This article is by Ian Hu, Claims Prevention & practicePRO Counsel at LAWPRO

Increasingly, legal services are moving away from the full-service model. Outsourcing document review, e-discovery, and other discrete legal services are becoming more common-place. Small practitioners and larger firms alike can offer limited scope representation, or “unbundled” representation, which let clients pick and choose when they want to engage with a lawyer during the life of a transaction or litigation. Limited scope representation provides greater access to justice, as clients need not retain a lawyer for the whole life of a file, and can instead save money by . . . [more]

Recently, allegations of sexual harassment in the kitchen of a trendy Toronto restaurant have ignited a dialogue about workplace harassment. While this doesn’t excuse it, industry veterans aren’t surprised by the complaint, saying that many of Canada’s restaurants have a workplace culture that is overwhelming male, close-knit, and full of sexualized banter.

The employee at the heart of the controversy says she was aware of the industry’s reputation when she accepted the job. “I just thought this came with the job and it was something I just had to overcome,” she reports.

In Ontario, sexual harassment in the workplace . . . [more]

The benefit that I gained, while participating with Jason Wilson and Gary Rodrigues in a session on the future of legal publishing at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries annual conference, was in learning more about the broad range of issues that both concerned and excited law librarians in their relationships with the major law publishers.

We had set out to explore questions of challenges and publisher responses to them, changing market structures and competitive factors, digital challenges impact on business models and how they need to be altered and who will be the winners and losers. These were . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty 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 Securities Law 2. BC Injury Law and ICBC Claims Blog 3. Vincent Gautrais 4. Slater Vecchio Connected 5. Off the Shelf

Canadian Securities Law
Cybersecurity issues: what directors need to consider

As we previously noted, many of our readers will be interested in following the new series of . . . [more]

Mandatory minimums. Mega prisons. “Tough” on crime.

These have been the hallmarks of the Federal government’s reform of the criminal justice system, but the policies have been more politically motivated than good policy or social science evidence. Canada’s crime rate has been the lowest since 1972, and the literature on law enforcement suggests these measures will actually make things worse.

The mandatory minimum provisions and removal of credit for time has already been challenged successfully in court. Courts in B.C., Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Northwest Territories have all found these provisions as unconstitutional, culminating in the Supreme Court’s decision in . . . [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.

RECOURS COLLECTIF: Le tribunal refuse d’ordonner le paiement de dommages moraux dans l’un des deux recours collectifs intentés contre les compagnies canadiennes de cigarettes, car la preuve ne permet pas d’établir d’une façon suffisamment exacte la somme totale des réclamations des membres (art. 1031 C.P.C.).

Intitulé: Létourneau c. JTI-MacDonald . . . [more]

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files. You may also subscribe to have chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 16
The Morning Aftermath

Are you keeping track of the law on digital currency such as Bitcoin? Are your clients using it, or wanting to? Are you?

The Senate of Canada has issued a report supporting its use. Here’s a story on the report (in case you don’t subscribe to Crypto Coin News…).

Objects in the future are closer than they appear (sometimes). . . . [more]

I recently took a course on copyright law. A number of the questions that came up during the course could not be answered with a simple yes or no; often the answer was “in this circumstance, you should talk to a lawyer.” The course made it clear that there are many misconceptions about copyright. For example, several people taking the course believed that you could freely use copyrighted materials if you were not profiting from your use of these materials.

The copyright questions that librarians have to wrestle with often fall into the grey areas of copyright law. As a . . . [more]

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) many calls to action that focus on the information management community (museums, Library and Archives Canada, archivist associations, vital statistics agencies, etc.).

Earlier this month, the TRC released its findings after its years-long investigation into the many abuses against Aboriginal children at Church-run Indian Residential Schools in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This week, the ActiveHistory.ca website published an article by Krista McCracken, Archives Supervisor at Algoma University’s Shingwauk Residential School and Wishart A. Library.

It is called The Role of Canada’s Museums and Archives in Reconciliation: . . . [more]

Some of you may have seen the Canadian Legal Digital Survey report (or the infographic that gives you the highlights) that was released by my firm, fSquared Marketing, last week. If so, you may have realized that something was missing. But before I get into that, for those of you unfamiliar with the report, here’s some background.

In recent years, we’ve seen various reports and analyses that seek to understand the needs of in-house counsel. However, the majority of these surveys are initiated by, and focused on, the US market. This implies, perhaps incorrectly, that Canadians both find and consume . . . [more]

Last June 5^th, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) issued its findings (Complaints against Globe24h.com, 2015 CanLII 33260 (PCC), the “Findings”) in relation with the activities of a Romanian entrepreneur who illegally downloaded a large number of Canadian decisions in order to commercially exploit the desire of the individuals named in these decisions to maintain some degree of privacy. The story of Sebastian Radulescu, the operator of the Globe24h.com website, has been reported by news organizations such as the Financial Post, the CBC and the Globe and Mail. See our summary . . . [more]