The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced on May 20th that it had launched TOSsed Out, a new iteration of EFF’s continuing work in tracking and documenting the ways that Terms of Service (TOS) and other speech moderating rules are unevenly applied to people by online services. Sometimes, posts are deleted. Sometimes accounts are banned. For many people, the internet represents an irreplaceable forum to express their ideas, communicate with others, etc.

We have long been fans of the EFF and were delighted to hear that cybersecurity guru Bruce Schneier is leaving IBM, in part to focus on teaching cybersecurity to . . . [more]

Any planning of a public calendar can be challenging in a diverse and multicultural society. The Law Society of Ontario, for example, learned this the hard way when they scheduled the Barrister exam this year on June 4, 2019, which coincided with Eid celebrations of Muslims across the province.

The planning of a Federal election is a more extensive endeavour, not only in the national scope of the exercise, but in the more significant limitations imposed by statute. The Canada Elections Act, states,

Date of General Election

Powers of Governor General preserved

56.1 …

Election dates

(2) …each general

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) : La tenue d’un nouveau procès est ordonnée pour l’appelant, déclaré coupable de meurtre au second degré au terme d’un procès devant jury; le juge a commis des erreurs de droit dans la détermination de la recevabilité de déclarations extrajudiciaires ainsi qu’en omettant de donner une directive précise . . . [more]

Legal podcasts have really taken off in Canada over the last couple of years. From niche practice areas to big picture legal profession issues, smart and entertaining discussion and commentary abounds in these podcasts. You can find a directory of 20+ Canadian legal podcasts at lawblogs.ca.

While law practice management, legal industry culture, and substantive law subjects are well represented in this list, there really haven’t been any podcasts related to law libraries–until now!

At their last annual conference in Edmonton this past May, CALL/ACDB partnered with vLex for an exclusive podcast series, hosted by Colin Lachance, interim . . . [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 (newest first):

• Program Counsel (Full-time) | Winnipeg, MB (Law Society of Manitoba)
• Corporate Lawyer – High Growth Companies (Full-time) | Toronto, ON (The Heller Group)
• Financial Services Lawyer (Full-time) | Toronto, ON (The Heller Group)
• Securities Lawyer (Full-time) | Toronto,

[Download the full text for this summary from the SSRN.] Law societies appear to be powerless to serve the public interest by defending lawyers’ markets against three major threats:

(1) the access to justice problem (the A2J problem of unaffordable legal services for the majority of society that is middle- and lower-income people), which has left the majority of law firms short of clients;

(2) the commercial producers of legal services such as LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, now have millions of customers, who are now here in Canada beginning the same process of invading lawyers’ markets, along with the . . . [more]

Your personal information has already been compromised. Your business may already be infected. There have been so many breaches of user ID’s over the years that it is almost certain there is a login/password combination for almost everyone somewhere on the dark web. One of the striking revelations of many breaches is how long the bad actor has been lurking in a system before being discovered – sometimes months. Almost everything we do is digital, and most of it is in the cloud. It can be catastrophic if it fails or is compromised. Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly important for businesses . . . [more]

Les salles de classe des facultés de droit sont remplies d’étudiantes. À l’Université Laval, elles forment près de 70 % de la nouvelle cohorte admise au baccalauréat en droit à l’automne 2018. Au Québec, plus de 65 % des diplômés de l’École du Barreau sont des femmes. Pourtant, les statistiques montrent que les avocates abandonnent la profession beaucoup plus tôt que leurs confrères (en moyenne 49 ans comparativement à 61 ans chez les hommes, selon les statistiques du Barreau du Québec). Les femmes sont très nombreuses à quitter la pratique du droit au cours des 10 premières années, cette période . . . [more]

Law school classrooms are filled with female students. At Université Laval, in fall 2018, female students made up nearly 70% of the new cohort admitted to the Bachelor of Laws program. In Quebec, more than 65% of graduates from the École du Barreau (Bar School) are women. Yet, statistics show that women lawyers leave the profession much earlier than their male colleagues (at age 49 vs. 61, on average, according to Quebec Bar statistics). Many women leave the practice of law during the first 10 years, a period considered crucial for career advancement. Inevitably, they are less likely to become . . . [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. St. Marthe v. O’Connor, 2019 ONSC 4279

[24] The defendant described the case as a “straightforward personal injury matter”. On the face of it, that is true; there was nothing exceptional in respect of liability or damages. But that tells only half the story. This was hard-fought litigation on both sides and that almost invariably results in the expenditure of time . . . [more]

Recently Alan Freeman wrote about the use of artificial intelligence in third party funding of litigation, in his article “Intelligent Funding: Could AI Drive the Future of Litigation Finance”. Litigation funding, also known as third party funding, provides financing to plaintiffs and law firms to enable them to pursue their claims in return for a piece of the recovery. For a court to approve a third party funding agreement, the party must show that (a) the agreement is necessary to provide access to justice, (b) that access to justice is facilitated by the third party funding agreement in . . . [more]

The role of a society’s recognized and legal “leader” is a complicated one. It is affected by and affects the society’s political culture. It can be unifying or divisive. It can seek to move the society forward or to take it back to an earlier time. It can reflect the individual’s ignorance or knowledge of the political unit’s norms, conventions and laws. However, one of the most important aspects of leadership is that the individual understands the law (with help from advisors) and respects the legal system, even though they may disagree with particular laws. A so-called “leader” who shows . . . [more]