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. A.T. v. Globe24h.com, 2017 FC 114

[70] In my view, the respondent’s claimed purpose “to make law accessible for free on the Internet” on Globe24h.com cannot be considered “journalistic”. In this instance, there is no need to republish the decisions to make them accessible as they are already available on Canadian websites for free. The respondent adds no value to the . . . [more]

I have been thinking of this blog post by Jean P. O’Grady from last September: “Lex Machina Launches New ‘Easy Button’ Analytics Apps to Compare Judges, Courts and Law Firms”. To my knowledge Lex Machina doesn’t literally call their system improvements an “easy button”, but the site developments and O’Grady’s description are symptomatic of this moment in how we discuss legal research: there is a desire to make legal research easier, and as technology improves this is becoming a reality.

In many cases this will be a great help to people who want to navigate the legal system . . . [more]

Almost 70 percent of organizational change initiatives fail. At that rate, you might wonder why law firms – which are notoriously change resistant – would try at all. But they do. And some succeed by taking a more thoughtful approach right from the start.

Change can evoke pain, loss and uncertainty. All too often, change initiatives are communicated in a way that causes people to feel defensive, rather than inspired.

Perhaps it’s a matter of taxonomy; “transformation” or “evolution” might be better descriptions of the adjustments that many firms need to undertake to improve performance and profit.

Regardless of . . . [more]

The time honoured, hand tailored approach to cases favoured by lawyers over the centuries is restrictive. By forcing lawyers to deal with only one matter a time, legal services can only be immensely profitable if lawyers either bill a high hourly rate and/or deal with a high volume of cases.

Before computers and the internet, the hand tailored approach was the only means of providing services. But now with automation, artificial intelligence, and the Internet, we are no longer limited to the bespoke model. In the public’s interest, we need to rethink legal services and get creative. For example:

1. We 

Recently we took on two Small Claims Court actions for good clients. In both cases we acted for the plaintiff.

Anyone who has commenced a Small Claims Court proceeding knows that the Small Claims Court Rules provide that the plaintiff is generally required to commence the action in the jurisdiction where the defendant lives or carries on business. In both cases our client operated from Toronto. In both cases, we had to commence the action in L’Orignal, Ontario as a result of that being where the defendant carried on business.

For those of you who don’t know, L’Orignal is about . . . [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 research, writing, and practice.

Research & Writing

4 Questions to Ask About Any Database (Part 3)
Ken Fox – Law Society of Saskatchewan Library

This is part 3 of a series on questions you should ask about any electronic research source. Did you miss parts 1 & 2? Find them here and here. What is the Search SYNTAX? …

Practice

New Government, New Tax Changes. Here’s What You Need to Know About Tax in . . . [more]

So often, law firm marketing discussions go something like this: “Billings are down, we should be doing more marketing” or “The associates aren’t busy, they should be marketing themselves” or “We need to grow the firm, we have to get out there and market.”

OK, good, fine, now what? The most common response is to leap straight to tactics: “Let’s do a seminar!” “We need a brochure.” (Yes, some lawyers still say that.) “The website sucks, we need a new one.” But without a strategy, these tactics are random, uncoordinated acts that will end up costing a lot of money, . . . [more]

This article is by Tim Lemieux, Claims Prevention & Stakeholder Relations Coordinator at LAWPRO.

In the early days of email, one of the common bits of productivity advice was “turn off your inbox notifications.” The “You’ve Got Mail” sound or pop-up was a constant source of distraction while trying to get work done. Even with the advent of smartphones that advice was still mostly good enough. The phone meant you could check email everywhere you went, but the distraction was still limited to emails and texts from friends and clients. Jump forward to 2017, and we’re all carrying around what . . . [more]

The quotation below contains the first paragraph and part of the conclusion of an article with the title of this post. You will find that article on the University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog, here.

One might assume that LGBT rights in Canada were worse the further one delves back into our history. This would be incorrect. While LGBT rights in 1867 were nowhere near what they are today, it’s important to note that things actually got a lot worse before they got better.

…

To those of our readers in law school, legal professions, politics, and others

Benjamin Alarie, Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto and CEO of Blue J Legal, gave a lunch time presentation at Osgoode Hall Law School last Tuesday. This session was based on the paper “Regulation by Machine” co-written with Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon delivered at the 30th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2016), Barcelona, Spain. [3]

The paper looks at how the process of machine learning could be used to improve the regulation of human activity. This idea is contrary to the usual and “preoccupied” view that legal scholars have . . . [more]

Career prophets have been announcing the demise of the legal profession for decades already. According to some, the traditional lawyer will soon follow the way of telephone operators, bank clerks and travel agents. Recently, the prophecies have taken a new turn. While outsourcing, offshoring, legal Taylorism—all previous threats of course remain, we are now being forewarned about a new source of disruption: “intelligent software” in law. Once again, prophets insist that those who are not already into it are laggards, and by now we should all know what will happen to them.

In this post, I address the deployment of . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from more than 80 recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Welcome to the Food Court 2. Éloïse Gratton 3. Labour Pains 4. David Whelan 5. Employment & Human Rights Law in Canada

Welcome to the Food Court
S2E4 – Gerald Chan on Food Crime

We’ve got Gerald Chan from Stockwoods LLP this episode and we’re talking about . . . [more]