C. CLE/Seminar Papers

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 45-48

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Whereas university law reviews or journals tend to be more academic or scholarly, there is a body of literature in the form of continuing legal education (CLE) seminar papers that tend to be more practitioner-focused. Attendees of CLE seminars will ordinarily be given a binder containing copies of the papers presented at the seminar; these binders are then typically added to the law firm’s internal library or kept by the lawyer in her office. Seminar topics are usually on either current issues facing the profession (e.g., Civil Litigation: Your Passport to the New Rules: Hit the Ground Running) or on practical, substantive areas of law important to practising lawyers (e.g., Real Property Law: Closing the Deal). Increasingly, CLE seminars are making their materials available online.⁸

The Canadian Legal Symposia Index on LEXISNEXIS Quicklaw is the best way to search for CLE papers (this database indexes CLE papers from 1986 to current). You can search by keyword and then check the

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"Subjects" of records in your search results and revise your search, as needed, to search on the official "Subject" descriptors. Alternatively, LEXISNEXIS Quicklaw currently allows you to search by the "Title" or "Author" segments of the results record, which can focus your search if you limit your keywords to the "title" of the paper or if you are searching for a known author.

Figure 2.3 shows the contents of a typical search result on the Canadian Legal Symposia Index, with five headings: Title, Author, Publisher, Subjects, and Symposium.

Figure 2.3

Contents of Sample Entry from the Canadian Legal Symposia Index on LEXISNEXIS Quicklaw

[SEE ATTACHED PDF]

Actually getting a copy of a particular CLE paper is a two-step process, starting with searching by keyword in the Canadian Legal Symposia Index on LEXISNEXIS Quicklaw and then checking to see if your law library has a copy of the particular CLE binder in which the paper is found. To do this second step, you usually need to search on the name of the Symposia (e.g., "Negotiating and drafting a bulletproof shareholder agreement" in the example in Figure 2.3) since most libraries catalogue CLE seminar conferences only to the level of the name of the Symposia (as title) and Chairpersons of the conference (as authors) and not necessarily at the level of individual paper titles and authors of individual paper titles.

Using the example in Figure 2.3, I would recommend citing CLE papers as follows:⁹

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