The IALL conference is one of my favorite meetings to attend. The International Association of Law Libraries’ 37^th Annual Course on International Law and Legal Information took place in Luxembourg, from Sunday, September 30, to Wednesday, October 3. I’d never been to Luxembourg before, but will make up any excuse to go again! The theme was “Law in Luxembourg – Where Local Tradition Meets European and International Innovation.” The programme for the 2018 IALL meeting was wonderful as usual – educational, enlightening, and entertaining. I met a robot, TORY! I encourage everyone, even though you do not specialize in . . . [more]

The ex-CEO of General Electric for a time had an empty corporate jet follow his own corporate jet “just in case.”

But it was a paragraph in his explanation letter that I found most instructive:

“Given my responsibilities as C.E.O. of a 300,000-employee global company, I just did not have time to personally direct the day-to-day operations of the corporate air team. I had every right to expect that it was professionally run. Other than to say ‘Hello,’ I never spoke to the leader of corporate air in 16 years.” [emphasis mine]

Now GE has lots of money invested . . . [more]

Is an electronic signature valid in law? Twenty-five years after the Internet was opened to commercial use, that may seem to be a surprising question. An off-the-cuff response might be, “why shouldn’t it be?” The law does not prescribe a form or medium for a signature. Any method of associating a legal entity (human being, corporation, government) with a piece of information (document, text, inscription) will do the job, if the legal entity had the intention that the association should be for the purpose of signing it.

A signature may have many purposes, of course: to indicate consent, to show . . . [more]

A year ago in this blog, I addressed York University’s appeal of the federal court’s decision against its clams to “fair dealing” in its instructors’ reproduction of course materials in Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (CCLA) v. York University. I am returning to this case, even as the appeal proceeds, because I’ve begun to think that it reveals the extent to which the Copyright Act is currently unable to serve both party’s legitimate rights and interests.

Judge Michael L. Phelan’s ruling in the original case, rendered July 12, 2017, denied York’s claim that the copying of materials by instructors . . . [more]

In a move that surprised many in the IP community, a budget bill that received royal assent before the holidays, introduced file wrapper estoppel to Canadian patent law.

Bill C-86 (link) included a number of changes to intellectual property legislation including enacting the College of Patent Agents and Trade-mark Agents Act, reforming the Copyright Board, and numerous amendments to the Patent Act, Trade-marks Act and Copyright Act.

One of the changes to the Patent Act, allows for the patent file wrapper or file history to be used to rebut claim construction of a patent. The file wrapper refers . . . [more]

On June 15, 2010 I wrote a column for Slaw titled “Evolution of Bilingual Judgments in New Brunswick”. The judicial process was only a part of the struggle of New Brunswick francophones against assimilation.

Francophones, speaking French at home, account for about 30% of the New Brunswick population of 730,000.

I was a practicing lawyer in New Brunswick in the 1960s when the court process functioned only in English. A trial in French was not available. The land registry was only in English, you could not file a mortgage in French. Files maintained by lawyers were only in . . . [more]

Last week, several access to justice champions involved in delivering legal aid services in the province participated in a panel on TVO’s The Agenda. In this segment, panelists discussed how critical Ontario’s legal aid system is to access to justice, not only for those who are marginalized but also, fundamentally, to a fair and participatory justice system. Julie Mathews, Community Legal Education Ontario’s (CLEO) executive director and a featured panelist, highlighted the importance of ensuring that people – particularly those who are marginalized – are able to understand and exercise their legal rights. Good legal aid includes understandable, accessible, . . . [more]

To many clients, one of the key benefits of unbundled legal services is that clients have the opportunity to play a key role in solving their own legal problems. They appreciate the “partnership” approach between lawyer and client and say that they feel more “empowered”. Forrest (“Woody”) Mosten, the Father of Unbundling, says:

“Unbundling is based on a power-sharing between attorney and client as to how to handle the case and who will do the work. Also, unbundling and Collaborative Law both underscore client empowerment as the basis for these forms of legal services.”

An empowerment approach also helps . . . [more]

It was in my role as a director of Dunedin Academic Press that recently and with some trepidation, I attended a series of workshops on open access (OA) in relation to scholarly monographs. Issues surrounding open access, as they apply to the academic journals market are now substantially rehearsed but they are less so in relation to books and the various markets for them. While most of the discussion and progress made thus far is in the academic market and primarily in such fields as humanities and social sciences, it certainly made me ponder, perhaps with a degree of anxiety, . . . [more]

Most of what you are being told about the future of blockchain in the legal profession is nonsense.

Don’t get me wrong. Blockchain is very cool. And I am the furthest thing from a luddite you will find in the legal profession. I’m a part-time LLM student at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law and Department of Computing Science studying the automation of legal reasoning. I’m an ABA Innovation Fellow for 2018/2019, writing open-source software to automate analogy to prior cases. I am an advocate for the adoption of technology in law.

So I’m enthusiastic about blockchain being adopted . . . [more]

The Law Society of Ontario has a duty to maintain and advance the cause of justice and the rule of law[1]. Does that mean that the Law Society is empowered to intervene in private litigation in order to advance the cause of justice? Is the Law Society is entitled to involve itself in judicial review cases where it is alleged that another administrative body has acted outside of its jurisdiction, or for improper purposes, in breach of the rule of law principle?

The Law Society has a duty to act so as to facilitate access to justice for . . . [more]

The Washington Post reported on 19 December that justice was the word of the year 2018, based on data about searches on the online dictionary Merriam-Webster. Interesting. It seems there was a constant need for this word. The writer of the piece adds: “[w]hat we saw with justice in 2018 was more like a continuous sequence of bumps in the data rather than a single outstanding spike.”

A movement is under way. No, not populism or Islamic extremism. A movement to get justice systems to produce better value. To be more precise: to get ministries of justice, bar associations, . . . [more]