The following warning was issued by Lawyers Mutual of North Carolina. We haven’t had any reports of this in Ontario yet, but lawyers should always be alert to phishing scams that try to trick them into opening an attachment or clicking a link that could instal malware.

There is a new phishing scam targeting bar members across the country. The fraudulent email pretends to be a communication from the State Bar or Bar Association.

There are several versions of this scam. The most common are: “[state] Bar Complaint,” “[state] Bar Association Past Due Notice,” and “Lawyers and judges may now . . . [more]

Boring but important fact: law firm clients of all types – sophisticated, unsophisticated, big, small (and everywhere in between) increasingly use the Internet to research, vet, and select their lawyers. This is not news. But what is noteworthy is that online ratings & reviews of lawyers generated by the public are becoming a more predominant part of the overall picture of your firm that prospective clients see when they look you up online. You may want to address that.

Ratings are not new either. I’m old enough to remember when Martindale-Hubbell’s highly coveted AV ratings were doled out in giant-book . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from seventy 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. Legal Feeds  2. Blogue du CRL 3. ABlawg  4. University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog  5. Barry Sookman

Legal Feeds
Métis law student crowned Miss Universe Canada

A University of Saskatchewan law student is hoping to use her new position as Miss Universe Canada to elevate the discussion . . . [more]

After pushing it through the Senate on Friday morning, the House of Commons finally voted for Bill C-14 on Friday afternoon. The Department of Justice has created a Q&A page on the Bill and some of the related issue.

The Senate attempted to modify Bill C-14 to adjust the issue of reasonable foreseeability, but were unsuccessful in doing so. This issue was especially important in light of a recent decision by the Alberta Court of Appeal, which indicated this criteria was not necessary under the 2015 Carter decision.

The Department of Justice has responded to this concern in an . . . [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.

ACTION COLLECTIVE (RECOURS COLLECTIF) : L’action collective au nom des personnes qui auraient été privées du statut d’Indien en raison de dispositions discriminatoires énoncées à la Loi sur les Indiens entre 1985 et 2011 est autorisée.

Intitulé : Sarrazin c. Canada (Procureur général), 2016 QCCS 2458
Juridiction : Cour supérieure . . . [more]

I recently taught “Legal Information Sources and Services” at the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia. One of the topics that gave rise to a particularly interesting conversation was knowledge management. I was informed (very politely and gently) that at the school knowledge management is mainly discussed in the context of the archival program, but that as a term of art it is now considered old fashioned in information studies, as it is difficult to define and measure among other problems. Instead other terms like information management are taking its place.

This is . . . [more]

LégisQuébec, the website that contains official versions of Quebec laws and regulations, this week went totally free.

The site which offers access to current and former versions of Québec statutes and regulations used to require a subscription for many of its more advanced features.

The revised site has documents in HTML, PDF or EPUB formats.

The material includes the consolidated statutes and regulations for Quebec, historic versions of legislation and regulations, the Table of Amendments to Statutes and the Table of Amendments to Regulations. Information on what period is covered by the historical versions is available in the FAQ . . . [more]

To date, the Federal government has accepted 27,580 Syrian refugees into Canada through various government programs and private sponsorships. The processing of this volume of applications has been a monumental task. In meetings, the Deputy Minister described how they created a 24/7 processing machine, using their resources around the globe to increase efficiency and decrease processing times. These +27,500 refugees join the ~150,000 other refugees from other source countries. When they arrive, there is no doubt that they require significant settlement services and the children need access to education. This is where things can get messy. While the Federal government . . . [more]

On June 6, 2016, the Ontario government announced that changes to the Customer Service Standard under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) will come into force on July 1, 2016, and apply to all organizations providing goods, services or facilities in the province. . . . [more]

Despite recent years of decades-low law school application levels, law school seats are still heavily over-subscribed. Similarly, for those who graduate (which, to be honest, is nearly every single admitted student that manages to pay tuition), the opportunities to be called and to practice as a lawyer is case of too many grads and too few jobs. Yet when it comes to supporting the legal needs of the public, lawyers aren’t even close to filling the chairs that exist, much less the new ones added each day. Worse, we’re increasingly less interested in doing so.

Estimates and sources vary, but . . . [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. R. v. Olson, 2016 BCPC 150

[63] Mr. Olson’s entire relationship with the complainant, outside of the sexual one, was steeped in his role at the school: as a teacher, a house leader and as one of the group of teachers and house parents who stood in a parental role for all of the students. There was an inherent power imbalance . . . [more]

Several Slaw contributors have written recently about the use of artificial intelligence in law (Tim Knight here, Nate Russell here) with particular reference to the program on “Computers in Legal Research” at the conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries held in Vancouver this past May, moderated by Slaw’s Steve Matthews. I attended the program. I was disappointed though not surprised that none of the speakers was a librarian; and, while there was much discussion of the potential and possible consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practice, there was, aside from the moderator’s . . . [more]