When I sat down with lawyer and author Katherine Reilly to talk about her new book Legally Zen, I surprised her by starting at the end. It felt right: the final chapter is where she introduces the idea that has stayed with me most—the concept she calls “Gen Zen.”

Reilly is not the stereotype of a mystical explorer. She is a senior civil litigator with almost twenty years in practice: formerly a partner at a national law firm in Vancouver, later counsel with the Ministry of the Attorney General in Victoria, and now back in private practice. She has . . . [more]

On 5 November 2025 the Department of Justice updated the Justice Laws website to, “enhance usability, accessibility, and consistency across government platforms.” per the Canada.ca redesign. However, Justice Laws has been adapting to the evolving digital landscape for over three decades, sometimes with incremental changes and sometimes in noticeable design leaps like this latest iteration. Looking back at its earliest versions reveals how far the provision of electronic federal law has come. This blog post will review the visual history of the website in an effort to show how design choices have always communicated ideas about access to law . . . [more]

As 2025 draws to a close, this column looks back on three high-profile areas of development in Canadian legal ethics and lawyer regulation over the past year. It also flags several major court cases and disciplinary proceedings from 2025, as well as cases to watch for in the year ahead.

Three High-Profile Areas of Development

1. Rule of Law Concerns

The first year of Donald Trump’s second presidential term sent shock waves through the American justice system. In the spring, it was reported that U.S. federal judges were experiencing “unusually high threat levels” amid often vicious partisan attacks. Some began . . . [more]

In just a few weeks, the Legal Design Journal (the LD Journal)[1] will launch its second edition. Published online and free via open source, the journal is gaining in popularity and success since its maiden voyage in June of 2025.

Unlike some open-access academic journals, the LD Journal does not charge its authors publication fees or its readers a viewing/downloading fee – it is known as “diamond open-access”.

The LD Journal is the first of its kind. An academic journal that connects academics and practitioners of legal design by combining three separate elements: articles, a studio showcase, and . . . [more]

If you’ve been adrift on the internet desperately trying not to drown in the flood of legal information, great news! You’ve found a raft!

No, that’s not really funny. When you’re representing yourself, trying to get to the information you want does often feel like drowning. There’s so much info, mostly not what you need, so you wind up flailing about desperate to stay afloat while the currents try to pull you under. Or you get caught in whirlpools of misinformation. Or weighted down by too much case law.

Few make an intentional choice to dive in and go DIY-lawyering. . . . [more]

When starting a PhD thesis or other long piece of writing (any substantial intellectual project really), choosing the right topic is a significant part of whether the end result will be successful. Graduate students choose their topics in many ways. Some see postings for PhD positions within research groups and apply to work on a project with a particular researcher. Some may start a degree program and decide on a topic after they’ve spent time with the subject. And some have a passion for a particular topic and want to spend several years working deeply on it to move the . . . [more]

In a bizarre procedural twist, the Ontario Divisional Court issued two contradictory decisions on consecutive days in the same case. Two written motions for leave to intervene in Dosu v. Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario was sent to two different judges – Justice Sharon Shore and Justice Shaun Nakatsuru – who rendered opposite rulings. Justice Shore dismissed the would-be intervenors; the next day, in a separate ruling, Justice Nakatsuru granted them intervention, setting the stage for what appears to be an embarrassing judicial outcome for the court.

The anomaly in the motions outcome – essentially a legal coin flip yielding . . . [more]

The Condominium Authority Tribunal is experiencing a trend. There has been an increase in the number of applications filed that do not fit within its jurisdiction. The parties in these cases are often neighbours who live in a community while they continue looking for ways to resolve their dispute.

In such situations, people can often find guidance on how to escalate matters, but what happens when a situation does not warrant that time and cost?

Let’s look at a couple of examples and explore ways the parties can address their issue without resorting to escalation…

Ramadhin v. Niagara South Standard . . . [more]

While reading Susannah Tredwell’s post, Does this case really exist? from last October, I realized how much this question is at the heart of my work. As the Associate Librarian for International and Comparative Law, I joke with my students and colleagues, most people think they don’t need my expertise until they desperately need me. Despite the fact that they come to my office last minute, with multiple deadlines upon them and at the cusp of a nervous breakdown, I do tend to help them with a simple yet existential question: Does this even exist?

When it comes to legal . . . [more]

Trouble sleeping? Try having your phone read the Rules of Civil Procedure to you. You’ll drift off to a soothing stream of minutiae, like sheep jumping over a fence. Very few Big Ideas will excite you. Most rules (not to mention the subrules and the clauses and the subclauses) are about what a party or court must do in a very specific scenario. For example, my civil procedure students always perk up when I tell them about Rule 20.04(4), which explains what to do if a summary judgment motion is deemed to involve only a question of law, but . . . [more]

Transformative change is underway in the Canadian lawyer licensing system. Two of the country’s largest law societies have signalled the impending end of high-stakes, multiple-choice legal-knowledge exams as the primary test of lawyer licensure.

In Ontario, a September report from the Law Society of Ontario (LSO)’s Professional Development and Competence Committee proposed that the current multiple-choice barrister and solicitor exams be replaced with a “mandatory skills-based course with assessments for all licensing candidates.”

The committee identified a lengthy list of problems and challenges associated with the written exam system, including:

• Written exams fail to assess core practice skills like interviewing,

This submission is part of a column swap with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) bimonthly member magazine, AALL Spectrum. Published six times a year, AALL Spectrum is designed to further professional development and education within the legal information industry. Slaw and the AALL Spectrum board have agreed to hand-select several columns each year as part of this exchange. 

The Data Rescue Project is an archetypal librarian story. A community of data librarians, researchers, concerned individuals, and organizations sprang into action to preserve U.S. federal government data after it began disappearing from websites at a rapid pace in . . . [more]