Results from the 2009 Canadian Law Blog Awards (CLawBies) are in, and Law is Cool and Slaw are both winners:

1) Best Canadian Law Blog (or Blogger) Award: Slaw – As most readers will already know, Slaw is not only a huge presence on the Canadian law blog scene, but it’s also a testament to the innovative and creative vision of Simon Fodden. It’s often hard to see how Slaw could get better, but it did in 2009. Want proof? See this year’s guest blogging initiatives, which included major law firms, provincial ombudsmen from across Canada, plus five Justices from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Add a DK Blawggies recognition, and we have a winner!  Runner ups: Canadian Privacy Law Blog, Wise Law Blog

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3) Legal Culture Award – Law is Cool – Two of the fastest rising stars in Canadian legal blogging just happen to be law students. Lawrence Gridin and Omar Ha-Redeye lead an impressive group of contributors at Law is Cool, and are seeding the queue with more law student bloggers for the future. Bravo! Culture doesn’t happen without a little sweat equity.  Runner ups: Precedent, Dynamic Lawyers Parody Videos

A special thanks to those who gave a special mention to me (although I freely lend my authority to the other sites I’m affiliated with instead):

Antonin Pribetic – My Nominees for the 2009 Canadian Law Blog Awards (the “CLawBies”)

Omar Ha-Redeye Blog: http://www.omarha-redeye.com/): Omar Ha-Redeye is a J.D. candidate at the University of Western Law School and a leading light in the Canadian blawging community.  His publications include scientific journals, trade magazines, and contributions to university textbooks. Ha-Redeye has served as a Senior Administrator for a tsunami relief team that operated in rural Aceh, Indonesia and consulted NGO’s and businesses on crisis communications. He has taken the lead in the field of reputation management law. A frequent contributor to Slaw.ca and Law Is Cool, I admire Omar’s dedication to law, justice and human rights.

Donna Seale – My Picks for the 2009 CLawBies

3. My last pick is Slaw.  Slaw is a co-operative weblog covering pretty much anything that has a connection to Canadian law and it does that in spades.  Since I started following this blog a few years ago it has grown leaps and bounds and now has so many contributors I’ve lost count.  In fact, it has grown so much that I sometimes find it hard to keep up with the blog’s multitude of posts, but I always find something in my feedreader from Slaw that is of interest and use to me.  I do have to admit, though, that because of the sheer volume of content coming from Slaw I have taken to scouting out posts from particular Slaw contributers — David Bilinsky, Dan Michaluk, Steve Matthews, Jordan Furlong, Omar Ha-Redeye always top my list because they produce content I find personally relevant.

Connie Crosby - My nominations for the Clawbies

Like almost everyone else who have blogged their picks, I can’t help but mention others who are well deserving and should be included in any “top Canadian law blogs list” – Library Boy by Michel-Adrien Sheppard, Law is Cool by an ever-growing slate of law students, created by the inimitable Omar Ha-Redeye,  Thoughtful Legal Management by David Bilinsky, Canadian Privacy Law Blog by David Fraser, Michael Geist’s blog which has a reach far, far outside the legal community in Canada,  and Halo Secretarial blog by Laurie Mapp who is a legal virtual assistant (or legal VA) and helps me stay on track in my day to day work. And so many others!

Blawger of the Year – Omar Ha-Redeye

My nominations for the 2009 CLawBies Awards.

Despite being conflicted I have to start with Jordan Furlong, especially for posts like this:

Firms focus relentlessly on the students with the highest grades… even though these students can be one-dimensional performers with an affinity for the academic environment and no competing pressures outside the classroom. Contrast that with an older student, perhaps with a couple of kids and a part-time job, with or without a partner at home, who took an unorthodox route to law school and perhaps struggles to compete with the younger students — but who is still bright, hard-working, experienced and capable of being a standout lawyer. The firms never even look at graduates like that, and an opportunity is missed on both sides.

Then there’s always stories like this one which make the choices in a legal career really easy to make,

Nearly half of aboriginal and visible minority lawyers are associates, compared with one-third of white lawyers. And the minority groups are more likely to work as in-house lawyers, in government, in business or as sole practitioners.

As for pay, minority lawyers earned $40,000 less on average than did white lawyers… “This suggests the systemic exclusion of aboriginal and members of visible minorities from the most lucrative jobs.”

