Friday, April 3, 2020 – Effective March 19, 2020, the B.C. Supreme Court suspended regular operations of the Supreme Court of British Columbia until further notice. While the courthouses are closed, applications may be made to the Court only for essential and urgent matters. The move is part of the Court’s efforts to protect the health and safety of court users and to help contain the spread of COVID-19.

The procedural approach of the Courts to the present crisis may be expected to continue to evolve. Those wishing to have matters brought before the Court will need to check frequently . . . [more]

The increased utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) has been identified as giving rise to numerous privacy concerns.^[1] For illustration, “the data protection principle of limiting collection may be incompatible with the basic functionality of AI systems”. AI systems generally rely on large amounts of personal data to train and test algorithms, and limiting some of the data could lead to reduced quality and utility of the output.^[2]

Another issue is that organizations using AI for advanced data analytics may not know ahead of time how the information that is processed by an AI system will be used or . . . [more]

As I am writing this, everything else has been knocked out of the news and our consciousness by the emergence of COVID-19 as a pandemic.

As we struggle to cope with COVID-19 we are facing hard questions – sometimes choices – as members of our own communities, as Canadians, and as world citizens.

• How well does our existing infrastructure – health care, labour rights, social services – mitigate some of the impact of the virus?
• Did our civic governments take enough notice of the earlier warning signs of the pandemic and respond in time?
• Are we doing enough to protect

In person if necessary, but not necessarily in person…

The Superior Court of Justice in Ontario issued a notice on March 13, advising people not to go into any courthouse, if they have been advised to self-isolate in response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic. The courts remain open to the media and public (this may have changed since I wrote this…) but anyone who has COVID-19 symptoms, has been advised to self-isolate, or has travelled from an area under a travel advisory should stay away. This includes civil litigants and criminal defendants, who are advised to contact their lawyer or . . . [more]

We interrupt this program, as they say. Life has intervened, and many of us are working remotely.

Remotely, in this case, is a synonym for “home.”

For many lawyers, managing professionals who are not in the office – who are not in any office – is new, and may feel like one of those old maps whose edge bears the legend There be dragons here.

Let’s try to slay a few of those dragons, or at least encourage them to find other prey.

Treat Them as You Want to Be Treated

This tenet should apply at all times, of . . . [more]

The line between bad strategy and a law firm collapse is as thin as a noose. Yet law firms practise bad strategy on a regular basis. Take heed from the lessons of a very public breakdown.

A client recently gave me a copy of Norman Bacal’s book “Breakdown, the Inside Story of the Rise and Fall of Heenan Blaikie”. I was familiar with the story, having lived through it as a horrified observer in 2013. I also met Norm a few years ago when we were both speakers at the same conference in Toronto: him on how a firm implodes, . . . [more]

We’ve spent a lot of time worrying about the possible effect of deepfake videos on the 2020 election.

While that’s a real concern, we were blown away by the stats in a report from Deeptrace Labs. The most startling statistic was that 96% of fake videos across the internet are of women, mostly celebrities, whose images are used in sexual fantasy deepfakes without their consent.

Deeptrace Labs identified 14,678 deepfake videos across a number of streaming platforms and porn sites, a 100 percent increase over its previous measurement of 7,964 videos in December of 2018.

Sadly, we imagine we’ll see . . . [more]

As modern states were developing in Europe during the medieval period, local feudal lords held power of governance over people living their territories. Part of the responsibility of the lord or monarch was to adjudicate disputes. For the sake of simplicity, I will use the term king here, though we should understand that there were multiple titles for people who filled this role depending on the structure of the particular territory: emperor/empress, king/queen, prince/princess, duke/duchess, knight/dame, etc. People would appear before the king at the royal court to present their cases, and the king would issue a decision about what . . . [more]

You can’t really miss it: a huge square concrete wall full of graffiti. In the middle, a dignified sign in UN blue & white. Casa Justitia Cuidad Bolivar. This is not a chique neighbourhood. Small taxi’s, old trucks, and most people take the bus. There’s also the cable car to get to the higher parts of the barrio. The building is attached to the municipal offices. Local justice and administration, hand in hand. Around them, the small shops and café’s that form the livelihood of some and a critical service for others. This is down-town, everyday life.

Houses of Justice . . . [more]

Almost everything of social or financial value is now online in some form, benefitting in many ways from the interconnection with the world, and tempting in many other ways to the world’s thieves and saboteurs. As a result, Internet security has never been more important to personal, corporate and political interests than it is now.

Yet we read weekly of new damage done to online resources: legal service firms taken offline by ransomware, virtual currencies highjacked, endless personal records stolen from enterprises in all lines of business. It is remarkable how rarely critical infrastructure – power supplies, transportation, communications – . . . [more]

I wrote this column and submitted it to Slaw on March 6, back when we didn’t know how good we had it. I’m writing this new prologue on March 17, with much of Canada and the world effectively in lockdown because of COVID-19.

I thought about rewriting the column to reflect our new reality. Instead, I’m adding a frame around it, because I think the column still stands on its own merits. But COVID-19 and our societal responses to it are in the process of crushing our slow, creaky, in-person justice system, and the lessons here about human-centred design are . . . [more]

This is the second article in a series about mismanaging projects. In other words, if you can avoid doing the stuff here, you’ll be on the road to managing projects effectively.

There are five aspects you have to manage to move projects forward effectively:

1. The project itself, discussed in the previous column.
2. Time.
3. Money.
4. The client.
5. The team.

Let’s talk about mismanaging time. This topic is complex, and I’ll break it into two sections, concluding in my next column.

The Matrix of Project Times

The table below flags time-related issues on three different scales for various aspects of a project . . . [more]