Legal Research

LawTop Release

By Simon Fodden

I’ve put together a website, LawTop, that uses Google News to bring you the most recent law-related stories from Canadian mainstream English-language news sources. You can choose whether to see 10, 25 or 50 of the latest stories, and whether you’d like the headlines only or the headlines and a brief excerpt. As I say on the main page, this is really a simple exercise because Google does all the heavy lifting — and the only reason you’d want to use LawTop instead of Google News directly is because LawTop’s got a handy and consistent set of terms to search with.

This is a baby toe in the water for my more ambitious venture, Lexmix, an umbrella that can, and over time I hope will, link together various new devices to separate signal from noise for lawyers on the internet. On this score, don’t hesitate to let me know if you have ideas about what legal workers would like to see, when it comes to filters and aggregators.

On LawTop I’ve provided for RSS and email subscription. But the data are most fresh when a particular LawTop page is first loaded or is refreshed, because that runs the search anew.

Please feel free to let me have your views, either by way of comments or by email. I’m not aiming for perfection here — the search algorithm would be immensely long — and neither am I looking to draw items from every town’s paper. But there’s no doubt that obvious mainstream news sources have been missed and that the search terms can be improved with simple changes that have eluded me.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 24, 2009 (boomark / email).