Guest post byMelanie R. Bueckert, Legal Research Counsel – Manitoba Court of Appeal
I am very thankful for all of the excellent resources that the Great Library provides through our Law Society Member Portal. My gratitude has increased greatly during the pandemic, while I have been unable to access the law school’s library. While I often use HeinOnline to locate articles that I have already determined are relevant to my research, I hesitate to run searches of their databases, as the volume of results can be overwhelming. However, in at least two cases in the past few months, my research has been improved substantially by their “More Like This” feature. In case you haven’t used it yet, I will walk you through the very simple process.
Once you have located a relevant article in HeinOnline, look at the top of the document for the “More Like This” button. Click it. It will bring you to a list of results related to your article. If you find that they are not particularly helpful, you can tweak the “Interesting Words” weighting on the left-hand side of the screen or remove some of those words. You can also enter a new filtering term in the “Enter new term” box underneath the “Interesting Words”. You can also limit your results by date range.
According to HeinOnline:
More Like This uses a program which finds ‘interesting words’ in an article, as determined by an algorithm that analyzes the article’s text. …
More Like This compares all articles in HeinOnline and ranks them in order based on which articles’ interesting words are most similar to the first article. Results include the top 50 most relevant articles available in HeinOnline.
The Annual Review of Insolvency Law journal is now available on CanLII. This journal is part of the ARIL Society’s Annual Review of Insolvency Law Annual Conference, which you can learn more about here.
Visit CanLII’s blog to read more about the announcement, or access the latest issue.
This adds to the dozens of other freely accessible journals available on CanLII’s website.
Lawyers are taught to take detailed notes. Every conversation with a client, whether in person or by telephone, or written in a document or email, is recorded in order to back up actions taken and matters billed. It’s what you turn to when your client says “I didn’t tell you to do that” and you face a complaint.
Recent estates litigation in Ontario turned on the exemplary note taking of Solicitor Barry Smith. As noted by Gans, J.:
[32] I digress to make one observation. Smith, who had been Helen’s, if not Eugene’s, solicitor for at least 7 years by the Spring of 2011, would best be described as an ‘old-school’ solicitor. He was not only a generalist, who made ‘house calls’, but was a man who was involved or involved himself with every aspect of a client’s affairs. He made copious notes to file, which I found to be unassailable in terms of providing me with the details of the events as they unfolded during the Spring and into the Summer of 2011.
This case involved all the usual suspects: a large estate, a testator recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a power of attorney clash, and undisclosed codicils. But it was the note-taking by Mr. Smith that persuaded the judge that Mrs. Kates was competent.
When reading Kates Estate, 2020 ONSC 7046, don’t ignore the footnotes. There are some very interesting comments there as well.
The latest edition of Estates,Trusts & Pensions Journal has arrived and is now available for loan.
The current issue, Volume 40 Number 1, December 2020 includes:
FROM THE LAW REPORTS
The “Wrong” of Survivorship: A (Very Late) Comment on Pecore v. Pecore by Joel Nikitman
The (Ir)revocable Right of Survivorship by Peter Roy Cotton and Calvin Hancock
Unhappy Families — Kent Case Commentary by Clay Fernandes and Diane Harbin
ARTICLES
Up the Creek Without a Paddle: The Law Relating to Unincorporated Associations by Natasha Smith and Katrina Kairys
Considering Indigenous Trust Investments through the Lens of Two-Eyed Seeing by Frankie Young
Saskatchewan’s Approach to Costs in Estate Litigation by Beaty F. Beaubier and Christine Libner
If you would like a copy of any of these articles, please email library@lawsociety.mb.ca and we would be happy to provide a pdf version (subject to copyright regulations).
This month brings a few new features and additions to CanLII and HeinOnline.
CanLII has added the ability to upload your own documents to Lexbox. This new feature lets you keep all your research in one place and use CanLII’s resources like Reflex to automatically link to cited cases and legislation. You can also set up alerts and feeds based on information in your document. For those who subscribe to Clio, you can also now link to CanLII to add a timer straight to the header of every page.
While you are over on CanLII, check out this blog post that analyses how COVID-19 has affected how people are using CanLII, what they are looking for, and why that might be. It includes a really cool animated bar graph.
Over on HeinOnline, they have added a long desired search feature. Users can now search multiple selected databases at a time, right from their HeinOnline welcome page. Now, instead of searching one database at a time, you can select the ones you think will be most useful. This also includes filtering results to help narrow down queries.
HeinOnline has also continued to add new journals to its Law Journal Library, with a collection of now 2,900 titles. If you are interested more in specific authors, scroll down to their Tip of the Month to read more about their Author profile pages.
Among the new journals added this month, HeinOnline now provides current coverage of the Journal of Space Law. “Published by University of Mississippi School of Law since 1973, this widely recognized journal is devoted to space law and the legal problems arising out of human activities in outer space.”
Summaries of these titles can be found on the HeinOnline Blog. Another item to note is the ‘Tip of the Month’, which shows you how to send documents to yourself, or others, right from Heinonline.
“First developed in 1968 to showcase the work of Queen’s University’s law students, theQueen’s Law Journal has since become one of the most respected legal publications in Canada and an important scholarly platform for legal commentary. Editors take an interdisciplinary approach that welcomes a diversity of perspectives for publication, the journal is also rigorously refereed. “
The Manitoba Law Library would like to acknowledge with gratitude that we are situated on Treaty One Territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree and Dakota peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.
Printing and Photocopying
If you need to use the library’s printing and photocopying services you will need to create an account. See us at the front desk for assistance.
Please note: The library will be closing early on Friday, December 13th at 11:00AM for a special event. Regular library service will resume Monday, December 16th at 8:30AM.
Please note: The library will be closed on Monday, November 11th, 2024. Regular library service will resume Tuesday, November 12th at 8:30AM.
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