There is a growing trend to bring the tools of data analysis into legal practice, and much of the media coverage references Michael Lewis’ 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game*, or perhaps the movie based on the book:

With so many things being described as being “like moneyball”, I started to wonder what Moneyball actually said. It also made me wonder what analytics can best be used to illuminate legal information, and where the data could come from, so I read the book:

Lewis discusses the development of the statistics required to adequately measure baseball . . . [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. Susan on the Soapbox  2. Slater Vecchio Connected 3. McElroy Law Blog  4. IPilogue  5. Pensions & Benefits Law

Susan on the Soapbox
Never Watch a Presidential Debate When You’ve Got the Flu

Ms Soapbox has the flu and missed Thanksgiving dinner last night with her family and friends. . . . [more]

Donald Trump is estimated to have been involved in over 3,500 lawsuits, unprecedented for any presidential nominee. Most recently, he threatened to sue for defamation over further allegations of groping. Sources, however, indicate he hasn’t actually sued a news outlet in decades, and his threats may have a boomerang effect.

It’s clear that he has other legal disputes on this side of the border as well. Many of them involve the tower in downtown Toronto which bears his name. Only one of them has been reported though, and the Court of Appeal recently weighed in on this action . . . [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.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Accusés de complot, de corruption et d’importation de drogue à l’issue de l’opération policière «Projet Colisée», les appelants voient leurs verdicts de culpabilité confirmés par la Cour, ainsi que les peines de détention à purger au sein de la collectivité qui leur ont été imposées.

Intitulé :  . . . [more]

It is a distinct honour for me, in my capacity as Dean of Law at Thompson Rivers University (TRU Law), to provide a contribution to the Canadian Council of Law Deans series of important issues affecting legal education and the legal profession. I have chosen to select the critical challenge for today’s law students (and recent law graduates) of the ever increasing costs of legal education in Canada. I recently was talking with a law classmate of mine (UBC ’75,) who is now a distinguished justice, about tuition fees. His recollection was that we were paying approximately $450/year to pursue . . . [more]

In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., reported earlier this week on two recent comparative law reports published by the institution.

The first, Government Access to Encrypted Communications, “describes the law of 12 nations and the European Union on whether the government, pursuant to a court order or other government process, can require companies to decrypt encrypted communications or provide the government with the means to do so”.

The other one is an updated version of an earlier report entitled Foreign Intelligence Gathering Laws that examines the legislation regulating the . . . [more]

As some of you may recall from earlier in the year, we ran our first-ever Slaw reader survey. While it has taken us some time to aggregate and digest all of the submissions, we are pleased to finally release our inaugural Slaw Readers Survey Report.

At the outset of this process, our goals were pretty simple: to better understand our readership, and to lay the groundwork for future planning. And I must say, it was very exciting to watch all those submissions roll in! So many of you took the time to respond, giving us demographics, your likes . . . [more]

Big news, friends: Canada’s first food law & policy conference is happening in a little less than a month. The Future of Food Law & Policy in Canada is this November 3-4 at the Schulich School of Law in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This conference marks the first time that leaders in the legal community will come together to discuss how to strengthen and improve our food systems, to consider how stakeholders perceive and adapt to change, and to learn better practices and approaches to food law problems for clients, researchers, and government.

I have written previously on both the ups . . . [more]

I noticed it first this past summer when I attended the joint International Journal of Clinical Legal Education – Association for Canadian Clinical Legal Education conference in Toronto. It was my first time attending and I had no idea what to expect.

What I found was a group of very smart, dedicated and focused academics and lawyers engaged in the field of clinical legal education. What I noticed was that the gender balance among conference attendees was weighted heavily in favour of women.

Upon returning to the office after the conference, I looked around at our summer students – 5 . . . [more]

The prevailing legislative standard in Canada for a duty to report a breach of data security (loss of data, compromise, etc) seems to be that there is a real risk of serious harm as a result of the breach.

Have Canadian courts or regulators given useful guidance on when that happens, and what kind of harm is serious and likely? I am especially interested in court rulings, since the threat of litigation can focus the data holder’s mind as much as or even more than a regulator’s order. (Have privacy regulators cracked down on reporting requirements or other useful follow-up . . . [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. Bhasin v. Hrynew, [2014] 3 SCR 494, 2014 SCC 71

[1] The key issues on this appeal come down to two straightforward questions: Does Canadian common law impose a duty on parties to perform their contractual obligations honestly? And, if so, did either of the respondents breach that duty? I would answer both questions in the affirmative. Finding that there is . . . [more]