Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on practice, research, writing and technology.

Research & Writing

Miscellaneous Mistakes
Neil Guthrie

Some random things I’ve seen and heard lately. Don’t take it personal: Nope. Personally is how one should (or should not) take it. You would make it personal, however, because you want an adjective to modify it (not the adverb that needs to modify take). … . . . [more]

Cognitive bias is:

1. Making decisions or judgments not supported by objective reality;
2. The subject of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow;
3. A barrier to effective Legal Project Management;
4. All of the above.

As a lawyer, you probably have some familiarity with cognitive biases. (If you do defense work, your clients are likely very familiar… from experience.) However, I want to focus on some ways cognitive biases can screw up projects.

(I’m deferring my promised column on project charter disasters to next time.)

Anchoring, or “First Liar”

We can’t help it. Someone tells us about a . . . [more]

With all the advertising around personal injury services proliferating, it’s tempting to some plaintiffs to think they can go it alone. The contingency fee alone in such arrangements might provide some financial or monetary incentive to explore such options.

As with most legal proceedings though, this is rarely advisable. This was clearly highlighted in a recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Jex v. Jiang.

The parties conducted a 10 day jury trial, based on a motor vehicle collision on August 29, 2007. The self-represented plaintiff was successful in providing causation, but was unsuccessful in proving damages. Consequently, the . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PROCÉDURE CIVILE : Les administratrices de la page «Dis son nom» doivent transmettre au demandeur l’identité de ses victimes alléguées ainsi que les communications échangées avec celles-ci; de plus, la défenderesse A.A. devra utiliser sa véritable identité dans le cadre des procédures entreprises par le demandeur à la suite de . . . [more]

Each Friday, we share the latest job listings from Slaw Jobs, which features employment opportunities from across the country. Find out more about these positions by following the links below, or learn how you can use Slaw Jobs to gain valuable exposure for your job ads, while supporting the great Canadian legal commentary at Slaw.ca.

Current postings on Slaw Jobs:

• Operations Manager – College of Patent Agents and Trademark Agents (Full-time) | Remote/Canada
  (College of Patent and Trademark Agents of Canada)
• Director, People and Culture (Full-time) | Remote/Vancouver, BC
  (Ecojustice)

Written by Daniel Standing LL.B., Editor, First Reference Inc.

Cases in which courts must determine reasonable notice for a dismissed employee are generally straightforward, involving an analysis of certain time-honoured factors in relation to the employee and his or her work. The case before the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Cho v Stonebridge Solutions Inc., 2020 BCSC 1560 involved a unique twist: the court first had to determine whether the plaintiff worker was an employee (as he claimed), or an independent contractor (as the defendant company claimed). The court concluded that, as an employee, the worker was entitled . . . [more]

In February, it was reported that the UK’s Legal Services Board was moving forward with plans to introduce “continuing competence checks” for lawyers. This could involve the regulator obtaining feedback from consumers, judges and peers; making quality assurance visits; and possibly even requiring formal revalidation of lawyers’ credentials.

In my last column, I discussed how the raison d’être of lawyer regulation is to ensure that anyone providing legal services will meet standards of professional competence and professional conduct. In Ontario, this is codified in s. 4.1(a) of the Law Society Act.

But I have long wondered: Is the . . . [more]

The Courts were busy in 2020 with some significant decisions in patent law addressing several substantive issues affecting the enforceability of patent rights in Canada. The following summary focuses on some of these decisions that may be of interest beyond those practicing patent law.

Computer-implemented Inventions – An area of significant an ongoing uncertainty has been the degree to which patents can be granted for software and ‘business method’ inventions. In Choueifaty v. Canada (Attorney General), 2020 FC 837, the Federal Court rejected the approach used by the Canadian Patent Office in reviewing these types of inventions to . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. R v Stephan, 2021 ABCA 82 (CanLII)

[139] Expert witnesses must accept that their methodology and opinions may well be strongly challenged given the consequential role they play in the justice system. But in our pluralistic democracy, there is no place for weighing evidence, much less determining its admissibility, based on how someone speaks the language of the proceeding. It is . . . [more]

For all the lives lost and human suffering experienced as a result of this pandemic, the rapid biomedical response to this scourge has been a ray of light and hope. A number of open science approaches – including publishers making all of the relevant research open access – have led to accelerated genetic sequencing, vaccine development, three-phase clinical testing and approval and a global vaccination roll-out. The open science movement has also been spreading beyond the immediate questions of treating COVID-19.

It is influencing the opening of scholarly publishing, more generally, which is the area in which I work on . . . [more]

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on practice, research, writing and technology.

Research & Writing

Thoughts on the Oxford Comma
Neil Guthrie

When people hear I’ve published a book on writing, many of them ask for my views on the ‘Oxford’ or “serial’ comma, in that intense ‘please confirm my own view’ sort of way. The Oxford comma, so called because the University Press has long insisted on it, is used in lists: A, B, and C. Whether one needs the . . . [more]