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

Try a different browser
Susannah Tredwell

I was asked what the library equivalent was of our help desk’s standard “try turning it off and back on” advice. I’m not sure there’s an equivalent, but “try a different browser” comes close. …

Practice

And the numbers show… (Part 3)
Andrea Cannavina

And Finally: Volume. I think the last reason attorneys are spending so much time doing administrative tasks . . . [more]

Commercial Law Reform

Commercial law almost always follows commercial practice. Businesses innovate and the law tries to catch up, validating some practices and regulating others.

It is risky for law reform to get out in front of commercial practice, for a number of reasons. The rules may fail to have their desired effect, because business can be more complex than legislation. The rules may restrict innovation, because the methods by which they grant legal effectiveness channel practices into known and safe directions. The rules may simply be wrong, because the rule-makers have not appreciated the dynamics at play among the . . . [more]

I’m looking forward to reading Gillian Hadfield’s new book, “Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy,” which was released at the beginning of this month. As reported in a recent article in The Lawyers Weekly, Hadfield has been exploring the relationship between law and technology and how it impacts access to justice.

At a conference on civil justice and economics sponsored by the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice (CIAJ) she described it like this:

“We need to attract some of the capital

For more than 30 years Richard Susskind has been a thought leader on the future of the legal profession.

This is despite the Law Society of England and Wales saying he did not understand confidentiality and was bringing the legal profession into disrepute by suggesting that email would become the predominant way lawyers and their clients would communicate in his 1996 book, The Future of Law.

Susskind’s most recent book, The Future of the Professions: How technology will transform the work of human experts, is a must read for anyone who wants to gain insights into where . . . [more]

The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s Eight Report: Delaying Justice is Denying Justice: An Urgent Need to Address Lengthy Court Delays in Canada (published, August, 2016), must produce a final report by March 31, 2017.

1. The Major Shortcomings of the Committee’s Report

Appendix A to the Report is this List of Recommendations (p. 16):

Recommendation 1: The Committee recommends that the Government of Canada work with the provinces and territories as well as with the judiciary to examine and implement best practices in case and case flow management across Canada to reduce the number of unnecessary appearances and . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from seventy 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. Canadian Class Actions Monitor  2. FamilyLLB 3. Legal Sourcery  4. Legal Feeds  5. DroitDu.net

Canadian Class Actions Monitor
Araya v. Nevsun Resources Ltd., 2016 BCSC 1856: British Columbia Supreme Court refuses to allow a “common law class action” alleging human rights violations at Eritrean mine

In an important decision . . . [more]

The bar has often lamented the lack of “plain language” by the bench, a necessary prerequisite for transparency and open access to the public.

At times, the need for this approach has been criticized as overlooking the needs of the parties. Sometimes, like in the Meads case, this approach is intended to address broader, systemic problems. As I told Canadian Lawyer Magazine a few years ago,

“I think the fact that the judge even made this ruling suggests how big a problem it is,” says Toronto lawyer Omar Ha-Redeye. “This is a hot issue. Family law is in crisis

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’article 10 b) de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés donne à la personne détenue par les policiers le droit d’avoir recours à l’assistance d’un avocat et non pas un droit constitutionnel limité à «un seul appel» pour joindre un avocat.

Intitulé : Stevens c. R., . . . [more]

To address conflict it is important to select the process and style that best suits the nature of the problem and the needs of the parties. I have just realized that there is another dimension to this analysis – complexity theory! I love finding writings that bring together two of my current passions: complex system change and mediation. The most recent piece is a compelling article by Greg Rooney entitled “Applying Cynefin Complexity Theory to Mediation”.

First, a bit about Cynefin (how do you pronounce that anyway?). Chris Corrigan teaches the Cynefin Framework for strategy and decision-making, leadership and . . . [more]

Or, Ms May may not and must not; at least, not yet.

(For readers outside of the (ice) hockey world, substitute “end of first half”.)

The UK QB ruled unanimously (3-0) this fine English morning that the Tory gov’t cannot use the Crown’s prerogative to initiate the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. The decision to withdraw or not – the decision whether to give notice under the applicable EU treaty – is for Parliament to make, not the party in power in Parliament; aka the “gov’t” or the Crown.

[111] for the reasons we have set out, we hold the

Between July 2016 and February 2017, the federal government is consulting Canadians on planned federal accessibility legislation. The goal of the law would be to promote equality of opportunity and increase the inclusion and participation of Canadians who have disabilities or functional limitations in all areas of every day life. It is expected that the new legislation will incorporate many features from Ontario and Manitoba’s accessibility laws that would include the process or processes that the Government would use to develop the accessibility standards, as well as the areas or activities to which the standards would apply. . . . [more]

Data visualization is one of those phrases that is frequently heard these days. It’s a very interesting field; done properly, data visualization allows you to use charts, graphs or other visuals to put statistics into context far more easily than if they were in tabular format. The flip side is that if not done properly, data visualizations can be confusing or, even worse, misleading (as illustrated by this chart).

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Scott Berinato on “Visualizations that Really Work” talks about how visualizations enable us to use data to make . . . [more]