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. Mikolic v Tanguay, 2015 ONSC 71

[28] Although the trial judge was satisfied that the amounts the Plaintiff had received for past income replacement benefits had exceeded the tort award for past loss of income, he wrote that he could not determine from the evidence what amounts the Plaintiff had actually received under the settlement on account of future income replacement . . . [more]

We are reaching end of the year. My column is about the practice of law, so why don’t I take you through quick tour of where the end of 2015 brought me?

Much movement on measuring. Once, not all that long ago, the very idea of asking users of the justice system how they experienced its performance was considered daft. I still have workshops every now and then in which judges and ministry officials hint that asking the customers and making their views public could infringe judicial independence or the democratic process. Measuring justice has not been mainstreamed on . . . [more]

It has been said that over 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone.

The proliferation of documents has changed the way legal work is done. Litigation files with thousands or even millions of documents have spawned an entire industry devoted to document review. Wikipedia defines document review as “the process whereby each party to a case sorts through and analyzes the documents and data they possess … to determine which are sensitive [privileged] or otherwise relevant to the case.”

In Ontario, Deloitte has a department devoted to document review. It is filled with . . . [more]

What does it mean to discriminate on the basis of family status? The topic has been written about extensively on Slaw. However, the law has still been hard to interpret. Thankfully, the Ontario Court of Appeal has recently provided some clarity on the subject when it recently upheld a decision that found discrimination on the basis of family status after a work schedule was changed and interfered with an employee’s childcare arrangements.

In that decision, the employer demoted an employee who had returned a week earlier from maternity leave, reducing her hours and pay. When the employee objected, the employer . . . [more]

In 2012, the Copyright Modernization Act was enacted to make a number of significant changes to Canada’s existing copyright regime. One of the primary goals of this new legislation was to ensure that Canada did not open the floodgates to “copyright trolls” (copyright plaintiffs who file lawsuits simply to extort quick settlements) and devolve into the shocking state of copyright litigation south of the border. The federal government hopes to balance the rights of copyright holders with the privacy rights of the alleged copyright infringers. The Act now has a statutory limit of $5,000 on damages for all non-commercial copyright . . . [more]

In October 2013, Adam Liptak—The New York Times’ Supreme Court correspondent—dismissed law reviews as repositories of irrelevant and un(der)-read legal scholarship that merely bolster the curriculum vitae of published authors and, presumably, the student editors.

Disagreement with Liptak’s bold assertion ran the gamut from the observation that students run law reviews for lack of an alternative to the rebuke that Liptak’s criticism overreached to taint law reviews with less problematic publication structures. Others focused on Liptak’s brief praise for legal blogging; Kevin O’Keefe celebrated the article for heralding law blogs as better sources of “valuable legal insight” . . . [more]

In what has to be one of the more unusual cases I have come across, a Superior Court judge has set aside a default judgment after being satisfied that the process server hired by the plaintiff to serve its claim swore “untruthful” affidavits of service which were subsequently relied on by the plaintiff to obtain default judgment.

The plaintiff in a franchise dispute had its lawyer prepare a statement of claim. The plaintiff’s lawyer hired a process server to serve the corporate and personal defendant. The process server advised the plaintiff’s lawyer that the claim had been served on . . . [more]

A while ago I found myself basking in the sun beside a swimming pool, with not a great deal troubling me. The anxiety-free break had allowed me with pleasure to work my way through an interesting and informative biography and the moment was right quickly to find another book to read. Scouring through the available literature my attention was captured immediately by a highly regarded legal/crime novel by a well-known author and I immediately settled down for a relaxing read. Not the fault of the book or its author, I am convinced, but several pages in I began to become . . . [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 and writing, practice, and technology.

Research & Writing

Take a Pass on the Passive
Neil Guthrie

Does the subject of your sentence do something (She said that), or is something done to the subject (That was said by her)? The first is an active construction, the second a passive one. The active voice is much more effective. It tends to be shorter and simpler, more natural and direct, more engaging. …

Practice

How . . . [more]

Upon arrest or detention, a police officer must advise a detainee of their s. 10 Charter right to retain and instruct counsel without delay. Does this right apply if a person is “apprehended” and taken involuntarily to a health facility for a psychiatric assessment? Presumably it does: if the individual is not free to leave the officer’s custody or refuse the examination, then their individual liberty is clearly suspended by a state authority. This is the very definition of a “detention” under the Charter: R v Grant. Yet, the case law implies that officers may be failing to advise . . . [more]

2015 was the fifth year we’ve tracked the fraud-related emails forwarded to fraudinfo@lawpro.ca that allow us to post our warnings to lawyers on LAWPRO’s AvoidaClaim blog. This year we noticed a new trend: the number of emailed reports declined but not the number of actual posts we’ve done. This is likely because while the fraudsters are keeping up their efforts to dupe lawyers, more and more lawyers now recognize the scams and simply delete the emails rather than forwarding them to us. Sadly, not every lawyer sees the frauds for what they are. Last week we heard from a firm . . . [more]

An interesting post by lawyer and cognitive scientist Peter Macmillan, was captured in part by comments in the LinkedIn Legal Innovation and Technology group, caught my attention last week. In his post, “Robot Lawyers are Not the Future,” Macmillan begins by noting that “industry outsiders are pushing technologies that many believe will transform the legal profession from a technological backwater to a shining example of cognitive computing.”

And, although he knows that advances in technology will not stop happening, he contends that, “Robot Lawyers are not the future, at least not in the sense that they’ll rule . . . [more]