Mastery of vocabulary is a skill lawyers hone. But if the perfect choice of words is elusive—or if you have a more serious agenda—there’s always the dark art of “neology”.

I’m a bit of a word nut. As a youngster I was obsessed with the 1971 compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It had the full 13-volumes condensed into two impossibly dense books with pages so thin and print so fine it required dexterity and a magnifying glass to read. “Prestidigitation” and “myopia” are words you can find in that micronized lexicon, but also skills you will need . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada recently decided a contractual dispute, Bhasin v. Hrynew, involving businesses selling educational savings plans (ESPs). In doing so, the Court recognized a duty of honest contractual performance. While the Bhasin decision did not concern intellectual property, the Court’s ruling has implications for all contracts, including intellectual property (IP) licensing agreements.

Previously, Canadian law was divided as to whether parties to a contract were required to discharge their contractual obligations honestly or whether the duty of good faith only applied to specific types of contracts, e.g. employment agreements. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Bhasin recognizes . . . [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 technology, research and practice.

Technology

Go to Airplane Mode or Power Down to Charge Your Device More Quickly
Dan Pinnington

We’ve all been there: Waiting for an urgent email, text or call while watching the red battery warning light flash as you are running from one place to another. Dimming the screen and closing open apps will keep your device alive a bit longer, but often it won’t be enough. In this situation, you . . . [more]

At the end of each year we at practicePRO take a look at what articles, checklists, tips, and other resources had the most downloads. As always, the list contains many resources that remain popular year after year (e.g. our retainer precedents, ILA checklist and e-Discovery reading list).

There are also some new and interesting entries on the list that stand out:

• Self-represented litigants (A survival guide): This 2006 article by Carol Cochrane was #19 on the list last year, but jumped to #2 this year. Does this indicate that the issue of clients choosing to represent

Ontario litigators breathed a sigh of relief last Thursday when the Court of Appeal overturned a trial judge’s ruling that it was improper for a lawyer to review and discuss draft expert reports with an expert witness, and that such discussions must be documented and disclosed to an opposing party.

During the course of cross examination of an expert at the trial of a medical malpractice claim, it emerged that an expert had reviewed his draft report with defence counsel in a 90 minute phone call, and made changes to the draft. The judge took up the issue and directed . . . [more]

Thankfully I can begin by reporting that the statement above is not true. Sam Glover over at the Lawyerist (a blog he created in 2007 so he could “rant about bad legal software”) had a wonderful conversation with Ed Walters. Walters, in addition to being the CEO of Fastcase, is an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law where he’s recently been teaching a seminar called the Law of Robots. Glover chats with Walters about “Robot Lawyers and the Law of Robots” and “technology’s influence on the future of law.”* . . . [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. Lee Akazaki  2. Michael Spratt 3. BC Injury Law and ICBC Claims Blog  4. Legal Post  5. Administrative Law Matters

Lee Akazaki
The Bridge between ‘Aimless in Articling and ‘Big Law Blues’ – Two Features in Just Magazine’s Winter 2015 Issue

As readers of the OBA’s Just Magazine may . . . [more]

Email newsletters are a marketing tool that can help you to stay in regular contact with current and former clients and strategic alliances, and to create relationships with potential clients. But in order to be effective, your email newsletter needs to provide value to your readers, not just serve as a promotional vehicle for your practice.

In the January 2015 issue of Entrepreneur magazine, content marketing expert Ann Handley, in her article, “Before you hit ‘send’: 13 steps to emails that don’t suck,” says, “[E]mail is the Rube Goldberg machine of online marketing: There are multiple moving parts in what . . . [more]

We are all looking for meaning in life.

For some of us that means we want to make an impact on the world. For others, it means the mass accumulation of wealth. And for some, like the Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada, it means rendering every textbook published on labour law prior to 2015 entirely obsolete.

Hot on the heels of their recent decision Mounted Police Association of Ontario v. Canada (Attorney General), the Court released a decision on Friday in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan. The majority overturned the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal decision . . . [more]

Information overload! There are just too many posts, tweets and articles flying around in the Twitterverse and elsewhere on social media and the Web. None of us can even pretend keep up. And while there is a lot of spam, self-promotional crap and other junk out there, there are some real gems that get lost in the sheer volume of content thrown at us on a daily basis. The trick is finding the content that is really interesting or helpful to you in a practical way. Patience is required, hashtags and a bit of luck can help, and identifying good . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Indians, Inuit and Métis – Injunctions – Courts – Practice

Nalcor Energy v. NunatuKavut Community Council Inc. et al. 2014 NLCA 46
Indians, Inuit and Métis – Injunctions
Summary: Nalcor Energy was a proponent of the Muskrat Falls Hydro-electric Development on the Lower Churchill River in Labrador (the Generation Project). The Generation Project was . . . [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): Le ministère public ne peut obtenir la tenue d’un nouveau procès en se fondant sur l’article 676 (1) a) C.Cr. puisqu’elle ne serait qu’une occasion de refaire le débat factuel sur la crédibilité de l’intimé, qui serait placé en situation de double péril.

Intitulé : LSJPA — 151, . . . [more]