The time honoured, hand tailored approach to cases favoured by lawyers over the centuries is restrictive. By forcing lawyers to deal with only one matter a time, legal services can only be immensely profitable if lawyers either bill a high hourly rate and/or deal with a high volume of cases.

Before computers and the internet, the hand tailored approach was the only means of providing services. But now with automation, artificial intelligence, and the Internet, we are no longer limited to the bespoke model. In the public’s interest, we need to rethink legal services and get creative. For example:

1. We 

Recently we took on two Small Claims Court actions for good clients. In both cases we acted for the plaintiff.

Anyone who has commenced a Small Claims Court proceeding knows that the Small Claims Court Rules provide that the plaintiff is generally required to commence the action in the jurisdiction where the defendant lives or carries on business. In both cases our client operated from Toronto. In both cases, we had to commence the action in L’Orignal, Ontario as a result of that being where the defendant carried on business.

For those of you who don’t know, L’Orignal is about . . . [more]

This article is by Tim Lemieux, Claims Prevention & Stakeholder Relations Coordinator at LAWPRO.

In the early days of email, one of the common bits of productivity advice was “turn off your inbox notifications.” The “You’ve Got Mail” sound or pop-up was a constant source of distraction while trying to get work done. Even with the advent of smartphones that advice was still mostly good enough. The phone meant you could check email everywhere you went, but the distraction was still limited to emails and texts from friends and clients. Jump forward to 2017, and we’re all carrying around what . . . [more]

Benjamin Alarie, Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto and CEO of Blue J Legal, gave a lunch time presentation at Osgoode Hall Law School last Tuesday. This session was based on the paper “Regulation by Machine” co-written with Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon delivered at the 30th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2016), Barcelona, Spain. [3]

The paper looks at how the process of machine learning could be used to improve the regulation of human activity. This idea is contrary to the usual and “preoccupied” view that legal scholars have . . . [more]

A man in Ohio was charged with arson and insurance fraud after data from his pacemaker did not support his story about how his house burned down.

The evidence from the pacemaker was taken on a warrant.

A lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is quoted in the ABA story at the link as saying that privacy interests in one’s health information were “eroded” by the decision. The statement suggests that privacy should override the state’s interest in prosecution.

Do you agree? Or is the need for a warrant enough protection for privacy relating to medical devices, as it is . . . [more]

For those of you in Toronto with a free evening there’s a series of talks starting tonight called “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: How will Emerging Technologies Reshape Our Society and Ourselves” at the Glendon campus of York University.

There are three two-part, two hour sessions taking place Monday evenings as follows:

1. Monday, February 6, 7- 9pm (York Hall rm. 204)
   Part I: How Will Machines that Perceive, Deep Learn and Reason Affect the Way People Live, Work and Communicate with One Another?
   Part II: Jobs at risk? Employment and the Workplace: How Will Technology Transform the Career

It was bound to happen. As I noted here last year, Uber has been facing challenges to its work model in multiple jurisdictions.

A class action was recently filed in Ontario, focusing on the employee/independent contractor distinction, but also raising some other interesting arguments. In particular, the plaintiffs claim that the arbitration agreement that Uber drivers are forced to sign is in contravention of the Employment Standards Act and unfair, as it requires class members to travel to Amsterdam, Netherlands to resolve their disputes.

Despite being a highly mobile workforce, the route from Ontario to the Netherlands by car is . . . [more]

I heard about the United States Custom Border Agency had been asking Canadians for access to their Facebook accounts and cellphones when they arrived at the border to join the women’s march on Washington the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. When some Canadians refuse to surrender their information, they were denied entry into the US and turned away (this is in addition to those who were refused entry because they were going to the march). I was appalled to hear this, and appalled at the invasion of privacy and violation of civil and human rights – and in 2017! I . . . [more]

To combat link rot, the Supreme Court of Canada today launched an online archive of Internet Sources Cited in SCC Judgments (1998 – 2016).

Link rot refers to broken URLs or to URLs that direct to the original site but whose corresponding document has been removed or relocated without any information about where to find it.

From the Terms of Use:

“The Office of the Registrar of the SCC, recognizing that web pages or websites that the Court cites in its judgments may subsequently vary in content or be discontinued, has located and archived the content of most

That’s the title of a 25 minute video that is worth watching if you have an interest in where computing is going.

Don’t panic if you have just decided to do more of you business computing in the cloud. That isn’t going away any time soon.

It means that we will see more edge or fog computing. Some of the computation that now happens in the cloud will increasingly happen at the edge of the network. That might be in IOT devices, our phones, cars, or Alexa type devices. Think of it as a return to distributed computing. Peer to . . . [more]

Email encryption, data breaches and a lawyer’s duty to choose technologies with competence—these are recurring topics here on Slaw and elsewhere. At least two revelations in the last week call us to hark back on this.

First, there is the Law Society of BC’s recent fraud alert from January 19 about fraudsters again targeting lawyers disbursing trust funds. Millions of dollars in a real estate transaction payout were redirected by fraudulent notice of changes in instructions. The recent LSBC alert warns “We do not yet know how the fraudster knew the details of the transaction.” This is eerily similar to . . . [more]

The paperless-office religion probably makes you uncomfortable. The preacher says kill the paper, printing is a sin. Don’t fret. Here is why you should not be ashamed to print.

I write this for lawyers, and I am not talking about mandatory printing. Courts are more likely to go extinct when blockchains end commercial disputes and self-driving cars eliminate motor vehicle accidents than to go completely electronic. (But courts hearing criminal and constitutional cases will be with us forever it seems.)

I am also not criticizing paperless. I am a huge fan. I am sure you know why paperless is . . . [more]