Instead, we make our own opportunities like getting involved in social media, becoming what Lawrence Gridin jokes as, “the most famous law student in Canada.”  The upside of my approach is that I get people like Dan Michaluk calling me “a fascinating guy.”

That’s not the reason why I’m nominating his site, All About Information, as one of my three, but it sure doesn’t hurt.  Instead, it stems out of my increasing interest in Internet and privacy law, despite never taking a single related course at law school, and my focus during articles in litigation.

Which leads me to my second nomination, also mentioned by Dan: Antonin Pribetic of The Trial Warrior.  Blogging really is my legal education outside of the classroom, and veterans like Pribetic are a gold mine of information.  You can get a better idea of his legal philosophy from a paper that explains the origin of the name of his blog.

Given the issues raised above, I would have to pick Donna Seale‘s Human Rights in the Workplace as my final pick.  In fact, Donna caught the above story about discrimination in her last episode of Twitter Talk.  Maybe we’ll get change in the Canadian workplace down the road.  Maybe we’ll even get change in the Canadian legal workplace too, eventually.  I’ll keep ClawBie’ing away along until it does.

I’m obviously conflicted out from Slaw, Law is Cool, and even Wise Law Blog, given the collaborative projects I’ve worked on with Garry.

Slaw, a collective blog of legal writers, recently cleaned up at the 2008 Canadian Law Blog Awards (CLawBies).

Slaw contributors and Slaw itself cleaned up this year, demonstrating the enormous impact the site has on legal commentary in Canada.

Law is Cool, another site Omar contributes to, was a recipient last year of the Legal Culture Award, and came in as a runner-up this year.

Here are all the entries where Slaw won a category or was a finalist:

1) Best Canadian Law Blog (or Blogger) Award: Law21 – Anyone that says it’s impossible to break into blogging these days needed to watch Jordan Furlong this past year. Wherever you went in 2008, Jordan’s thoughts were cited and more frequently revered.  Law21 received the most nominations, both from fellow bloggers and via email. But mostly, Jordan’s blog is the 2008 winner because it became a fixture for anyone trying to think critically about legal practice.  Runner up: Slaw – Once again a bridesmaid, though I do try to make up for it below. Not that Slaw can’t win, but solo blogging is a tough gig to do well, and in 2008 it simply felt right to let Jordan bask in the spotlight.

3) Legal Culture Award - Slaw evolved in 2008, drawing in more Canadian blogging talent (see Omar & the Daves!) and producing even more quality commentary.  Despite my own involvement, this year’s nomination process (and Blawggies award) support what I’ve always known: Slaw has become a beacon for what Canadian law blogs have to offer.   Runner ups: Law is Cool, Precedent.

6) EuroCan Connection Awards – This award was envisioned to recognize some of our European law blog friends who frequently highlight and link to Canadian law blogs. In 2008, Charon QC reached out to many Canadian law bloggers, myself included. The work he did late in the year creating a Canadian Law Blog Pageflake just sealed the deal.  Runner Up: Our 2007 winner Nick Holmes became an occasional contributor to Slaw in 2008, and earns a finalist nod this year for doing so.

9) Best Legal Technology Blog – (TIE) This may seem a bit odd, but this award is a tie between Slaw and the great big gap in Canadian legal technology blogs. We web-geeks may be plentiful over at Slaw, but what Canada really needs is a few Mac Lawyers or iPhone JDs.  Or even a run of the mill (but competent & unbiased) legal technologist.  So let it be known, the gauntlet has been dropped for 2009!

Donna Seale, a human rights lawyer that was recently interviewed on Law is Cool, just republished the show notes from the episode.

Donna was a finalist in the 2007 Canadian Law Blog Awards (CLawBies).  Law is Cool won the 2007 CLawBie for Legal Culture.

Here’s what she said:

Recently, along with human rights lawyer Pearl Eliadis, I had the opportunity to be interviewed via podcast by Omar Ha-Redeye over at the Law Is Cool Blog and Podcast regarding recent media criticism of Human Rights Commissions across Canada.  Here’s a full reproduction of the blog post referencing the interview (I don’t usually do this but since they did such a good job setting things out, why reinvent the wheel?)…

If you’re interested in listening to the actual podcast, head over to the Law is Cool post and scroll to the bottom.  You’ll see the podcast there for download.