Those familiar with my writing will know that I usually write about artificial intelligence in terms of regulation, governance, and risk. This piece is a slight departure. What follows is a set of reflections for young professionals working in AI, or considering work in the field, at a moment when the pace of change, the visibility of the space, and the pressure to find one’s place in it can easily create more anxiety than clarity. I use the phrase “young professional” in a broad sense. It follows a familiar tradition in reflective writing, but I do not mean it strictly . . . [more]

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Trial by Numbers: A Lawyer’s Guide to Statistical Evidence. By Adam Chilton & Kyle Rozema. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 207 p. Includes list of figures and tables, notes, glossary, and index. ISBN 9780197747858 (hardcover) $90.00; ISBN 9780197747865 (softcover) $35.00.

Reviewed by Katarina Daniels
Research Lawyer, Library Services Lead . . . [more]

The legal services sector is in for rough times for the foreseeable future after which we will see a rebirth of legal services entities that bear little resemblance to those operating in the market currently. This is why your firm’s foundational rebuild must happen now.

Law firms are in the midst of grappling with a tsunami of changes within the legal services market that are impacting both practice and business. This is especially true after coming to terms – if we can honestly claim that – with the ravages of the pandemic. I understand that many people would like . . . [more]

Early in my career in education, I was introduced to a learning scale that offered both my students and me a different way of thinking about competency. The scale looks like this:

Understanding the Competency Continuum

Let’s consider this through a real-world example: learning to drive a car.

Before you begin learning to drive, you have little understanding of either the process itself or the rules of the road. At that stage, you are unconsciously incompetent. You do not yet know what you do not know.

As you begin to learn, however, you quickly realize how much there is . . . [more]

On March 6th, a prominent group of publishers including the 5 biggest global book publishers (Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster) filed a lawsuit in NY federal court to try and shut down the shadow library “Anna’s Archive”. A decade ago, John Willinsky described scholarly publishing as having its “Napster moment” with the emergence of pirate sites like LibGen and Sci-Hub. The race to train large language models using sites like Anna’s Archive (which is the successor site of Libgen/Sci-Hub) feels like a second act, where these sites are not just channels for . . . [more]

In recent posts, I have been skeptical about using AI to generate certain kinds of legal writing. I’ve drawn a distinction between using AI to edit or revise a document and using it to create one from scratch.

I take the view that even if you can avoid hallucinations, using AI to create a court brief is likely to raise issues of competence. And I’m not convinced it is well suited to drafting opinion or demand letters, because it leads to writing that comes across as flat and robotic, verbose, and overly formalistic.

But there’s another view out there . . . [more]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a bold experiment being conducted on our institutions, with very few guardrails. When we do experiments with chemicals and biological materials to develop new drugs, pesticides, or even cleaning products, we set up controlled environments with protections for the humans involved in the testing. AI is mostly being developed without external controls, other than basic guidelines implemented by the developers themselves.

We are living through an experiment and finding out in real time the impact of AI on institutions and society. Sometimes AI is a benefit, sometimes it is benign, and sometimes it can have a . . . [more]

Across Canada and beyond, organizations are waking up to a hard truth:
It’s no longer enough to say you value inclusion—your boardroom needs to show it.

For young lawyers and law students just beginning their careers, this call for inclusion is not theoretical, it’s foundational. They’re entering a world where law, leadership, and lived experience increasingly intersect to shape what fair, ethical, and effective governance looks like.

Too often, conversations about equity and diversity stay stuck at the surface, fixating on demographics and checking boxes. But when we look closer, a deeper issue emerges: individuals with different lived experiences often . . . [more]

I recently watched a documentary called Sensitive. The topic of this article was inspired by its content.

Introduction

Have you ever been told that you are too sensitive? Or that you need to have tough skin in this world and especially in the legal profession?

Or, how about the time when you are feeling sad or may start to cry, someone looks at you in a judgmental way and says, “what’s your problem? No one wants a sensitive person to be their lawyer.”

It seems that many of us have shut down our emotions and decided to hide who we . . . [more]

Canadian courts and judges are using AI in their work. Not all of them, but some of them. A small number of courts have publicly announced formal pilots or adoption of AI tools (see, e.g., here and here); other courts have authorized judges to use certain AI tools but haven’t (to my knowledge) made any public announcements about these authorizations; and, finally, individual judges are experimenting with using AI tools in their work on ad hoc, generally undisclosed (at least to the public) bases. I am not aware of any judicial decision in Canada in which a judge has . . . [more]

On March 26, 2026, Bill C-12, the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, received Royal Assent. Framed as a response to system pressures and “asylum shopping,” the law marks one of the most significant shifts in Canada’s refugee regime since 2002. Its core effect is simple but profound: it narrows who gets access to a full refugee hearing, and how.

Three changes deserve particular attention.

A One-Year Deadline for Refugee Claims

Canada has replaced a flexible standard requiring claims to be made “without delay” with a strict one-year filing deadline. Claims submitted after that period . . . [more]

In the midst of the ongoing concerns about hallucinations, particularly related to citations in documents filed with courts, I wonder if the particular focus on AI generated errors, and the penalties that have been imposed in response, are at least partly due to perceptions of these tools as cheating or aesthetic ideas about how “real” legal writing should happen. And I query the rationales for recent instances of judges issuing sanctions against people who have inadvertently included them. It seems that mistakes in AI generated documents are treated differently from mistakes that can and do appear in any piece of . . . [more]