You’re running a fever and have been coughing for the past few days, so you head down to your local clinic. You wait and wait, and finally the receptionist calls your name.

Walking into the examination room, you’re surprised to see not one but three doctors. “We’re a Cough Board,” one of them says, “and we’re here to diagnose and propose treatment for you.”

You stare at them blankly for a second. But then you remember something you saw in a medical drama on TV. A “tumour board,” you recall, is a meeting of specialists convened to try to figure . . . [more]

Quantitative methods are at once well-established and novel when speaking about access to justice. We’ve been reporting on our activities to funders, boards, and communities for decades, but we’ve also occasionally been complacent about what message we are conveying. When I think about data on the law and how we can approach using it better, I often think about Jon Snow and his search for the source of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854. Here you can see the original map that allowed him to identify the source as the water pump on Broad Street, which he created through . . . [more]

Earlier this year, I was invited by the Canadian Bar Review to write a review of a book by Professor Adam Dodek of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law titled: Heenan Blaikie: The Making and Unmaking of a Great Canadian Law Firm. I found the book an excellent read and I highly recommend it. My review is included in the current issue of the CBR, now available online. I’m grateful to the Canadian Bar Review for both the opportunity to write this article and for their permission to reproduce the excerpt below.

This is a gripping account of a . . . [more]

Court data is an important source of information that can increase our understanding of justice system issues. Research is currently under way at Osgoode Hall Law School and the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice using Ontario court data examining two issues: the impact of unrepresented accused on the efficiency of the courts and the disadvantages that may be experienced by unrepresented accused in terms of outcomes. The research is being carried out using an appearance-based data set from the Ontario Cout of Justice. The data set includes 17,622,670 appearances nested within 2,002,306 disposed cases from 2011 to 2022.

Court data . . . [more]

“A lawyer must encourage public respect for and try to improve the administration of justice.”[1]

This is a rule from the Model Code of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. The commentaries to the rule identify a more specific component duty to defend judges and other tribunal members from “unjust criticism”, because there is no way for them to appropriately defend themselves.[2] But the rule would also apply to unjust criticism of lawyers, especially those who, like judges, cannot defend themselves, particularly Crown attorneys.

This rule may appear to be aspirational. Indeed, Harry Arthurs has characterized this . . . [more]

The ease of finding a federal order in council depends greatly on when it was published.

The easiest way to get a federal OIC is through the Orders in Council online database which is a searchable database of orders in council from 1990 on. If the full text of an order listed in the database is not available, you can email the OIC Division to ask for a copy.

Orders in Council made between 1867 and 1924 can be found on the Orders in Council Research Tool through Library and Archives Canada.

Orders made between 1924 and 1990 are more . . . [more]

Legal citation isn’t what most would consider a good ‘ol time. I’m sympathetic to student complaints! But, alas, it is important and must be taught. Part of teaching is preventing bad habits. While grading assignments I’ve noticed a common practice of copying and pasting a URL in lieu of a citation, or tacking a URL on the end of a semi-complete or complete citation. Hyperlinks seem helpful and modern—just one click to get to the source! In legal writing, however, a citation should allow the reader to quickly identify, locate, and verify the source across platforms and over time. A . . . [more]

The landscape of access to justice research and work in Canada continues to grow and evolve. However, in such a large and diverse country it is sometimes easy to become siloed in one’s own work, institutional setting, and geographical location. Understandably, we are all focused on the particularities and situational challenges inherent in the necessarily specific work of addressing a plethora of access to justice symptoms across different governments, court and tribunal systems, regions, and populations. But we must not lose the bigger picture, and there is therefore a great benefit to being able to connect, exchange ideas, share research, . . . [more]

Tasked with proposing reforms to the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure, the Civil Rules Working Group (“Working Group”) misfired rather badly. For example, the Working Group proposed adding a prelitigation protocol that would in effect require plaintiffs to serve their Affidavit of Documents before commencing litigation and accordingly disclose sensitive information (think medical records, bank and credit card statements, tax returns and proprietary business information) directly to opposing parties, often before such parties had retained counsel. Ignoring privacy issues and resultant risks of such information being posted online, because why not, this would add significant up front cost to . . . [more]

Many legal ethics issues are interesting to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. There’s the “buried bodies case”, where two lawyers’ commitment to maintaining client confidentiality (in horrifying circumstances) destroyed their practices, sparked harassment and death threats, and caused them to be criminally charged. There’s the lawyer who gossiped with his spouse about his clients’ affairs, only for the spouse to report the lawyer to the Law Society for breaching confidentiality when their marriage broke down. My students are always engaged when we have in-class debates about the good character requirement, or the (lack of) regulation of lawyer-client sex . . . [more]

When a senior associate left the firm, the busy practice group leader moved swiftly. Files had to be reassigned, and quickly. The next morning, John, an associate in the group, opened his inbox to find seven new matters had been dropped onto his desk without warning.

At first, he froze. Then came a wave of anxiety: the tightening in his stomach, and the mental calculation of how to stretch his already packed schedule.

What unsettled him most wasn’t the extra work; it was how it was handled. The partner didn’t reach out to give him a heads-up or to ask . . . [more]

Over the last few columns, I have focused primarily on the regulation side of my work in artificial intelligence (AI) risk and regulation. That focus has reflected, in part, my concern about the current regulatory patchwork surrounding generative AI in Canada and the very real dangers of unregulated implementation of AI into our daily lives. That discussion will continue at a later date, but for the next few articles I plan to shift the focus to the research and perspectives on the risk management side of the equation.

The risks associated with AI implementation are not hypothetical. Many readers will . . . [more]