Chris Berzins is a long-time member of the Canadian administrative tribunal community and someone whose writings I’ve followed for some time. When he recently forwarded a copy of his most recent article – called “Administrative Transparency and the Protection of Privacy in a Digital Era,” now published in the May 2010 supplement of The Advocates’ Quarterly – I jumped on the opportunity to invite him to an interview.

We talked last week, and had a wide-ranging conversation that led me to conclude that Chris is a guy who has a very honourable commitment to seeing that administrative tribunals do things . . . [more]

The recent issue of The Copyright & New Media Law Newsletter is a special issue focussing on jobs and positions for non-lawyers including librarians, educators, communications coordinators and others. You can obtain a free copy of the Newsletter, subject to a creative commons license at www.copyrightlaws.com.

Lesley . . . [more]

The Law Society of Upper Canada commissioned a study by Michael Ornstein at York University’s Institute for Social Research, resulting in a report, Racialization and Gender of Lawyers in Ontario [PDF], presented to Convocation in April of this year. As expected — and, in my view, hoped — membership in the profession by visible minorities, Aboriginal people, and women is in fact growing. This growth has been dramatic in the case of women: in 1971 women accounted for 5% of the profession, whereas in 2006 they constituted almost 60%, as revealed in the chart below.

Click image to enlarge . . . [more]

I ran across this today while on a search for something else. At first, I just found it amusing. Now I’m thinking it’s a brilliant bit of viral marketing for Paul Pearson’s firm, Mulligan Tam Pearson.

In addition to the 4,000+ views, Pearson has been featured in a Victoria Times-Colonist article. And now a mention here. Who could ask for anything more? :) . . . [more]

One of the most wrenching questions in environmental law is who should pay for historic contamination which was legal at the time. There is no moral difficulty in holding today’s polluters responsible for the consequence of their acts. But historic contamination, the unintended result of perfectly lawful conduct, is different. Inco has been ordered to pay $36 million in damages for lost property value, after 2000, due to nickel emissions before 1984 that were legal at the time: Smith v. Inco 2010 ONSC 3790

Is this just?

The rule of law is an essential part of the fundamental bargain that . . . [more]

On July 19, 2010, the BC Attorney General released a white paper
containing draft legislation and policy proposals to significantly amend legislation in BC related to family law.

The suggested changes include the following:

– Enabling parenting coordination by agreement or court order;
– Amending the Commercial Arbitration Act to address family arbitrations;
– integrating reproductive technologies into determining a child’s legal parents;
– Replacing the terms “custody” and “access” with “guardianship” and “parenting time”;
– Defining “guardianship” through a list of “parental responsibilities” that can be allocated to allow for more customized parenting arrangements;
– Extending the legislative property . . . [more]

The legal press around the world this weekend featured a variety of stories that caught my attention. Let’s visit India, Sierra Leone, Namibia and England. . . . [more]

This week, as Quebec moved towards paying for in vitro fertilization with the goal of reducing expensive and risky multiple births (which may or may not work), it was hard to find a singleton in the world of biotech.

Twin diagnostics projects were born this week as Warnex, the Montreal Heart Institute & CEPMED announced ; and to combat childhood diseases.

Vancouver-based Forbes Medi-Tech , as Pharmachem expressed interest in topping a prior bid by MHT.

Finally, the Canadian industry as a whole got a mediocre second fiscal quarter to match 2010’s first mediocre quarter, though Wayne Schnarr . . . [more]

According to a press release issued by Access Copyright, “Canadian creators and educational publishers have won a six-year legal battle to receive reasonable compensation for the reproduction of copyright-protected teaching materials used in the classroom”. Access Copyright is the organization that collects and distributes revenue to authors and publishers from photocopy licenses negotiated with ministries of education, corporations and the like.

In 2009, the Copyright Board of Canada certified a tariff to compensate creators and publishers for the photocopying of their works in K – 12 Schools. The provincial Ministers of Education then asked the Federal Court to review the . . . [more]

Every year at about this time I find myself looking up to the evening sky more often. In addition to the recent full moon, I’ve noticed a lot more news coming out of NASA about stars and planets. Forgive my jaunt away from law to see what is happening in this other field.

Today out of NASA’s Kepler Mission comes news of the discovery of possibly 700 more planets, 140 of which may be bodies similar to Earth. Kepler is a telescope that, unlike the Hubble telescope, is not meant for taking images of specific astronomical objects. Instead, . . . [more]

In any outsourcing or other large contracting arrangements, one of the principal challenges is developing good lines of communication with the client. Whether one is acting as corporate counsel, or outside counsel, it can be a challenge sometimes to explain legal problems and manage expectations to deliver the best advice possible to the client. To manage this concern, I have adopted some strategies which have proven helpful. 

Develop a process. Having a clear process in place for communicating and decision making on a deal is crucial. I have always been fortunate in that regard, as my clients are often

In my experience, lawyers as a whole are not overly enthused about talk of brands and branding. If you must focus time, thought, money or all of the foregoing on a marketing effort of some kind, most would prefer to spend it on something distinctly more tangible – hosting a seminar perhaps, or taking clients to lunch, or even organizing a client golf tournament. Anything but being locked in a boardroom with the consultant-du-jour talking incoherent marketing-speak as part of an abstract navel-gazing exercise, or being asked to foot an exorbitant bill for a designer squiggle to adorn the firm’s . . . [more]