Officials from the Conservative Party have reportedly announced today they will try Senate reform, again. The last two attempts failed due to the 2008 election and the prorogation.

In 2006, the Senate failed to pass Bill S-4: An Act to amend the Constitution Act, 1867, requesting reference from the Supreme Court of Canada on its constitutionality.

They key difference today? The Senate appointments earlier this year by the Conservatives give them a 51-49 majority in the upper house, using the existing system. The irony has not been lost on Canadians.

This move shouldn’t come as a surprise though to . . . [more]

Legal Systematics is in the process of launching a series of practice systems, initially aimed at the Canadian market. The line of products, dubbed SpeedMatters, currently includes systems for accident benefits, small claims and real estate. Systems for estate planning and motor vehicle litigation are in the works, and products for other practice areas will follow. Heritage Law is assisting with the drafting of the estate planning documents.

Web-based versions of these products will be available and integration with Time Matters is also supported. These systems are designed to help lawyers be more efficient in their work, particularly when it . . . [more]

In university history classes the textbooks provided shots of cuneiform for our wonderment. It was hard to imagine reading the stuff, though, and I recall being told that the ancient Messopotamian tablets were mostly accounting documents. Well, no more. According to Knowlegde and Power:

The Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh in northern Iraq, from the mid-7th century BC, is the earliest attested site of courtly scientific patronage in world history. This website presents the scholars’ letters, queries, and reports to their kings and provides resources to support their use in undergraduate teaching. Since the summer of 2008 it also gives

Here’s a wordy one today. Really wordy. But I thought that you might like to see an example of “old skool” ingenuity as it meets modern technology. I’m talking about the practice of cross-writing in letters. Once, postage was determined by the number of sheets within an envelope and not by weight — actually, I remember pre-stamped, blue, airmail letter “envelopes” that allowed for no enclosures and offered you only a single sheet to write on — and so the frugal took to cross-writing, i.e. turning the written-on page 90 degrees and simply writing across the earlier text. Surprisingly, the . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada this morning told the Canadian legal profession of its obligations to continue to provide services when the money runs out, when it handed down its decision in the Cunningham case.

Jennie Cunningham was a lawyer working for the Yukon Legal Aid Services Society. Her client had been charged with three sexual assault offences against a six-year-old girl. Legal Aid found out that the accused was working but had not reported his income. So they dropped him from coverage. The client couldn’t pay. So Cunningham asked the Territorial Court in charge of the criminal proceedings . . . [more]

Spreed:Inc, a Canadian IT startup, offers to provide online publishers with the ability to present their content in such a way that readers can grasp it quickly, even — or perhaps especially — on the small screen of a smart phone. The notion has been kicking around for some time: flash one or a few words at a time in the centre of the screen, so that the eye doesn’t have to track left and right the way it might with a line of text. Those of you who have seen a Lawrence Lessig PowerPoint presentation will know that . . . [more]

I had an interesting experience the other week with a law firm client and their corporate client regarding the need to process a vast amount of data and the associated costs with the project. It was apparent that there was a lack of understanding of scope and appreciation for the associated costs related to achieving their goals. In my opinion, the scope of work was further reaching than what was needed. I am not a lawyer, but common sense should rule the day over restoring data from an entire network that could amount between 400 and 800 backup tapes and . . . [more]

Last week, David Cheifetz collected the salient paragraphs of the SCC’s decision on R. v. Morelli (2010 SCC 8) in a post here on Slaw, but only limited discussion followed. The dissent, though, has some interesting observations that deserve highlighting, such as this one from paragraph 144:

In light of the inevitability of technological change, it is important not to needlessly handcuff the courts to a concept of possession that is limited to certain technologies or to current-day computer practices. Control has been the defining feature of possession, not the possibility of finding data files on a hard drive. To

I often tell people (my great Field IT guys and gal) that I know only enough about technology to be dangerous (usually when I break something). I try to learn things and understand engineeringish processes and sometimes I meet with moderate success. Not today.

Since re-planting ourselves in rural Alberta, my family has been attempting to live land-line-less…no telephone line. It is still remarkable costly to bring telephone service onto an undeveloped property and our last experience doing that was unpalatable. We do have pretty consistent and speedy Internet service so we gave VOIP a try. For 17 painful months. . . . [more]

Spindle Law is a U.S. project to facilitate legal research by getting a community of lawyers to lay down the bones of areas of law in a hierarchical online treatise. Let me unpack that notion for you. To help me understand what Spindle is doing, I spoke to David Gold, the CEO and one of the founders of Spindle. At one level the notion is simple and straightforward: legal professionals join Spindle and, much as with Wex, the Legal Information Institute’s encyclopedia, members contribute to the building of a database. However, unlike Wex, which aims to meet the . . . [more]

Yes. You read the title correctly.
No. I’m not crazy. Although one might argue that point considering that I am about to propose a solution to the intractable problem of impaired driving that would, if implemented, wipe out a large percentage of my practice.

When the typical impaired driving client approaches me they invariably express one or both of the following two concerns: first, they want to avoid the stigma of a criminal record and second, they want to keep their driver’s licence. As the law now stands, neither of these objectives are possible without winning the case outright. If . . . [more]

Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) defines labour mobility as the freedom of workers to practise their occupation wherever opportunities exist. According to HRSDC, every year, approximately 200,000 Canadians relocate to a different province or territory to look for work.

Several Canadian provinces and territories have enacted or are in the process of enacting legislation that will eliminate internal trade barriers and enhance labour mobility to ensure all Canadian workers have the freedom to be able to work in their fields anywhere in Canada. These endeavours stem from the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), signed in 1994 by the . . . [more]