In June a jury awarded my uOttawa colleague Professor Joanne St. Lewis a stunning $350,000 verdict in her defamation lawsuit against blogger and former University of Ottawa professor Denis Rancourt. The jury’s verdict not only vindicated St. Lewis but also the entire justice system because the defendant had impugned the integrity of most of the judges who participated in the proceedings and the integrity of the Canadian justice system.

Let me be transparent in exposing my connections to the dramatis personae and my own biases about the case. Professor St. Lewis is a colleague whom I consider a friend and . . . [more]

On June 17, 2014, several environmental groups in New Brunswick circulated for comment a draft environmental bill of rights for children. Called “A Bill of Rights to Protect Children’s Health from Environmental Hazards,” it is the first of its kind in Canada. If passed, the law would confer on every child “the right to protection from environmental hazards,” meaning

a hazard that impairs or damages the environment or changes the environment in a manner that may threaten human health, including physical and mental well-being, and includes a “contaminant” as defined by the Clean Environment Act;

The teeth of the bill . . . [more]

In their recently published book Think Like a Freak, Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner offer a simple set of rules to explain the role of incentives in many forms of financial and non-financial interactions.

1. Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about.
2. Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you to provide.
3. Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises you or frustrates you, learn from it and try something different.
4. Whenever possible, create incentives that switch the frame from adversarial to cooperative.

People are always looking for a way to do business development in the summer that is fun and ensures ample time to get to know your client or potential client better. For decades that has been done on the golf course. It is often said that if you can spend 5 hours on the golf course together then you won’t mind working through the details of a transaction.

But not everyone likes golf and certainly not everyone is good at golf.

The sport of cycling has steadily been growing in popularity for the last number of years. Maybe it was . . . [more]

You’ve probably heard about the T-shaped lawyer. The origin of the term was the “T-shaped person” – a reference which first appeared in a 1991 London newspaper article on the subject of computing jobs. The premise is that a T-shaped person has a depth of knowledge in one discipline (this is the vertical stroke of the T) as well as a breadth of knowledge across multiple disciplines that allows for collaboration and innovation (the horizontal stroke of the T).

C-suite executives talk with enthusiasm about seeking T-shaped employees who can successfully collaborate and innovate with our rapidly changing times.

As . . . [more]

It is unlikely that when Canadian rockers Headstones released the song “When Something Stands for Nothing” in 1993 that they did so as a political comment on the continuing relevance of the Magna Carta to the laws of the United Kingdom and her colonies. So I may have been in alone in thinking of this song when reading a David Allen Green blog post on the Financial Times site entitled “The myth of the Magna Carta”. Mr. Green (lawyer, blogger, author and popular legal Twitterer under the handle @JackofKent) describes the most referenced of the three . . . [more]

The challenge for many women lawyers in the “Lean In” age is to lean in without falling over. This means developing sufficient resiliency to manage demanding clients in an increasingly competitive world while also managing family and personal responsibilities. Resiliency is a key leadership skill. However, women often need to approach resiliency differently than men.

While both women and men need to exercise, get sufficient sleep, and eat well, women often need to pay attention to three other important elements to gain sufficient energy to lead demanding lives as lawyers.

Firstly, women must give themselves permission to take time for . . . [more]

If a client asked you what else your firm is good at besides the services you provide, would you know what to say? If they had a legal problem outside of your expertise, would you know who in your firm could help them? If your answer is “Of course!”—put it to the test.

At a recent law firm retreat that I facilitated, we did an exercise where the lawyers had to tell the rest of the group something about themselves (professional, not personal). The most common reaction was, “I didn’t know that!” The conversation in the break afterwards was electric: . . . [more]

Two weeks ago, the Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters released the Colloquium Report. This document captures the action-oriented strategies, reforms and innovations from leaders in the access to justice field in response to the recommendations made by the Action Committee in their final report, A Roadmap for Change (see a SLAW summary here).

One of the institutional and structural goals discussed in the Colloquium Report was to “Create Local and National Access to Justice Implementation Mechanisms”, such as the recently-formed Access to Justice Co-ordinating Committee in Nova Scotia. The report looked to . . . [more]

What is a Court to do when faced with repeated breaches of Court orders by a virtual entity? In the case, Equustek Solutions Inc. v. Jack, 2014 BCSC 1063, the decision of the BC Supreme Court was to order an innocent third party, Google Inc., to remove the wrongdoer’s website from further search results – anywhere.

The case has far reaching implications on the ability to enforce injunctions on wrongdoers in cyberspace, on the role of innocent third parties such as Google, and on the possibility of the Court process being used as an avenue for censorship. The decision has . . . [more]

What’s a lawyer good for?

This isn’t a new question: the role and value of the legal profession has long been a subject of discussion. It does seem, however, that this question is now being raised with increasing frequency in a variety of forums. As technology continues to advance, important questions continue to be raised about what tasks still require the input of specially trained (and often expensive) legal professionals. Growing concern with access to justice has inspired similar types of questions. As Malcolm Mercer has argued in his recent Slaw column: “If we cannot find ways to effectively . . . [more]

The academic year ended a few weeks ago and as I wrote my regular farewell note to the finalists, I started to muse on the information related facts I hope they carry with them into their academic, professional and online lives post Oxford.

Here is a list I made in my head. I have added hints/links to some points that might be useful for SLAW readers. If you have other golden rules to add to this list, please do. BTW, I use the term ‘Wexis’ to denote commercial legal databases, and not to promote one over another!

1. Sometimes there just