During the ten years I spent closely involved in teaching articled clerks lawyering skills, I often described the program—only half jokingly—as “How to Deal with Humans.”

This past October, I read an article by Jordan Furlong titled “Three core attributes of tomorrow’s lawyer,” and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. One of the attributes Furlong identifies is personal trustworthiness. He uses this category to capture what he calls “relational skills”: empathy, listening, collaboration, judgment, and discretion. In short, he is talking about relationship-building.

But why are we still talking about this?

Shouldn’t law students arrive in practice with . . . [more]

My perception, supported by a good deal of evidence, is that some people and businesses favour, and indeed boast of those assets and competences which they already have and from which they are trying to profit; they sometimes play down the worth of products, services and content which they do not have and through which they cannot trade for potential profit. Therefore, to take an example, they might trumpet the significance of blogging in legal markets, while referencing, to little or no extent, the infinitely more dynamic sources of added value legal authority, viz. the authoritative . . . [more]

What many of us in law, legal education, and other fields still want to know at this point is: what is AI really good for? What does it do reliably well and better than we could do on our own? And when we use it for those purposes, what risks do we take on?

In the early days of ChatGPT, those risks were clear. AI hallucinated authorities and generated biased output grounded in its training data. But as models have improved and we’ve learned to guard against these problems, those concerns have become more manageable.

A different and more subtle . . . [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.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : L’ensemble de la preuve ne peut conduire à une autre conclusion que la culpabilité de l’accusé, lequel a assassiné les locataires qui vivaient au sous-sol de sa maison; il y a donc lieu d’appliquer la disposition réparatrice à l’erreur concernant l’absence de directive restrictive sur les déclarations . . . [more]

Have you ever felt so done with everything that if there was one more thing on your plate you could just explode?

I remember watching cartoons as a kid where the characters would get red in the face, the head would get bigger and bigger and then “boom” they would explode in a cloud of smoke. This is the best way to depict how many of us feel when we are at the end of our ropes. That strange sensation in the body that is telling you to walk away from your desk, go out in nature, calm down… do . . . [more]

Nous sommes heureux d’annoncer la publication du Guide canadien de la référence juridique en accès libre (le RJAL), disponible sur CanLII.

S’inscrivant dans la continuité du projet initial, le Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide (COAL), le RJAL est le fruit d’une collaboration soutenue entre des bibliothécaires désirant offrir un guide de référence juridique fiable, moderne, accessible et à la portée de toutes et de tous.

Sa publication en français constitue une étape importante pour mieux servir la communauté juridique dans les deux langues officielles du Canada.

Les règles du RJAL sont en majorité identiques au COAL, mais ont été . . . [more]

These changes are intended to update existing Canadian Non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) disclosure standards to conform to the new international accounting standard, IFRS 18 Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements, which is effective for annual periods beginning on or after January 1, 2027.

Background and Context

IFRS 18 Impact: The IFRS 18 standard requires the disclosure of Management-Defined Performance Measures in a note to the financial statements, which would have removed them from the scope of the existing NI 52-112 definition of non-GAAP measures.

Purpose: To continue providing investor protection and transparency, both in the financial statements and beyond . . . [more]

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Democracy, Protest and the Law: Defending a Democratic Right. By Michael Head. London, U.K.: Routledge, 2024. vii, 198 p. Includes index. ISBN 9780367608323 (hardcover) US$190.00; ISBN 9781003100652 (eBook) US$56.99.

Reviewed by Haley O’Halloran
Research Librarian
Toronto Lawyers Association

While reading this book, Toronto, the city where I live, passed a . . . [more]

Discourse on AI and the law often centres on the prospect (or lack thereof) of catastrophic injury to existing legal institutions and structures. Will AI tools decimate the legal profession, replacing all the lawyers? Or will lawyers who use AI simply replace lawyers who do not? Will our courts be overrun by hordes of robo-judges? Or is human decision-making essential and here to stay? These debates have proved remarkably resilient. Versions of them have bounced around for years, shifting shape as the technology progresses and our anxieties evolve.

I’m all for looking at the big picture and asking big questions, . . . [more]

Sticks and Stones

As a society, we tend to categorize folks. Introverts or extroverts. Calm or anxious. Easy to get along with or difficult. I struggle with these categorizations because I feel that they oversimplify matters. It has been my experience that most people shift how they behave based on who they are with, the environment they are in and the situation. As a result, I often question the benefit of these labels.

My greatest concern in this respect surrounds the impact of negative labels, in terms of what they project and the assumptions that are made around them. Groundbreaking . . . [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.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Puisque la juge de première instance n’a pas déterminé les mesures raisonnables prises par l’accusé afin de s’assurer du consentement de la victime à une relation sexuelle, le jugement se prête difficilement à un examen en appel sur la question de la croyance sincère mais erronée au . . . [more]