An acquaintance of mine recently accused me of being an “expert” on administrative law now that I have been regularly writing on the topic. His choice of words, not mine. Correct or not, I took it as a complement. Then, based upon his misguided belief, he put an interesting question to me, which provided with some inspiration for this article.

The question related to an unspecified administrative tribunal with no statutory appeal provision and no statutory reconsideration provision. Apparently, the tribunal discovered that it had made a demonstrable and embarrassing denial of natural justice, failing to invite submissions on a . . . [more]

(I’m very pleased to welcome Antoine Dusséaux from Doctrine as a guest contributor on this post. You can read more about and from Antoine below.)

Given my job (CEO at CanLII – saved you a click ) and law degree from a civil law program, I often get to talk about the differences between legal information in Québec compared to the rest of Canada.

I was an intellectual property (IP) lawyer before joining CanLII and although I wasn’t a litigator per se, I was routinely involved in IP cases before the Federal Court. Before that, I did a bit of . . . [more]

Most of the evidence now used in legal proceedings and for legal services comes from complex electronic systems and devices. But because of ignorance of technology in general, lawyers don’t challenge the reliability of such frequent sources of evidence. As a result, computers, their software, and computer storage, are dealt with as though they were infallible producers of evidence. As a result, so does the law of evidence. But the technical literature warns repeatedly that software-based devices and systems are far from infallible. Therefore, the evidence they produce may not be reliable. The following articles provide several examples and accompanying . . . [more]

It is now relatively uncontroversial that lawyers should be technologically competent. A duty of technological competence has been included in the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct since 2012 and has subsequently been adopted in 36 states. Here, in Canada, a similar duty is under active consideration by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada for inclusion in their Model Code.

Much less has been said and done in relation to judicial technological competence; it’s time for this to change.

To be sure, the proposition that judges need to understand technology is not an entirely new . . . [more]

For this month’s CFCJ Slaw blog, we asked Saba Samanian, a recent graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School to provide her perspective on a topic related to the future of the legal profession. Read on to learn what she has to say about law, technology, access justice and how she is thinking about her responsibility to be technically competent as she enters the profession.

As a recent graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School, and as someone who has an interest in technology and innovation, I often find myself thinking about how the two can intersect. While I have been looking . . . [more]

I recently went looking for a simple definition of arbitration and ended up going around in circles.

Wiktionary, the online dictionary, defines arbitrate as to either make a judgement in a dispute as an arbitrator, or to submit a dispute to such a judgment. Arbitrator is then defined as a person to whom the authority to settle or judge a dispute is delegated.

The Oxford English Dictionary is even less helpful. It defines arbitrate as to “reach an authoritative judgement or settlement.” Arbitration is “the use of an arbitrator to settle a dispute,” and arbitrator is “an independent person or . . . [more]

My generation, filled with existential angst, suffered in our youth the conceit that we would not sell out as those before us did. If Kurt Cobain was the hero of our time, it was because he was authentic to the end, true to his music but not the business. And for those of us who stumbled into this profession, I ask, how many of us wrote a law school admissions essay filled with lofty ambitions to better the world, and of those, how many are left living true to those ambitions? I have seen, no, even worse, convinced, classmates and . . . [more]

Climate change is probably the single greatest threat to the security and prosperity of Canadians, as well as the rest of the human race. The most effective, least painful way to mitigate climate change is to impose a price on greenhouse gases worldwide, either through carbon taxes or tradable emission permits. However, carbon pricing is as politically difficult as it is economically efficient. In most countries, voters and political leaders have so far refused to support prices high enough to keep the risk of catastrophic climate change within an acceptable band. In Canada, there is also real risk that the . . . [more]

We are not good at asking people for testimonial. Many of us feel awkward asking someone else for their opinion and yet what is the first thing we do when checking out a restaurant or an Airbnb or a new vacuum cleaner? We look to see what others have said about it.

In the past I have written about Super Fans. These are clients that will promote you at any opportunity, that help drive referrals, and are not just satisfied with your work but are truly loyal to you. We love Super Fans! As great as these clients are . . . [more]

Our daily interactions with self-represented litigants (SRLs) from across Canada, along with our continuous tracking of the developing jurisprudence around SRLs, disclose the emergence of a judicial strategy that amounts to a war on self-represented parties in some courts and jurisdictions. The resulting mistrust and anger among many reasonable members of the public should be a cause for alarm among members of the profession.

Not only does this strategy undermine our commitment to a right of access to the courts, and ignore the Supreme Court of Canada’s clear statement in Pintea v John that SRLs cannot and should not be . . . [more]

Thomson v. Afterlife Network Inc., 2019 FC 545, is a Federal Court decision in which the Court considers the existence of copyright in obituaries used in an e-commerce context.

DT was the representative plaintiff in a class action lawsuit claiming that posted obituaries and photographs, that were authored and taken by the plaintiff and other class members without their permission and thereby Afterlife infringed the copyright and the moral rights of the class members.

Afterlife operated a website that contained over a million obituaries in Canada and on which Afterlife reproduced obituaries and photos from the websites of Canadian . . . [more]

“We don’t believe in digital marketing. We believe in marketing in a digital world.” – Clive Sirkin, CMO of Kimberly Clark

And a digital world it is. We live in a world where three year olds have their own tablets (and operate them quite expertly, thank you very much) and people can work on a project across the globe from their kitchen table in their pajamas. While it is an exciting time, it is also a very challenging time to reach people and to stand out effectively in the crowd. Understanding Mr. Sirkin’s quote is a great first step. The . . . [more]