The limits on privacy and confidentiality of arbitration is often hard to unravel. They are really two separate questions. And the answer to both seems to be: “It depends.”

Is Arbitration Private?

It is generally assumed that arbitration is private – in contrast to the courts, which are generally open to the public, with some exceptions. But where does that assumption arise?

Provincial arbitration statutes generally do not provide that arbitration is private. (See for example the Uniform Arbitration Act and the BC, Alberta, and Ontario Acts.)

Nor does the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, which has . . . [more]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced on May 20th that it had launched TOSsed Out, a new iteration of EFF’s continuing work in tracking and documenting the ways that Terms of Service (TOS) and other speech moderating rules are unevenly applied to people by online services. Sometimes, posts are deleted. Sometimes accounts are banned. For many people, the internet represents an irreplaceable forum to express their ideas, communicate with others, etc.

We have long been fans of the EFF and were delighted to hear that cybersecurity guru Bruce Schneier is leaving IBM, in part to focus on teaching cybersecurity to . . . [more]

[Download the full text for this summary from the SSRN.]

Law societies appear to be powerless to serve the public interest by defending lawyers’ markets against three major threats:

(1) the access to justice problem (the A2J problem of unaffordable legal services for the majority of society that is middle- and lower-income people), which has left the majority of law firms short of clients;

(2) the commercial producers of legal services such as LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, now have millions of customers, who are now here in Canada beginning the same process of invading lawyers’ markets, along with the . . . [more]

Les salles de classe des facultés de droit sont remplies d’étudiantes. À l’Université Laval, elles forment près de 70 % de la nouvelle cohorte admise au baccalauréat en droit à l’automne 2018. Au Québec, plus de 65 % des diplômés de l’École du Barreau sont des femmes.

Pourtant, les statistiques montrent que les avocates abandonnent la profession beaucoup plus tôt que leurs confrères (en moyenne 49 ans comparativement à 61 ans chez les hommes, selon les statistiques du Barreau du Québec). Les femmes sont très nombreuses à quitter la pratique du droit au cours des 10 premières années, cette période . . . [more]

Law school classrooms are filled with female students. At Université Laval, in fall 2018, female students made up nearly 70% of the new cohort admitted to the Bachelor of Laws program. In Quebec, more than 65% of graduates from the École du Barreau (Bar School) are women.

Yet, statistics show that women lawyers leave the profession much earlier than their male colleagues (at age 49 vs. 61, on average, according to Quebec Bar statistics). Many women leave the practice of law during the first 10 years, a period considered crucial for career advancement. Inevitably, they are less likely to become . . . [more]

“Survival mode is supposed to be a phase that helps save your life. It’s not meant to be how you live”.
Michele Rosenthal, Author and Trauma Therapist.

Whether I’m coaching individual lawyers or assisting a firm with a strategic plan, inevitably the concept of stress management will arise. It could be at the heart of an under-performing lawyer; it could be blocking teams from executing on their practice group or client team plans; or it could be holding back the implementation of a new firm program. Sometimes stress is the obvious culprit; sometimes it’s under the surface and takes a . . . [more]

Fifteen years after the Assisted Human Reproduction Act was introduced, Health Canada has finally released the long-awaited regulations under the Act regarding the reimbursement of surrogates and donors. The new regulations come into force on June 9, 2020. They will have a significant impact on individuals who use assisted reproductive technologies and the fertility lawyers who advise them.

The Federal Government’s intention behind the new regulations is to further protect the health and safety of Canadians who use or are born through the use of assisted reproductive technologies like invitro fertilization and surrogacy. The Minister of Health has expressed that . . . [more]

Despite the best efforts of our dedicated and tireless Family Court judges, they are becoming overwhelmed. There are many reasons for this phenomenon I am sure including the fact that governments across Canada spend roughly only 1% of their annual budgets on the justice system[1]. One of them is what has been termed the rise of the “self represented” litigant. Self represented litigants are not necessarily a problem despite what you might hear in the media and read in studies[2] undertaken to try understand the reasons behind their “rise” and to offer to solutions to deal with . . . [more]

Recently, Becky Beaupre Gillespie, the University of Chicago Law School Director of Content, published a story on the collection I’m building titled “The Cartoonists’ Guide to Law: D’Angelo Law Library’s New Collection of Illustrated Legal Codes Offers Insight into Statutes and Society” (July 8, 2019)(also published at the University of Chicago Library News site, July 18, 2019). It is the culmination of several years of trying to hunt down and acquire hard to find copies of foreign law codes illustrated by Joseph Hémard and others.

So, how did I go about identifying and acquiring these illustrated law codes? . . . [more]

Intellectual property licenses will have additional certainty regarding their status when recent amendments to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act come into force. Licensees may preserve rights under intellectual property license agreements, as long as they continue to perform their obligations even if the licensor goes through insolvency, bankruptcy or arrangement in various circumstances.

These changes were included in Bill C-86 Budget Implementation Act that received Royal Assent in December, 2018. These changes add to changes that were implemented in 2009 that also addressed intellectual property license agreements.

The 2009 amendments (s. 65.11(7) of the . . . [more]

On May 17, 2019, Canada and the United States announced the settlement of the cross-border steel and aluminum trade conflict. Both countries agreed to eliminate tariffs on their cross-border trade in steel and aluminum products. Mexico and the United States also settled the issue in the same way–with the reciprocal elimination of the tariffs.

We recall that in spite of the then-ongoing NAFTA re-negotiations, the Trump Administration imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports of 25% and 10%, respectively, from Canada in June 2018. This action was pursuant to section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 on the . . . [more]

We urgently need to figure out how to talk about justice systems at the highest political level. As I have said before in this column: globally, justice systems are not delivering. Read the report of the Task Force on Justice. We need to make them better. That requires a new type of justice leadership and a new way of talking.

On 19 and 20 June the ministers of justice of the G7+ met for two days in The Hague. The fact that they met made me rejoice. You can’t have enough ministers of justice sharing experiences and getting . . . [more]