A little while ago, I gave a presentation to the National Judicial Institute‘s annual family law conference on the more important innovations in family justice introduced in British Columbia over the past decade, and in preparing my paper I realized something that struck me as terribly important. Of the nine or so changes with the biggest impact on family justice — which included things like the introduction of mandatory judicial case conferencing in 2002, the release of the report A New Justice System for Children and Families in 2005 and the introduction of Canada’s most progressive family law legislation . . . [more]

The latest edition of the CBA National, the magazine of the Canadian Bar Association, had a feature story on a topic that’s started to gain attention recently in Canada.

The legal profession is undergoing an era of profound change, influenced by technology, new business structures, globalization, and the high cost of justice. New skills and tools are needed by graduates in order to succeed. Law grads need to be problem solvers. But are law schools keeping up? Are they reflecting the realities of the legal profession?

On the CBA National article, legal futurist Jordan Furlong says the answer is . . . [more]

On March 8, 2016, the Ontario government gave royal assent to the Sexual Violence and Harassment Action Plan Act (Bill 132) to amend various statutes with respect to sexual violence, sexual harassment, domestic violence and other forms of abuse. The Act aims to make workplaces, campuses and communities safer and more responsive to the needs of survivors and to complaints about sexual violence and harassment. . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Write a Wikipedia Article for Law School Credit—Really?

John C. Kleefeld, Associate Professor, College of Law, University of Saskatchewan and Katelyn Rattray, Articling Student, Race & Company LLP.

65 J Legal Educ 597 (2016) © Association of American Law Schools

Excerpt: from the Introduction and Parts I-III | [Footnotes omitted. They . . . [more]

Active adjudication is an approach to dispute resolution that puts more emphasis on the role of the adjudicator in focusing the issues in dispute and the process for resolving those issues. It stands in contrast to the classic adversarial model of dispute resolution that puts more emphasis on the parties shaping the matters in dispute and the evidence required to prove their case. Active adjudication has many advantages for access to justice. I have written about this before. Active adjudication can result in shorter processes as well as levelling the playing field, to some extent, for self-represented parties.

The . . . [more]

Everyone seems to agree that law school new graduates are not practice-ready, but there continues to be disagreement about how ready they should be at that stage of their careers. This discussion has been going on for at least 30 years, and the debate continues to rage. The latest edition of the National sets it all out, highlighting the challenges inherent in changing the law school curriculum, along with some law school innovations that have taken hold. This topic was also the focus of a recent CBA Futures workshop entitled Transforming Legal Education in Canada: a Workshop to Inspire . . . [more]

Tomorrow I am speaking with law students at Robson Hall as part of a Do Law Differently launch event hosted by the MLSA and Canadian Bar Association. I’ve been invited to talk about my own career path, about lessons I’ve learned and what I look for when hiring.

I’ve prepared my 20 minute talk and can tell you it is full of optimism and hope for a new kind of legal profession that holds to old-school values like integrity and honour and generosity while boldly facing a new economic order that mostly values faster, better, cheaper.

Frankly, I’m not feeling . . . [more]

It’s been said that whoevers owns the dominant narrative in the courtroom wins.

How do you make sure that your story becomes the dominant story?

In Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die: Made to Stick, Chip Heath and Dan Heath provide six simple elements for creating narratives that stick. These elements are:

1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional
6. Stories

Simple:

To keep a story simple find the core of the theory. A great compact theory can be summed up in one statement and is profound. The most profound of theories are those that a person can spend an entire . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Jackson v Mayerle, 2016 ONSC 1556

8. These are nice, average people. Of modest means (now considerably more modest). They drive old cars and probably pinch pennies shopping at Costco.

9. And yet somehow, between them, they spent more than half a million dollars on lawyers “to have a judge tell us something we could arrange ourselves.”

(Check for commentary . . . [more]

It is timely that Vanderbilt Law School is hosting what is billed as the first legal conference on the topic: “Watson, Esq.: Will Your Next Lawyer Be a Machine.” The legal system, and the legal profession will need to dramatically lift it’s game if it is to keep up with client expectations as mankind prepares to take another big step. It led me back to an abstract of a Rees Morrison article I did almost 30 years ago:

Artificial intelligence and law: A conference report

The First International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law was held in Boston . . . [more]

The Ontario Court of Appeal has reaffirmed that in cases where there is a continuing breach of contract the limitation period for bringing the lawsuit resets each day as the continuing breach continues to occur.

The ruling occurred in the context of a commercial leasing dispute. One of the clauses of the lease required the tenant to carry on its business on a continuous basis from the leased premises. Although the tenant continued to pay rent, it failed to operate from the leased premises as required by the lease. The landlord sued the tenant after the end of the . . . [more]

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.

Practice

Welcome the New Tipsters…
David Bilinsky

Changes are coming to SlawTips! I would like to introduce our new enhanced team of practice tipsters. Our team will now include: Michael McCubbin, Vancouver; Andrea Cannavina, New York City; Stacey Gerrard, Halifax; Sandra Bekhor, Toronto; Mark Morris, Toronto; Elizabeth Mah, Vancouver; Bjorn (Barney) Christianson, Portage la Prairie; Ian Hu, Toronto. …

Research & Writing

Use LexBox for Case Law Monitoring . . . [more]