One of a family lawyer’s main duties is to have their client’s back when it comes to financial consequences of marriage and separation, whether it’s a cohabitation agreement, a trial, or an application to vary support because of a change of circumstances. Reasonable precautions to probe and investigate the parties’ financial affairs, including investments and business activities, are almost always required. And sometimes proactive measures are needed to protect assets pending distribution by agreement or court order.

The law has evolved, both substantively and procedurally, to equip lawyers with a variety of tools to ensure honest financial disclosure—from simple financial . . . [more]

This article appeared in the February 2018 issue of LAWPRO Magazine.

The legal profession is in the midst of significant change, and is headed into a period where there will be even greater change. These changes are driven by disruptions that alter the very nature of how traditional legal services have been performed and provided to clients for decades. These disruptions include:

• access to justice
• client empowerment
• technology
• alternative legal service providers

This article will give some insights into these disruptors and suggest how members of the legal profession can respond to them.

What is a non-lawyer?

To start, a . . . [more]

The not-so-smart money has pushed the price of a Bitcoin well above US$6,000. The crash is inevitable. The first-mover “cryptocurrency” is based on an inefficient proof of work model designed for anonymous transactions on a public network. The next generation of blockhain developers, like those working on the Ethereum platform, are less interested in the ideology of anonymous transactions than the practicality of efficient business applications. Corporate adopters like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance have already noted the pace of migration from anonymous public blockchain networks to a combination of public and permissioned private networks. Since “altcoin” currencies are not . . . [more]

The British Columbia Law Institute (BCLI) recently published a Study Paper on Financing Litigation that looks at six financing models that have emerged both in Canada and internationally that can help litigants pay for litigation:

• Unbundled legal services
• Third-party litigation funding
• Alternative fee arrangements
• Crowdfunding
• Legal expense insurance
• Publicly funded litigation funds

The Institute has started a 6-part blog series on the topic. Each blog post will showcase one of the financing models.

Two posts have appeared so far.

The first post is on Unbundled Legal Services. The second is on Third-Party Litigation Funding.

It is all part . . . [more]

OK, I’m going to talk about AI and unauthorized practice in just a second, but first…

Who can resist those stories with the teen genius? The wunderkind trope. That Dutch teen with the Boomy McBoomface contraption setting out to heal our polluted oceans. That Mark Zuckerberg fella circa 2004, with the other face thingy.

Who is not in awe of an uncalloused mind lit by bedazzling precociousness and disarmingly naive ambition?

Take Joshua Browder, for instance. He’s surely that kid—our teen wonder—for legal automation. He taught himself to code at age 12 and first came to glory two years . . . [more]

This blogpost addresses a second shortcoming in the foundational framing and materials for the Law Society of Upper Canada’s unfolding Dialogue on Licensing. In Part 1, I argued that the initial arguments and subsequent materials that have framed the Dialogue do not provide a clear or compelling demonstration of a ‘need for change’ in the current system for licensing of lawyers in Ontario. In this Part 2, I argue that a further shortcoming is a failure to adequately acknowledge the relevance of the ongoing inaccessibility of justice in Ontario. Proper recognition of access to justice issues could provide the . . . [more]

With the rise of technology, new programs are being created to predict the outcome of legal cases. These programs are often built on algorithms.

These algorithms generate outcomes by applying the facts of previously decided cases to the facts inputted by users. This means that the quality of the prediction is only as good as the data inputted by both the user and the programmer.

However, these programs should come with a warning. In “Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era” by Professor Daniel Levitin he states:

GIGO is a famous saying coined by early computer scientists:

“I’ve never been more optimistic more excited about where we’re going with technology than I am today. This is just an absolute, I mean, we’re in the middle of a revolution and I think it’s going to completely impact how we deliver legal services. And I actually think that in this space, in the nonprofit legal aid space, we’re going to make great strides in this, and kind of lead the way in many ways.”–IV Ashton

IV Ashton is a Chicago-based attorney and founder of LegalServer, a “web-based case management platform for the legal aid community.” . . . [more]

Over the summer months, the Law Society of Upper Canada has been conducting a Dialogue on Licensing to prompt information sharing, discussion, input and reflection on the future of the requirements for licensing of lawyers in Ontario. Based on materials disseminated as part of the Dialogue, a series of discussion sessions were held and summary reports released. Submissions were also invited through a broad call open into August. According to a late June update, the Professional Development and Competence Committee (PDCC) of the LSUC will spend the remainder of 2017 reviewing the input, with a view to producing . . . [more]

Aside from a robust knowledge in anatomy and physiology or radiation physics, there’s not much I can use my background in nuclear medicine technology in the practice of law. Which is why in 2009 I noted here the growing and emerging use of diagnostic imaging in sentencing and trials.

Since that time there has been quite a bit of developments in diagnostic imaging and its use in medico-legal work. One of the newest developments is its use for chronic pain. The economic costs of chronic pain are estimated to be over $600 billion in the U.S. Part of the challenge . . . [more]

It is said that change is the one constant in life. While personally, I’ve no reason to doubt the truth of that statement, as a member of the legal profession for the past 20(+) years, I sometimes have questioned whether others in the profession would argue against it. We are a profession reliant upon precedent, adept at identifying and avoiding risk and often, slow to adapt to the changing world around us.

Taking on this inherent resistance to new ways of lawyering, I’ve heard Jordan Furlong ask his audiences some variant of the question: If you weren’t already doing it . . . [more]

Artificial Intelligence is going to have a disruptive effect on the legal profession. The question is how soon, how much, and what areas of law come first. This kind of disruptive change builds up slowly, but once it hits a tipping point, it happens quickly.

Futurist Richard Worzel wrote an article titled Three Things You Need to Know About Artificial Intelligence that is worth a read. Here are some excerpts:

Every once in while, something happens that tosses a huge rock into the pond of human affairs. Such rocks include things like the discovery of fire, the invention of the . . . [more]