Canadian Association of Law Libraries 2012 Conference - Vendor Demos

The 2012 annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) got off to a start today in Toronto.

Demos of new products by vendors were one of the highlights of the day. I attended the sessions by LexisNexis (provider of the Quicklaw database) and Thomson Reuters (the company behind the Westlaw Canada database).

New products or features from LexisNexis include:

* the first edition of the encyclopedia Halsbury's Laws of Canada will be completed this year, with regular annual updates after that
* 21 of the 25 volumes of the Quebec legal encyclopedia Jurisclasseur Quebec will be completed and available on Quicklaw by the end of the year
* new labour and employment content from publisher Lancaster House
* the Quicklaw Legal Topics bilingual and bijural topical classification is being enhanced
* caselaw cited in LexisNexis e-books will  link to the full text in Quicklaw
* the really big new thing that will be rolled out next fall is "Quicklaw for Microsoft Office": subscribers will be able to add a Quicklaw tab to the ribbon of Microsoft tools such as Outlook and Word. By clicking on the tab, any company names, parties, legal citations, legal terms of art in an e-mail or document will become links to Quicklaw collections. From within any Microsoft application, it will be possible to conduct research, note up cases and legislation, find forms and precedents, and track work to a client file

Among the highlights presentedby Thomson Reuters, those that caught my eye were:

* the legal research memo collection on Westlaw Canada is growing at a rate of 100 a month (entirely new memos or updates). The memos are in 53 areas of law and come from law firms or legal research firms. They are organized using the well-known Canadian Abridgment taxonomy and contain links to caselaw and legislation in Westlaw. As well, memos citing cases or legislation now appear as secondary sources when noting up
* Westlaw Canada is adding Kim Orr Class Action Newsletter, a biweekly bulletin of news, analysis and feature articles on class actions by defence and plaintiff sides and judges
* it is adding the Solicitor's Core product, a forms/precedents collection in the areas of corporate commercial law, estates, family law and real estate
* the merger with publisher Canada Law Book will mean the integration of tens of thousands of new tribunal cases in labour law in Westlaw Canada
* some 25 new titles are coming to the Carswell e-Reference Library in 2012 in aboriginal law, defamation, corporate commercial law, administrative law, condo law and landlord and tenant relations. The Collection is the electronic equivalent of well-known loose-leafs
* the Thomson Reuters Proview e-book platform, currently available for the browser or the iPad, is coming to the Blackberry