy to see (now) how to get around the first of AustLII’s default settings discussed above – you can use the boolean operator and in between your search terms. For example, expert and evidence and checklist should limit your results compared to the original example. 

As an easy workaround for both of the issues identified, use the Advanced Search as a rule – it’s a link just under the main search box and contains a wealth of untold, uh, options. Which are almost as good as riches when you’re searching for a case that you need yesterday. Here you can limit your results to cases (or articles etc) or go further to cases within a particular jurisdiction and/or court or tribunal. Used in conjunction with AustLII’s boolean operators (listed below), you should be able to find your case first time, every time.

AustLII search connectors

From the AustLII user guide

Operator	Meaning	Example
and	page contains both terms	negligen* and defam*
or	page contains either of two terms	weapon or gun or firearm or pistol
not	page contains 1st term but not 2nd	trust not family
near	1st term is within 50 words of 2nd	disclos* near offence
w/n or /n/	1st term is within n words of 2nd	court w/5 jurisdiction
pre/n	1st term must precede 2nd term by less thann words	contempt pre/3 court
( )	Always use parentheses if search includes two types of connectors	contempt near (radio or television)
n *	Use * for truncation	‘negligen*’ finds negligent, negligence, negligently etc
	Regular plurals, and singulars, are searched automatically	‘firearm’ = ‘firearms’ and vice-versa

A few words of caution about using AustLII for legislation

You might note that this article is about finding cases on AustLII. I know many people use AustLII for legislation, but I don’t generally recommend it for this use. I’m not bagging out AustLII just for the hell of it – for a free resource it is world class and I use its case law and secondary materials constantly. I am hesitant because I am aware of a at least one instance where lawyers have relied upon out-of-date legislation on AustLII for an advice that was circulated externally; needless to say it didn’t reflect well on the people involved.

AustLII itself makes users aware that there is a lag between legislation being introduced and the legislation being uploaded to AustLII’s database. More importantly, how often existing legislation is updated to reflect amendments is anyone’s guess. The point to remember is that AustLII takes material from external sources (courts, parliament, etc) and process that material to appear in its own database. While this is usually fine for static information such as cases and articles, dynamic information such as ever-changing legislation should be sourced from the most authoritative place available.

In case you’re interested (and I won’t be offended if you’re not, I do realise this is quite a geeky thing to get hung up on!), I use Lawlex (which will send you out to the correct government site for each of the Australian jurisdictions) so that I don’t have to remember ComLaw for Commonwealth legislation, PCO for NSW legislation, etc.

In short: 

• Use the Advanced Search in AustLII to avoid searching for any of your results across all cases, legislation, articles etc
• Use the authoritative source for legislation, not AustLII.

Do you have any other tips or tricks when it comes to using AustLII? Please share! Leave a comment, find me on twitter [@laurenaustinLRR] or share a link on delicious [legalresearchrescue].

Chris mentioned that he found the LRR Legal Research Library on Google Books of particular interest – see my original blog article on the topic here – which is really encouraging! I’d better go and make sure the library is as up to date as it should be – I have at least one reader now!

Before you visit the LRR library to curl up and read Black’s Law Dictionary (you know you will), be sure to check out McLean’s site – he describes it as “dedicated to providing information about technology used by the legal industry in the Australian and Asia Pacific market”. I am absolutely hooked – it’s an incredibly comprehensive, up-to-date and topical site for Australian legal professionals.

But instead of cursing the resource you’re using, the person that requires the research or you general choice of degree/profession until everyone within earshot is blushing due to your choice of colourful words, read on and learn what I wish I had understood (or perhaps, had listened to) in first year law school.

Legal publishers don't tend to play nicely with each other

If you keep in mind that legal publishers are competitors, the reasons why they don’t link to each others’ report series and other products can often be easily explained and worked-around. And violent expulsions of expletives avoided.

If there is no link

You will often find reference to cases (particularly in  where the citation is not a link. “Ahhh!” I hear you exclaim. ” Why not?!” Well, the answer is simply as above – if that particular report series is not published by the publisher whose database you’re in, they aren’t going to link to the full text in their competitor’s product. No, they don’t often play nicely. But why would they? The Sydney Morning Herald website doesn’t link to stories on The Australian website. McDonalds doesn’t list Burger King items on its menu. It makes sense.

If the link doesn’t work

Obviously this could be for any number of IT reasons, but the most common explanation is that your library/organisation does not subscribe to that particular report series electronically.

That’s not to say you can’t access the full text of the case you’re after – use your library catalogue to see what kind of access to that report series you have (electronic and/or hard copy), or use the citator document to find an alternate citation and search your catalogue for access to that report series. Cases can be (and often are) reported in more than one report series. Every subscription adds to a library’s operating costs, so it’s not often that libraries will have more than 1 or 2 ways to find the same information.

If your library doesn’t have the report series, try searching everyone else’s catalogue and asking your library to arrange an inter library loan.

Not sure what the citation stands for (and so can’t search your catalogue for it)? Look up the abbreviation (just the letters, not the whole citation).

Still can’t find it? Ask your librarian… or me! Leave a comment, find me on twitter [@laurenaustinLRR] or share a link on delicious [legalresearchrescue]. ]]> http://www.legalresearchrescue.com/?feed=rss2&p=235 2 http://www.legalresearchrescue.com/?p=3 http://www.legalresearchrescue.com/?p=3#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:13 +0000 admin http://legalresearchrescue.wordpress.com/?p=3 One of the most frustrating things to encounter in your legal research is a reference to a case with either a) no link; or b) a link that doesn’t work. It’s something that plagued me for years and continues to plague many of the lawyers I work with.

But instead of cursing the resource you’re using, the person that requires the research or you general choice of degree/profession until everyone within earshot is blushing due to your choice of colourful words, read on and learn what I wish I had understood (or perhaps, had listened to) in first year law school.

Legal publishers don't tend to play nicely with each other

The answer as to why this happens is simple: legal publishers are competitors – so they’re not going to link to each others’ products.

If you keep in mind that legal publishers are competitors, the reasons why they don’t link to each others’ report series and other products can often be easily explained and worked-around. And violent expulsions of expletives avoided.

If there is no link

You will often find reference to cases (particularly in  where the citation is not a link. “Ahhh!” I hear you exclaim. ” Why not?!” Well, the answer is simply as above – if that particular report series is not published by the publisher whose database you’re in, they aren’t going to link to the full text in their competitor’s product. No, they don’t often play nicely. But why would they? The Sydney Morning Herald website doesn’t link to stories on The Australian website. McDonalds doesn’t list Burger King items on its menu. It makes sense.

If the link doesn’t work

Obviously this could be for any number of IT reasons, but the most common explanation is that your library/organisation does not subscribe to that particular report series electronically.

That’s not to say you can’t access the full text of the case you’re after – use your library catalogue to see what kind of access to that report series you have (electronic and/or hard copy), or use the citator document to find an alternate citation and search your catalogue for access to that report series. Cases can be (and often are) reported in more than one report series. Every subscription adds to a library’s operating costs, so it’s not often that libraries will have more than 1 or 2 ways to find the same information.

If your library doesn’t have the report series, try searching everyone else’s catalogue and asking your library to arrange an inter library loan.

Not sure what the citation stands for (and so can’t search your catalogue for it)? Look up the abbreviation (just the letters, not the whole citation).

Still can’t find it? Ask your librarian… or me! Leave a comment, find me on twitter [@laurenaustinLRR] or share a link on delicious [legalresearchrescue].

LRR’s 5 minutes of fame on Practice Source / House of Butter.

Legal Research Rescue and Linda Moore’s new blog KM Librarian were both featured as useful Australian (yay!) legal research/knowledge management blogs.

Another great Australian legal research/KM blog I follow is Jo Hicks’ Bibliophile – it’s great to see so much support and information for Australian lawyers, law librarians and legal researchers out there.

Thanks again Sean!

Don’t forget to follow Sean Hocking, Linda Moore, Jo Hicks and/or me on Twitter!