On June 26, 2020, the Law Society of Ontario (LSO) released the Family Legal Services Provider License Consultation Paper (FLSPL) for review and comment by the legal profession in Ontario. Prior to the release of the FLSPL the LSO had released the Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project Steering Committee’s Report to Convocation entitled “Listening to Ontarians”, which in May of 2010 reported to Convocation that the Committee had identified access to justice as a significant issue facing the public in Ontario.[1]

Access to justice in the area of family law is an issue. Access to justice is an issue . . . [more]

I am a big fan of trivia. I am pretty much undefeated in any game of Trivial Pursuit since the mid-1980s[1]. One night years ago my family thought they might defeat me playing a DVD-video based version of the game. My victory that night has become family legend.[2]

A piece of trivia I recently learned was that the Audi automobile company takes its name from the legal maxim, audi alteram partem. The founder, August Horch, could not use his surname as it was part of the trademark of his former company. “Horch” in German means “hear”. . . . [more]

Over the past decade, many commentators, myself included, have argued that lawyers should have a duty of technological competence. This duty now exists: in October 2019, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada amended its Model Code rule on competence to include explicit reference to technological competence. Several provincial and territorial law societies have incorporated this amendment into their respective codes, and more will hopefully soon follow suit.

The fact that there now exists a formal duty of technological competence raises the question of what, exactly, does this duty entail? What does this duty require from lawyers? In a strict . . . [more]

Earlier this fall, the Law Society of British Columbia made headlines when it announced the creation of an “Innovation Sandbox” that would allow unauthorized providers of legal services to deliver those services in BC on a pilot-project basis while the regulator assesses their reliability and effectiveness. From The Lawyer’s Daily:

Proposals to enter the innovation sandbox must include a summary of the services that the provider is proposing to pilot, who are expected to be clients, how the services will increase access to justice, as well as information about the provider and an assessment of any risks to the

[The content of this article is closely related to six of my previous posts on Slaw, dated: July 25, 2019; April 9, 2020; May 29, 2020; August 6, 2020; October 22, 2020; and October 24, 2020. See also the full text on the SSRN. And, the articles cited below without authors named, are mine.]

The responses being advocated for the access to justice problem (the A2J problem) of unaffordable lawyers’ services, do not involve solving the problem. Instead, they propose using: (1) “lesser legal services providers”—people of lesser qualifications as to education and . . . [more]

Since March 2020, a group of law librarians have been monitoring and reporting on the legal responses to COVID-19 throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The main idea behind this project is to provide the most pertinent and precise amount of information concerning a situation in a particular country or a comparative report on various countries. Unfortunately, the rapidly evolving and tragic situation in the region has given us numerous topics and angles to pursue, learn from and write about. The more the health crisis becomes multiple crises: political, social, educational, humanitarian, financial and so on, the more we must . . . [more]

One of the easiest ways to stay on track with an activity is to make a list. For many people, business development doesn’t come naturally making it easy to put off. By making and sticking to a list, you will begin to form a habit around business development to the point you eventually don’t even know you are doing it.

I have used contact lists with lawyers for years as a simple reminder of people that the lawyer wants or should keep in touch with throughout the year. The best part is that it works at every level of practice. . . . [more]

One of the objections we often hear to Mediation-Arbitration (Med-Arb) is that it is “neither fish nor fowl”. It is not an effective form of mediation because the mediator is constrained by their dual role. The impartiality of the arbitrator is somehow compromised by also acting as mediator.

I think this is a misunderstanding of what med-arb is all about. It’s not just a hybrid mash-up of two forms of dispute resolution. It’s a unique form of its own, with its own benefits and challenges. And it can take many different forms, to suit many different kinds of disputes.

My . . . [more]

Are people coming to court without counsel “self-represented litigants,” or are they “unrepresented litigants”? I shall reveal all below, but frankly, I feel the tendency of the Canadian Bench and Bar to get caught up in assigning separate distinctions to these terms distracts from the important work of understanding the lived realities of these litigants, and working with them to find solutions to our shared and indisputable Access to Justice problem.

All the same, the reason it IS important to address this issue once again is because the language describing those who are in court without a lawyer has been . . . [more]

Virtual private networks (VPN) are very standard these days. But they are riddled with vulnerabilities – and subject to a “man in the middle attack.” They have wreaked havoc in 2020 in a work-from-home environment.

Enter zero trust network access (ZTNA).

An October 2020 Forrester study (commissioned by Cloudflare) offered some key findings.

Working from home compelled firms to transform how they operated in the cloud. However, 80% of the IT decision-makers interviewed said their companies were unprepared to make the transformation. Existing IT practices made it difficult to support employee productivity without security compromises.

As a result, 76% of . . . [more]

In identifying professional misconduct, legal regulators are heavily reliant on client complaints and receive relatively little help from practitioners. For example, 71% of complaints to the Law Society of Ontario in 2019 were brought forward by members of the public (typically clients) while only 12% came from legal professionals. The problem is that there are many forms of professional misconduct that only professionals, and not clients, can readily identify. Misconduct therefore goes undetected, leaving clients and others to be victimized by bad lawyers who should have been caught after previous offences.

This is especially true in practice areas where clients . . . [more]

During the Covid-19 pandemic scams have not stopped and appear, by many accounts, to be on the rise. As a result, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has continued its enforcement action under Canada’s Anti-Spam Law^[1] (CASL).

Most recently the CRTC conducted an investigation of Notesolution Inc. doing business as OneClass (OneClass). OneClass is an online educational platform for crowdsourced university course content. OneClass seeks to build a global interactive library for educational content across all levels of education.

The CTRC alleged that OneClass violated several provisions of CASL^[2], namely violation of:

(a) the electronic communications . . . [more]