News

New on CanLII: Civil Procedure and Practice in Ontario

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

There is an exciting new resource on CanLII that we wanted to flag for our Ottawa lawyers! Led by Professor Noel Semple of the University of Windsor Faculty of Law, the brand new Civil Procedure and Practice in Ontario is a comprehensive and entirely free guide to the Rules of Civil Procedure, Courts of Justice Act, and Limitations Act.

The title was written by 135 lawyers and experts in the province, including Ottawa lawyers Phedely Ariste (Gowlings), Kelsey Buchmayer (Gowlings), Cory Giordano (Supreme Advocacy), Corey Groper (DMG Advocates) and Guy Régimbald (Gowlings), and made possible with funding from the Law Foundation.

Information for 2020-2021 Summer and Articling Students

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

Even though we may be living in extraordinary times, particularly for the justice sector, the staff of the CCLA Library are still here for you. This is especially true for this year’s summer and articling students. Normally, we invite students to come to the CCLA to meet us, have a tour of our space, and learn about our library services. As we don’t have a projected re-opening date, we aren’t able to invite students over, but we still very much want to meet them. Working with students is one of our favourite and most important jobs, so if you don’t read any further in this blog post, please pass along our email (library@ccla-abcc.ca) to your students!

If you will be taking on students (or already have), for either a summer term or for an articling year, please let us know! Student memberships in the CCLA are available – find out more and register here. However, if you aren’t sure that you’ll be signing your students up for membership, we’d still be grateful if you could send us a quick note with the names and emails of your students so that we can reach out to them and let them know about the CCLA Library.

As always, please encourage your students to sign up for our free email newsletter at this link. The CCLA News weekly newsletter and special announcements are a vital form of connection for the Ottawa legal community, and we’d love to have them on our list.

HeadStart Ottawa: Legal Research for Articling and LPP Students

In previous years, we’ve held a session exclusively for articling and LPP students called “HeadStart Ottawa.” While we may not have access to our physical space this year, we are delighted to announce that we will be planning a virtual HeadStart program for later this summer. Details on this free session will be available soon, so keep an eye out for that!

 

 

Remote Access to Westlaw and ProView during COVID-19

Posted on by Brenda Lauritzen

Some more happy news during this strange time!

Thomson Reuters has agreed to help support Ontario lawyers with their remote work during the COVID-19 crisis. Thomson Reuters alongside the LIRN network of courthouse law libraries is providing all Ontario licensees of the Law Society complete remote access to Westlaw and an online ProView Library of legal texts and looseleaf equivalents covering the practice areas most important to you.

Please click here to see a full list of what is available. Initial access to these programs will be for 30 days.

If you are interested and would like to get started, please request access here: https://legalprof.thomsonreuters.com/TR-LSO-Partnership

For any questions on where to get started with WestLaw or ProView, feel free to visit the Customer Learning Centre, where you can find training materials, how-to videos and other resources to help you navigate and maximize your usage of WestLaw and the ProView Library.

Thanks, Thomson Reuters!

Remote Access to Lexis Advance Quicklaw during COVID-19

Posted on by Brenda Lauritzen

Lexis Advance Quicklaw Access

We’ve just heard some excellent news that we are pleased to pass along to all of our Ontario lawyers! During the COVID-19 crisis, LexisNexis Canada is offering Courthouse Library staff the opportunity to provide a link for a free 30-day trial of the Lexis Advance Quicklaw service to lawyers upon request. This means you can get remote access to our library subscription of Lexis Advance for 30 days; a timeline which will be re-evaluated based on the status of the pandemic.

Our library subscription includes case law, legislation, and an excellent collection of texts and commentary.

To request your 30-day trial, please click here!

Additional Resources

LexisNexis Canada has also extended free access to the following useful resources during the crisis:

Thank you to our friends at Lexis!

Available CCLA Library Services during COVID-19 Shutdown

Posted on by Brenda Lauritzen

The CCLA Library may have closed its physical doors for the time being, but we’re still able to assist you remotely with many of your legal research needs! Here’s what we can still help with :

  • Case & Looseleaf Searching: We still have access to Quicklaw Advance, WestlawNext, and Proview and are able to run keyword searches for you on a wide variety of topics.
  • Case & Document Retrieval: Missed the chance to grab a remote HeinOnline password while the Great Library is closed? Let us know if there are any journal articles you might need and we can forward them along to you!
  • Precedents: We might not have our print collection, but there are a ton of precedents available in O’Briens and Quicklaw that we can search for you to assist with your drafting.
  • Legislative Research: Historical legislation is confusing! (but we love doing it!) Let us help point you in the right direction with tracing or helping to find point-in-time legislation.

Unfortunately for the time being we are not able to assist with:

  • Scanning Print Materials
  • Interlibrary Loans
  • Eliminating pandemic-related anxiety (let’s all breathe and do some yoga)

So please don’t hesitate to send us an email if there’s anything we may be able to help with as you’re locked up at home! Wishing you and your families health and safety.

CCLA Conference Papers: Now on CanLII!

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

Back in August, we mentioned that software and hardware upgrades at the CCLA necessitated our taking down the CCLA Conference Papers Database on our website. For almost 10 years we provided free access to our excellent archive of conference materials, and whatever was going to replace the database had to be great. We believe we’ve found the perfect solution. 

As of today, select papers from the CCLA’s four major conferences will be available on CanLII! CanLII’s Commentary collection has been growing steadily in the past few years, bringing more and more free and high–quality legal information to its platform. Freely accessible from anywhere, the collection has been a monumental step forward in access to justice. When CanLII said they would host our conference papers collection, we were thrilled!  

