Ballad in Plain E

I really enjoyed Laurie Mapp’s latest post over at Halo Secretarial Services. In it, Laurie explains why non-lawyers have an important place in the legal blogosphere:

“Non lawyers are important and valuable assets, whether to brick and mortar law firms or virtual practices. In fact in every law firm I have worked at the non-lawyer staff members were a critical part of the success of the team. The secretaries helped manage timelines, completed dictation and often completed the first draft of pleadings.  Paralegals did the research, helped organize large files and oversaw support staff. The library staff were always so amazing, especially when a deadline was looming and the supporting caselaw for a brief had to be quickly found! Oh and let’s not forget the IT staff who made sure our information was all backed up and accessible!”

I completely agree, and would add that every person – from the hostess to the name partner – who keeps a law firm running has a unique perspective on how it operates: what works, what doesn’t, what’s helpful, what’s a pain, and I think we all benefit from hearing others’ voices.

Just as an articled student learns pretty quickly that a librarian can be his new best friend, and a librarian learns quickly that an ornery partner’s secretary can be her greatest ally, we could all learn something from our fellow support staff. So, in the Canadian legal blogosphere, we’re pretty well represented. We have blogging lawyers, students, librarians and library technicians, webmasters, marketing consultants, and entrepreneurs such as Laurie who support law firms. But do we have blogging law firm IT staff? Paralegals? Secretaries? I can’t be the only one who’d be glad to read about their experiences!

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On a related note, my own nominations are forthcoming, but don’t forget to nominate your favourite Canadian legal blogs for the 2008 CLawBies!

Legal web guru (and, okay, my boss) Steve Matthews just published a really good article on law firm SEO over at Slaw.

Even if you’re not particularly interested in SEO, this is a great introduction to the concepts of natural/organic vs. paid search. It’s useful for anyone who wants to know what kind of effort is required to improve a website’s visibility and ranking within search engines. The section on building assets vs. renting space is especially thoughtful, I think.

At last week’s VALL luncheon, Catherine Best & Teresa Gleave gave a presentation comparing Quicklaw and LawSource (WestlaweCarswell).

Catherine, a research lawyer, covered scope and functionality; Teresa, a law librarian, discussed the practical aspects: pricing, administration, training considerations, cost recovery, etc. Not surprisingly, the session was well-attended and well-received. They did a fantastic job of giving an impartial review of the two tools and made an effort to compare apples to apples, which isn’t always easy to do.

Catherine’s presentation, entitled “Electronic Legal Research: A Moving Target” is available on the VALL website.

What was nice is that Catherine included some tips on when CanLII is a good alternative to the pay sources. I admit it: when the new CanLII interface was unveiled, I really didn’t like it. But it just gets better and better all the time. Now I use CanLII almost daily.

You can use it to search by citation and in many cases, parallel cites are provided. It provides a gorgeous, clean PDF of each case. RSS feeds for each court and tribunal. So I’m glad that Catherine could point out some of CanLII’s newest enhancements: stemming, proximity searching, etc. I wasn’t aware of the proximity searching capability until her presentation, and had occasion to try it out today–it works well.

We all have our favourite tools that we tend to be faithful to, but this presentation gave some great reasons for why we should always be aware of what the “other guys” can do.

Big news for one of my favourite blogs: Precedent: The New Rules of Law and Style. Editor Melissa Kluger announced a few days ago that she’s launching a print magazine by the same name. I’m not a lawyer – but I live with one, and work with them all day long, so I’m pretty excited about this news.

Precedent – the blog – has saved me countless times with its Wednesday Roundup – a summary of the Globe & Mail and National Post law pages. And La Fashionista is, as I’ve mentioned before, one of my favourite things about Fridays. Needless to say, I’m sure the magazine will rock, too.

But Precedent isn’t the only new magazine on the block. CLB Media has just announced their new offering, Associates, which targets a similar demographic. It’ll be interesting to see how the two new mags compare.
Another one to watch is the National Post’s relatively new Legal Post blog, called Legal Post Docket. There’s some good stuff on there already. I think it’s important for us non-lawyers to keep up on at least some of the industry news/gossip. You never know when it might come in handy.