The first conference I attended in 2020 was the Innovations in Technology Conference hosted by the Legal Services Corporation in Portland, Oregon, last month. Initially I thought that having a conference in January was highly eccentric, then I booked my hotel room and saw the rates for staying in Portland in January, and I immediately saw how brilliant it is.

For those of you who don’t know, it’s the national conference on technology aimed at a legal aid audience, most of whom are grantees of the Legal Services Corporation. One of the themes of the conference that I was particularly . . . [more]

We are almost at the end of the second month of 2020 and have compiled for you a number of upcoming employment and labour law changes and key compliance issues that federally regulated and Ontario employers need to consider in their HR and payroll practices. . . . [more]

Periodically on Thursdays, 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.

Bankruptcy Law Picture Book: A Brief Intro to the Law of Bankruptcy, in Pictures

Wela Quan is a proud Albertan living in New York City. A former corporate lawyer in Toronto and in New York City, she now spends her time running a Brooklyn based ed-tech start-up and writing visual legal guides. . . . [more]

Who owns your data is actually the wrong question to ask. The better question is what are others able to do with information about you?

You may have heard the saying “data is the new oil”. Various kinds of data can indeed be valuable and useful. Where that goes off the rails is when that data is about you. While privacy laws have a notion of consent or reasonable use for information that is connected to us personally, it’s not always that simple.

This issue gets complicated and messy. Here are some things to ponder:

• Cars know increasing

It is possible that traditional law schools will reinvent themselves structurally from the ground up and become exemplars of innovative 21st-century lawyer formation. It is also possible that I will play Polonius, the irritating giver of unwanted advice, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s next production of Hamlet. Both these scenarios would be welcome (especially Act III, scene iv, when the advice-giver behind the curtain finally gets what’s coming to him).

More likely, however, the reinvention of lawyer formation will begin outside of our legacy law campuses. Ryerson University’s new law school is a very promising entrant in this burgeoning . . . [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. Gichuru v. Vancouver Swing Society (No. 3), 2020 BCHRT 1 (CanLII)

[242] The Tribunal has rarely had to consider the issue of vexatious litigants in the context of its own decisions, and the VSS was unable to identify any decisions in which an award was made against a party to a complaint on the basis of a pattern of vexatious litigation.

[243] . . . [more]

In the fall of 2019, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada amended their Model Code of Professional Conduct to incorporate reference to the use of technology in section 3.1-2 of the Model Code, which addresses competence. The Law Society of Ontario has provided the profession with a “guideline” in the use of technology, which in some cases refers to the Rules of Professional Conduct, but it is not itself a rule of professional conduct. It constitutes, in effect, desirable behaviour but, with some exceptions, not required conduct. As does legal practice generally, however, the use of technology requires ethical . . . [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 practice, research, writing and technology.

Research & Writing

The
Neil Guthrie

As used (or not) in the names of countries. One does still occasionally hear or see the Ukraine, but be careful not to use that around people of Ukrainian origin. They can get very shirty about it. Their point is that the definite article the makes the country sound more like a region, like the Midwest or the Highlands – and, by implication, . . . [more]

In Seedlings Life Science Ventures, LLC v. Pfizer Canada ULC, 2020 FC 1, Mr. Justice Sébastien Grammond presided over a patent infringement action in the Federal Court of Canada. The review is a helpful reminder of the modern approach to interpret patent claims.

Seedlings Life Science Ventures, LLC (Seedlings) is an early-stage health-care research and product development company. It alleges that Pfizer Canada ULC (Pfizer), infringes Seedings patent by selling in Canada an auto-injector commonly known as the EpiPen. While, at first sight, the EpiPen and Seedlings’s invention do not look alike, Seedlings argues that the EpiPen infringes certain . . . [more]

The wheels of justice move slowly. So slowly sometimes, that their conclusion occurs after all practical considerations for the parties are finished.

The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R. v. Poulin is an example of this, with the defendant passing away within four months of the Court granting leave for appeal.

In case you were wondering, he did not have the opportunity to file his factum.

Prior to his demise, the Crown had unsuccessfully sought to bring a motion to suspend the execution of his conditional sentence. The conditional sentence provided by the trial judge was due to his . . . [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.

FAMILLE : Un adolescent de 16 ans a le droit de refuser de fournir une copie de ses passeports, de son certificat de citoyenneté et d’autres documents personnels du même genre à son père; le droit à la vie privée de l’adolescent l’emporte en l’espèce sur l’autorité parentale.

Intitulé :  . . . [more]