Canada’s online legal magazine.

Archive for May, 2025

Wednesday: What’s Hot on CanLII? – April 2025

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

For this past month, the three most-consulted English-language decisions were:

1. Afolabi v. Law Society of Ontario, 2025 ONCA 257

[102] The LSO has a duty to protect the public interest, maintain public confidence in the profession, and ensure the entry-level competence of incoming licensees. It is to be afforded considerable latitude in regulating the legal profession and in determining how the duty . . . [more]

Posted in: Wednesday: What's Hot on CanLII

Free AI Is All You Need to Supercharge Your Practice

The market for legal AI is teaming with options. Many of them are compelling. All of them are expensive.

What the companies offering these tools hope that you don’t notice is that free (or almost free) tools, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are getting so good at basic legal research tasks that many lawyers looking to boost their productivity don’t need to look any further.

We highlight three ways to use these free tools to make research more effective — but we note that becoming a subscriber to one of them, for roughly $30 a month, will tend . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Technology

Indigenous Cultural Competency for Tribunals – the Steps Ahead

Ten years ago, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set out some recommendations for cultural competency training for lawyers, law students and public servants. The Calls to Action (numbers 27, 28 and 57) call for education/training on the history of Indigenous peoples, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations. The Commission stated that such training would require “skills based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism”.

There were no calls to action for education or training of judges. . . . [more]

Posted in: Dispute Resolution, Legal Ethics

Monday’s Mix

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from more than 80 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. Canadian Appeals Monitor 2. Know How 3. Administrative Law Matters 4. Library Boy 5. Civil Resolution Tribunal blog

Canadian Appeals Monitor
Limiting Liability for Duties of Good Faith: California Dreamin’?

Limitation of liability clauses are a common feature of commercial agreements in Canada. Parties frequently include such

. . . [more]
Posted in: Monday’s Mix

Summaries Sunday: SOQUIJ

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) : Les dispositions ayant haussé l’âge du consentement de 14 à 16 ans, lesquelles sont en vigueur depuis 2008, ne font pas obstacle à l’application de l’ancien article 140 du Code criminel en l’espèce; ainsi, dans la mesure où la victime avait 14 ans en 1981 et où . . . [more]

Posted in: Summaries Sunday

No Half Measures: Four Big Ideas in Ontario’s Civil Rules Review

Ontario’s Civil Rules Review Working Group has proposed the most comprehensive reform of Ontario’s Rules of Civil Procedure since their introduction in 1985. The Consultation Paper released in early April weighs in at 122 pages, with recommendations affecting every major element of civil litigation within the province.

The Working Group’s overarching goal is to get “all cases heard within two years.” This is certainly not unambitious, given that the status quo average is between four and five years. Quicker times to disposition, the Working Group hopes, will generate lower legal bills and better access to justice.

There seem . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Ethics, Practice of Law

Fearless: A Required State of Being

The global legal services market needs optimistic contrarians: strong people who think fast and clearly, and whose actions are decisive and fearless. Their power needs to be united, harnessed, and used for good.

The legal services sector has always had a reputation for being tough. It’s getting tougher by the minute and unlikely to let up.

While disruptive factors are many, the three most daunting are:

  • Accelerating advances in generative artificial intelligence that are usurping service-oriented tasks and upending how various types of legal work get produced and priced – all of which is impacting traditional law firm pyramid structures
. . . [more]
Posted in: Legal Marketing, Practice of Law

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