Yesterday was Earth Day — an opportunity to reflect on the impact of administrative justice on our environment and how tribunals can balance fairness, efficiency and environmentally-friendly practices. It’s obvious that the environment is an inter-related system that needs to be looked at holistically. However, the administrative justice system is rarely looked at holistically. The actions of a tribunal have an impact on all the users of a tribunal services (parties and representatives). A tribunal’s rules and procedures create its own “ecosystem” that has the potential to impose both environmental costs and benefits.

Two small examples will serve to illustrate: . . . [more]

A few months ago, a subscriber to John Gregory’s listserv (which every IT law enthusiast should subscribe to) sent a message regarding how the impact of IT on the legal profession was being taught (or rather wasn’t being taught) in Universities across the country.

Of course, that very question has preoccupied lawyers and legal scholars alike for two decades with regard to IT law, i.e. whether it should be treated as a subject in and of itself (in which case it usually isn’t a mandatory class, meaning that students can go through law school without hearing the word “Internet” . . . [more]

The news, reported in late February, that Apple and Samsung had once again failed to resolve their smartphone patent dispute through mediation did not come as a big surprise. At this writing, the technology giants were preparing to go to trial in California in late March, although there was still some prospect that continuing discussions with the mediator could produce a last minute breakthrough.

Published reports citing court filings stated that company executives met with the mediator in a full-day session, followed by a number of phone calls, without success.

The background of this dispute includes significant wins by Apple . . . [more]

The recent decision of the Supreme Court on summary hearings in the courts has sparked discussion within civil litigation circles, including on slaw.ca. But what, if anything, does the decision tell us about the court’s possible approach to summary processes in the administrative justice system?

The court appears to be open to new models of adjudication:

[t]he balance between procedure and access struck by our justice system must come to reflect modern reality and recognize that new models of adjudication can be fair and just.

The court also noted the importance of public adjudication of disputes for the development . . . [more]

Justice reform is a hot topic in Canada these days. In particular, we have the benefit of the CBA’s Envisioning Equal Justice Summit and report and the final report of the National Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family matters. These follow a long series of reports federally and provincially that include many of the same recommendations for change including BC’s Civil Justice Reform Working group report and the CBA’s 1996 report. In fact, in 1919 Reginald H. Smith identified delay, court costs and fees and the expense of counsel as the three primary defects in the . . . [more]

Arbitrator independence and fairness are the cornerstones of arbitration. They seem to be coming under greater scrutiny, both in Canada and abroad.

There are many sources of bias in any adjudication system, whether it is court or arbitration. (This may be a topic for another column, but see for example arbitrator Edna Sussman’s paper, “Arbitrator Decision Making: Unconscious Psychological Influences and What You Can Do About Them,” December 20, 2013, American Review of International Arbitration, Vol., No. 3, 2013 available online here.)

The accepted test for arbitrator bias in Canada was established by the Supreme Court of . . . [more]

Since 2010, those of us in the online dispute resolution (ODR) community have usually either ended the year or begun the new one reading reports from the November session of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law’s (UNCITRAL) Working group on online dispute resolution (Working group III or WG3) to see what – if any – strides have been made since the preceding Summer session. We (and others) have discussed at great length the work being done by this working group and have even expressed our doubts as to whether said work would ultimately be useful . . . [more]

Access to justice should not stop at the hearing room door. Much of the current discussion of access to justice has focused on getting people into the justice system, with little discussion of how to make justice accessible once they get there. In a justice system that increasingly has self-represented parties as well as unequal representation, fairness and efficiency require that adjudicators take a more hands-on role in the hearing process. This hands-on approach has been termed “active adjudication” by commentators and adjudicators.

There are a great variety of adjudicative tribunals in Canada, all with different rules and approaches to . . . [more]

We need to change our primary focus. Too often, we focus inward on how the system operates from the point of view of those who work in it. ….. The focus must be on the people who need to use the system. … Litigants, and particularly self-represented litigants, are not, as they are too often seen, an inconvenience; they are why the system exists. … Until we involve those who use the system in the reform process, the system will not really work for those who use it.
National Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, . . . [more]

As the courts in Canada continue to struggle with difficult issues relating to the enforcement of arbitration agreements and the enforcement of arbitral awards, it is worth looking at how courts in other common law jurisdictions see the relationship between the courts and arbitration.

The Hon James Allsop, Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia, gave a very thoughtful address at 2013 Clayton Utz University of Sydney International Arbitration Lecture (29 October 2013).

Like others, he sees serious problems with the trend in many countries toward “over-elaborate, over-lawyered, and slow and costly [arbitration] hearings. …[R]ecalcitrance and excessive demands for . . . [more]

Two years ago, almost to the day, Simon Fodden contacted us to write a bimonthly column on online dispute resolution (ODR). A dozen columns later, and after going through the most important current developments on the topic, we realized that we might have skimmed over the core question that should have preceded all of our previous entries: what is ODR?

Obviously, definitions of ODR are plentiful. However, as is often the case when everyone has his or her own idea of a word’s meaning, definitions are sometimes incompatible. That being said, as explained in a recent paper published by Julio . . . [more]

There has been a much-needed recent focus on the state of the civil litigation process in Canada. Of course, the courts are only a small (albeit vital) part of our system of justice. In fact, a majority of people in Canada will have little, if any, direct contact with the courts; they are more likely to encounter various aspects of the administrative justice system in disputes with neighbours, in their workplace and with governments. In this column, I will focus on the justice system for unionized employees – the labour arbitration process.

Labour arbitration was introduced as part of the . . . [more]