Papers presented at continuing legal information seminars are good research sources.  They are prepared by recognized, often  local experts in an area of law. They may offer a timely update on a topic. Best of all they are pretty easy to find. First, pick your jurisdiction. Then find a catalog source. Search and retrieve.

Alberta CLE material from our Legal Education Society of Alberta are catalogued by the fine folks at the Alberta Law Libraries.  Each paper from a seminar is individually available by using a keyword search for a title word or writer name through their library catalogue.

Ted Tjaden’s  website, a companion to his , has an excellent selection of links for

In the age of email, tweets, texting, IM and messages through facebook, the telephone has new power.  If you need to gather a specific item to help with a research problem, try picking up a telephone and making a call.

The phone a friend lifeline works really well getting early versions of cases (call the lawyers on the winning side), getting information from a government source (most governments have online telephone directories that list people with their  titles and direct phone lines), or answering tricky procedural questions (parliamentary counsel offices, court clerks, university professors).

This weeks tip – try for the personal touch of a telephone call.

Sometimes it is important to know about every single new Canadian case on a particular topic.  Often it is best if you know about these cases as soon as possible.  This research tip offers an “as soon as possible” option with some creative use of CanLII.

1. determine your search strategy (narrow it as musch as possible)
2. run your search using CanLII’s – limiting to caselaw from the court levels and jurisdictions you need to watch
3. sort your results by decision date
4. copy and paste the resulting URL into your electronic calendar, and set a schedule to re-run your search
5. keep track of the most recent case that appears in your result (or top five, just to be sure)

Voila, a quick method for reviewing cases on a subject.

I chose to offer this tip with a CanLII search since it is available without a subscription.  Both LexisNexis Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada offer notifications of new items that meet search criteria as well.

Things move about on the web.  Sometimes when you search you will get the dreaded message

ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved

Today’s research tip – read that URL!  Google, Bing, and other search engines provide the URL  for the search result that is coming up.  If a domain has changed or a site has been revamped, often you can find “missing” information by reading and translating the URL.  For instance, an error message when you click on this link

http://www.apuo.uottawa.ca/Info/arbitrations/
Chodos%202nd%20supplementary%20award%20May%202009.pdf

can be found at

http://www.apuo.ca/Info/arbitrations/
Chodos%202nd%20supplementary%20award%20May%202009.pdf

In this case, the path to finding out that the domain name changed was to navigate to the base URL when I got an error message.  Test this out with any URL by deleting everything to the right of the first / in the browser address bar.  Often there will be an automatic redirect to the new site which will help to determine what the new URL is, even when the navigation structure of a site has been altered.

You can also use Internet Archive’s  Wayback machine to look at older versions of a root site.

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