The collection on CanLII currently is just from 2018; it will eventually date back to 2014, and we will continue to add new materials to the collection after each conference. Which materials are included are decided by the editorial team at Lexum (the platform CanLII lives on), so if you want your paper or presentation to be included, be sure to make it awesome. If you have contributed in the past and you’d rather not have your work on CanLII, that’s okay too – just let us know. 

If you want to go check out the collection, here’s a direct link to the “Conference Proceedings” page  on CanLII. Materials will come up in search results too, under the “Commentary” tab. 

As for the materials from previous years and the materials that did not get posted to CanLII, you can always request those from us. On each of the conference pages on the CCLA website, you can find a Table of Contents for each conference. Call, email, or visit us and we’ll set you up with those materials. 

Thank you to CanLII for giving our conference papers collection a new home! 

2019 Clawbies: Canadian Law Blog Awards Winners!

Posted on by Brenda Lauritzen

Happy New Year! We can’t believe it’s 2020 already.

With the new year brings a new round of winners for the Clawbies, the Canadian Law Blog Awards! It’s evident from the blog roundups we do every month that we have a ton of extraordinarily talented bloggers, podcasters, videographers, and more in the Ottawa region, and we’re extremely happy to see that many of them were recognized for all their hard work in this year’s awards. We’re very happy our CCLA newsletter got a shoutout as well!

Congratulations to the following Ottawa-area winners!

You can find a list of all winners and descriptions of their work at the Clawbies.ca. We look forward to seeing more Ottawa lawyers and legal professionals join the fray in 2020!

 

Introducing our New Library Name: The Gordon F. Henderson Library

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

Cross-posted from the CCLA/ABCC website:

The County of Carleton Law Association (CCLA) is pleased to announce the new name of their library.

Thanks to the generous title-sponsor level contributions by Gowling WLG (Canada) to the CCLA Renovations Campaign, the CCLA Library will now proudly bear the name of The Gordon F. Henderson Library.

Gordon F. Henderson CC QC (1912–1993) was an intellectual property lawyer who joined Henderson Herridge & Gowling (now Gowling WLG) in 1937, and later became its chairman. He was known for his advocacy on intellectual property matters as well as his involvement with intellectual property organizations throughout his career. Gordon Henderson was not just an IP lawyer; he excelled in every branch of the law he touched. His love of learning and of the law, as well as his high ethical and work standards infected all who were exposed to him.

Henderson was an active participant in professional associations both within and outside the legal community. He established the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada and was president of the Canadian Bar Association. He was the founding editor of the Canadian Patent Reporter in 1941 and was its editor until his death. Henderson served on the Board of Governors of the University of Ottawa, and from 1991-1993, he was chancellor of the university.

Henderson was also a philanthropist, humanitarian and civic leader in Ottawa, having founded or lent his support to numerous causes. He was awarded Canada’s highest civilian honour, a Companion of the Order of Canada, for his decades of service to his community and his profession.

Within the the Library, visitors can now find both a portrait of Gordon F. Henderson, as well as an art installation dedicated to his life and influence in the community.

The Gordon F. Henderson Library is located in the Ottawa courthouse at 161 Elgin Street. Established in 1888 to provide a legal research materials to Ottawa lawyers and judges, the Gordon F. Henderson Library remains a vital research hub for the Ottawa legal community, and serves lawyers, judges, paralegals, and students.

CCLA Conference Papers Database: On Hiatus

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

Following our post from earlier this week about the CCLA Library Catalogue, we’d also like to note that our Conference Papers Database is currently unavailable.

If you would like to receive a copy of a CCLA conference paper, please feel free to email us in the library.

If you would like to review the contents of past conference binders, a PDF and Word document version of the contents for each conference from 2010 to the present are available directly from the conference page on our website.

We will be sure to update everyone when the papers are available online again.

CCLA Library Catalogue: 1990-2019

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

Big changes are underway at the CCLA Library with regard to our online catalogue. It was in 1990 that the CCLA replaced the old card catalogue with an online system, as announced in the newsletter below. Sorry to everyone who wants the actual old card catalogue for their home – it’s long gone!

From the August 1990 CCLA Bulletin

From our understanding, this was the first courthouse library catalogue in the province. Go us! In time, however, the Law Society’s Great Library catalogue (Advocat) came into being, and more recently, their Infolocate search engine, which looks through library holdings for every courthouse library in Ontario (including the CCLA) *and* the online CPD materials prepared by the Law Society.

Due to required software and hardware upgrades at the CCLA, it was time to decide what to do with our now redundant catalogue. We have made the call to sunset our dear old catalogue in favour of the admittedly far superior Great Library catalogue. We’ve updated the links on our website and in-library computers.

Some much better features of the Great Library catalogue software that CCLA Library users will enjoy:

  • Fuzzy searching: You don’t have to spell everything exactly right to get results. This was a huge drawback of our old in-house catalogue
  • Tables of contents: Lots of the entries for texts books or looseleafs will have a table of contents in the item record. You can look at what’s in a resource without leaving your computer.
  • Law Society of Ontario CPD materials: When searching the catalogue, you’ll also pull up hits for individual PDFs of relevant conference papers from LSO CPD.

Please Note: Selecting the CCLA Library

When you access Infolocate, the default is to search all of the Ontario courthouse libraries.

If you wish to limit this to just Ottawa, select Carleton County in the drop down  menu: