Today’s Halifax Chronicle Herald reports that the current mayor of Cape Breton municipality, John Morgan, is about to face a disciplinary hearing by the Nova Scotia Barristers Society for professional misconduct. He’s not accused of bad lawyering (he hasn’t been practicing since becoming mayor in 2000), but of being discourteous to the bench in media interviews in connection with a particularly contentious lawsuit brought by the municipality against the province for a greater share of equilization funds. From the Herald article:

“Specifically, the charges allege that the member failed in his duty to encourage public respect for justice and to

A couple of new features are now available at Quickscribe’s BC Legislation Portal:

1. BC Bills Tracker – As BC Bills recieve their 1st or 3rd Reading and added into the Quickscribe databases, the new bill tracker page will automatically publish those alerts.
2. BC Consequential Amendments – When proposed legislation, if passed, will amend another Act, this page category will aggregate those related alerts.

Both tools may be personalized further – limiting by area of law, for example – using Quickscribe’s (free) RSS alert service for Bill Tracking. But if users are simply after a roundup of new BC . . . [more]

In C.H. Giles & Co. Ltd. v. Morris, [1972] 1 W.L.R. 307, [1972] 1 All E.R. 960 at 971 (Ch.D., Megarry J.) said:

… In this judgment I have referred to a number of authorities not cited in argument. On the procedural point I have reached no final conclusion, and so the citation of additional authorities in that respect does not raise any particular difficulty. But it is otherwise in relation to the question of specific enforceability. On this, the only authority cited to me by either side was Fry, cited by counsel for the defendants. Wilson v West

The Supreme Court of Canada is hearing Prime Minister of Canada, et al. v. Omar Ahmed Khadr tomorrow, November 13 — a Friday the 13th, as it happens. There is a webcast of the hearing scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. EDT.

You can read the SCC Case Information Summary to get a quick overview of the matter. The appellant’s (i.e. government’s) factum is online [PDF], as is that for Khadr [PDF].

The appeal is from a judgment of the Federal Court of Appeal: Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr, 2009 FCA 246 (CanLII), which in turn was an . . . [more]

The Times Online has a curious nostalgia piece entitled, “Whatever happened to the radical lawyers,” that keys off Michael Mansfield’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer (co-written with Yvette Vanson). Mansfield, president of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, has been practising in Britain since 1967, and has a string of unpopular causes as his clients over the years. The article examines his, and others’, views on what happened to the radicalism of the sixties that seemed to motivate so many young law graduates.

I say the piece is curious because it supplies something of an answer . . . [more]

A U.S. federal court in the state of Georgia has ruled that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibits “tweeting” from the courtroom:

“The immediate result of the court’s decision is to reject a request from a reporter for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer that he be allowed to use his BlackBerry during the Shellnutt criminal case in order to send updates to his newspaper’s Twitter feed.”

This is exactly what Ottawa Citizen reporter Glen McGregor did during this year’s bribery trial of Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien.

This whole area of discussion (the impact of social networking media . . . [more]

Chatting with Angela this morning about judgments, and then the Ontario Reports undermines my certainty about my prior views.

One expects that such issues as what is a judgment, and what is an endorsement, would have been determined years ago, when the basic rules of precedent were laid down by common law courts.

However, this morning’s copy of the Ontario Reports has me wondering. There are 80 pages of reported judicial decisions in part 10 of volume 96 of the Ontario Reports, Third Edition.

However, four of those decisions from the Superior Court totalling 61 pages are nominally endorsements. I . . . [more]

Here is this morning’s Interim Management Statement from Reed Elsevier. Note the interested bolded statement on R&D in the legal research sector.

LexisNexis has seen a modest decline in underlying revenues with softer legal and corporate markets in the US and internationally. Overall revenues benefit from a full year contribution from the ChoicePoint business acquired in September last year.

The US Legal Markets business has seen a continuation of the first half trends. Revenues in the core law firm market have held up, although these are under some late cycle pressure reflecting the downturn in the legal services industry. Directory

Google is always releasing new features or apps. Here’s a rundown of some released recently that may have relevance for lawyers…

Google adds World Bank data

googleblog.blogspot.com… – Permalink – Similar

Now it’s possible to export your documents from Google Docs, removing one anxiety about working in this cloud. You can export up to 500 MB of data in a single zip file. You can export to a variety of document types.

Google uses feeds to find new sites

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com… – Permalink – Similar

Google has built a Custom Search Wikipedia skin. If you have a Wikipedia account, log in . . . [more]

Conventional wisdom is that law firm web sites should contain a list of major deals the firm has worked on. I’ve always thought that was wrong – but didn’t really understand why until this morning.

I attended a TechAlliance breakfast club seminar where Nick Hall of Hall Associates ( @hallassociates ) spoke about Brand Promise.

One of the examples he used was a hairdresser. The brand experience a good hairdresser provides is confidence – not a haircut. Confidence that the hairdresser uses her/his expertise to make the customer look and thus feel good. That results in loyal customers who will . . . [more]

I’ve never pre-ordered a textbook until Melanie Bueckert’s “The Law of Employee Monitoring in Canada.”

This is no slight to Melanie’s fantastic background, but I didn’t expect much. Though there are exceptions, many privacy texts tend to be thin on substance, perhaps because the domain is evolving so quickly.

Given I had set my expectations low, I was delighted when I received Melanie’s text last month and discovered it included a thorough and deep discussion of the law of employee monitoring in Canada. This led me to introduce myself to Melanie, who is Legal Research Counsel at the Manitoba Court . . . [more]

A heads up for those interested in the Law Commission of Ontario’s Modernization of the Provincial Offences Act project. The Consultation Paper is scheduled for release early next week. It lists about 20 issues on which we want people’s views: should we address this issue? And if so, what should we recommend? We also want to know if there are issues we missed.

We were aware of the Streamlining Paper emanating from the MAG Working Group and tried to avoid duplication of issues. We’ll do the same with Bill 212 which recently received second reading, although it addresses only a . . . [more]