The recent United Airlines incident where a passenger was dragged off the plane because United wanted the seat for a United employee is a good reminder of some social media realities.

The obvious lesson is to not bloody your passengers and drag them off your plane. Or that just because you have the right to do something, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

But sometimes bad stuff happens. And often someone is there to record and publish it for the world to see.

When that happens, the social media / public relations lesson is to not react in . . . [more]

When I suggested ten years ago that email would become the principal means by which clients and lawyers would communicate, many people suggested I was dangerous, that I was possibly insane, that I should not be allowed to speak in public, and that I certainly did not understand anything about security or confidentiality but [email] technology and many other emerging technologies have now firmly taken hold.[1]

So much has changed in a relatively short period of time when it comes to our use of technology in delivering legal services. As noted by Richard Susskind above, the use of email . . . [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. Elmardy v Toronto Police Services Board, 2017 ONSC 2074

[1] On a winter’s evening in Toronto, the Appellant, a black man, was walking on a downtown street when he was stopped by two Toronto Police Service officers. An interaction ensued during which the Respondent Constable Pak punched the Appellant in the face twice, emptied the Appellant’s pockets without his consent and . . . [more]

In Christie Blatchford’s book Life Sentence: Stories from four decades of court reporting – or, how I fell out of love with the Canadian justice system, Blatchford critiques the judicial system. Her critique is centred on her personal experiences and on several court cases.

In particular, she recalls an exchange she had with a lawyer, while observing a trial. During their conversation, she accidentally cited the wrong case when he immediately corrected her. Stating that “in those few minutes was illustrated so much that is enraging about the broader justice system: Its collective overweening self-satisfaction; its increasing deference to the . . . [more]

As most lawyers would agree, few recent court cases have had the impact of last year’s Supreme Court decision in R. v. Jordan. A quick look at the CanLII website tells us that it has already been cited in over 200 other decisions in the 8 months since it was rendered and many court administrators have been tasked with finding new ways to comply with its teachings.

As a reminder, the decision affirmed, among other things, that:

[49] The most important feature of the new framework is that it sets a ceiling beyond which delay is presumptively unreasonable. For . . . [more]

This article is by Ian Hu, claims prevention and practicePRO counsel at LAWPRO.

Understanding cognitive biases can help reduce communication-related claims, which are the biggest source of malpractice claims. While many cognitive biases are dealt with by following some common sense principles, others are not as obvious. From anchoring effect to decision fatigue, knowing how your client makes decisions can help you build rapport with your clients, effectively give recommendations, and help ensure you and your client are on the same page.

1. Let your clients make a good decision –decision fatigue

Decision fatigue has perhaps the highest profile of . . . [more]

Might that majority of society who cannot afford a lawyer’s advice (“the problem”) soon use the social media to demand the abolition of law societies? Indeed; “off with their heads!” Quite fitting for a law society, created during the last years of the French Revolution, which had so taxed the heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette but a few years before. Ontario’s Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC) was created on July 17, 1797, in Wilson’s Hotel, at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, by 10 of the 15 lawyers in the then British colony of Upper Canada. (See: Christopher Moore, The . . . [more]

Codification can be a wonderful thing. It helps consolidate all of the myriad of rules and exceptions that exist in the common law, and lays it out in one place for everyone to find.

But codification also has its drawbacks. Once enshrined in statute, there can be a tendency towards complacency.

The best example of this of course would be the Criminal Code of Canada. First enacted in 1892, it was modeled after a proposed a codification in Britain written by James Fitzjames Stephen, which never made it past Second Reading there. The reason for its codification was that John . . . [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) La juge de première instance a commis une erreur en faisant reposer l’abus des procédures sur l’atteinte à l’équité du procès en raison de la simple substitution des accusations portées contre l’intimée; il y a lieu d’ordonner la tenue d’un nouveau procès.

Intitulé : R. c. Dumont-Chamberland, 2017 . . . [more]

If your firm has been around for a while, how has it changed? Let’s say you’re in a mid-sized Canadian city and the firm has been in existence since the 1970s. Chances are that at least one set of partners has retired from the firm and new recruits have brought new interests (and new clients) into the firm. New industrial developments on the outskirts of town have yielded new clients, who in turn have referred other new clients from even further out of town. Before anyone has realized it, your firm is serving clients province-wide, yet you’re still promoting yourselves . . . [more]