Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on research and writing, practice, and technology.

Research & Writing

Take a Pass on the Passive
Neil Guthrie

Does the subject of your sentence do something (She said that), or is something done to the subject (That was said by her)? The first is an active construction, the second a passive one. The active voice is much more effective. It tends to be shorter and simpler, more natural and direct, more engaging. …

Practice

How . . . [more]

Upon arrest or detention, a police officer must advise a detainee of their s. 10 Charter right to retain and instruct counsel without delay. Does this right apply if a person is “apprehended” and taken involuntarily to a health facility for a psychiatric assessment? Presumably it does: if the individual is not free to leave the officer’s custody or refuse the examination, then their individual liberty is clearly suspended by a state authority. This is the very definition of a “detention” under the Charter: R v Grant. Yet, the case law implies that officers may be failing to advise . . . [more]

2015 was the fifth year we’ve tracked the fraud-related emails forwarded to fraudinfo@lawpro.ca that allow us to post our warnings to lawyers on LAWPRO’s AvoidaClaim blog. This year we noticed a new trend: the number of emailed reports declined but not the number of actual posts we’ve done. This is likely because while the fraudsters are keeping up their efforts to dupe lawyers, more and more lawyers now recognize the scams and simply delete the emails rather than forwarding them to us. Sadly, not every lawyer sees the frauds for what they are. Last week we heard from a firm . . . [more]

An interesting post by lawyer and cognitive scientist Peter Macmillan, was captured in part by comments in the LinkedIn Legal Innovation and Technology group, caught my attention last week. In his post, “Robot Lawyers are Not the Future,” Macmillan begins by noting that “industry outsiders are pushing technologies that many believe will transform the legal profession from a technological backwater to a shining example of cognitive computing.”

And, although he knows that advances in technology will not stop happening, he contends that, “Robot Lawyers are not the future, at least not in the sense that they’ll rule . . . [more]

From the Court:

OTTAWA – The Supreme Court of Canada is pleased to announce the launch of its English and French Twitter accounts. Tweets will pertain to the business of the Court and will be posted on both accounts simultaneously.

The launch of these Twitter accounts in 2016 coincides with an important milestone in the Court’s history: it is the 140th anniversary of the first hearings held by the Supreme Court of Canada.

You can follow the Supreme Court of Canada on Twitter in English @SCC_eng and in French @CSC_fra.

Chief Justice McLachlin commends the Court’s presence on Twitter:

For the past two years I’ve taught Advanced Legal Research and Writing to upper year law students, and I’ve just begun a third session.

This is a small seminar course and the students are primarily final-year students. My day-one poll of the students generally suggests some feel uncertainty about their legal research and writing skills as they prepare to enter the profession, and they take the course almost as “remedial legal research and writing,” to borrow the words of a colleague.

To meet stated student learning needs, we generally focus in depth on the skills of researching case . . . [more]

Law firm Web sites can be more secure and offer clients a greater degree of comfort that their interactions are protected. Security and encryption are hot topics as the scales fall from digital eyes (and sometimes are put back again). Some recent developments in the way Web sites can secure their interactions make it even easier for law firms to have secure Web sites.

HTTPS

I’ve touched on using https yourself when sending or receiving client information, or banking, or engaging in other online activities. This slight change in a Web site’s URL – from http:// to https:// – means . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. First Reference Talks  2. Canadian Appeals Monitor 3. Blogue du CRL  4. The Court  5. Michael Geist

First Reference Talks
Alberta the newest province to add gender identity and gender expression to human rights legislation

Effective December 11, 2015, Alberta has added gender identity and gender expression as a . . . [more]

Last year I indicated that there were changes in Ontario which suggested that cloud computing had been implicitly authorized for lawyers. There was no other practical way to implement the new services rules under the amended Rules of Civil Procedure.

Despite these changes, there is still resistance to adopting cloud computing in practice, and sometimes with good reason. Security breaches of online databases have illustrated the enormous risk and problems created in a digital world.

The Ashley Madison hacks had many scurrying in embarrassment, and others concerned because their names had been used by the website without their permission. . . . [more]

So-called fugitive Canadian federal government documents are documents that are available in print or on a website but that are not collected by an official depository program such as the federal Depository Services Program that maintains the Government of Canada Publications catalogue.

A few years ago, staff at 11 Canadian libraries launched the Canadian Government Information Digital Preservation Network (CGI DPN), an initiative dedicated to preserving digital collections of government information.

In 2014, the Network created the Fugitive Documents Working Group to develop strategies to collect fugitive documents.

The Working Group has created a spreadsheet to locate and report . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

CONSTITUTIONNEL (DROIT): Les articles de la Loi concernant les soins de fin de vie qui visent l’aide médicale à mourir sont incompatibles avec les articles 14 et 241 b) C.Cr.; leur mise en application sera ainsi suspendue dès l’entrée en vigueur de la loi, le 10 décembre 2015.

Intitulé :  . . . [more]

A lot of good research on litigants without counsel has been published in the last three or four years, most notably, in my view, Professor Julie Macfarlane‘s “Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Self-represented Litigants,” a trio of papers published by the Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family on the views of Alberta judges and family law lawyers, and a report by the Institute with professors Nicholas Bala and Rachel Birnbaum (in press) on the results of a national survey of judges and lawyers. Although this research doesn’t necessarily label it as such, I’ve noticed . . . [more]