Lawyers in all areas of practice continue to be the frequent targets of bad cheque scams. These scams involve debt collections, business loans, IP licensing disputes or spousal support payments. While it appears Ontario lawyers are increasingly aware of these frauds, occasionally some are being duped into disbursing funds on a bad cheque they have deposited in their trust accounts.

Don’t be complacent and think you will never be fooled. These frauds are getting ever more sophisticated. The matters will look legitimate, the fraudsters will be very convincing and the client ID and other documents you receive will look real. . . . [more]

Monuments are our memories rendered in stone. Those memories are a contested amalgam of memory, history, identity, politics and the power to publicly replicate that vision. This is made powerfully evident by the discussions related to the establishment of a Monument to the Victims of Communism to be established in the Judicial Precinct of our National Capital. Its location, in front of the Supreme Court of Canada building, will convey the message that the most important element of our national and legal history is one that is not about Canadian state action, did not take place on Canadian soil and . . . [more]

I somehow managed to miss the release of “The Top Technologies Every Librarian Needs to Know” when it came out last May. This Library Information Technology Association (LITA) guide was edited by Kenneth J. Varnum, Web Systems Manager at the University of Michigan Library. Varnum also contributed one of the papers and was responsible for gathering together the guide’s contributors.

He provides some context for the collection in his introductory remarks:

“In a landscape where tools and trends change in a heartbeat, how can a library technologist know what has staying power and might well

Last June I posted on how Canadian courts and creative counsel are using the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Hryniak v. Mauldin to improve access to justice by crafting procedures to bring cases to trial in a more efficient and cost effective way.

Last month in Letang v. Hertz Canada Myers J., invoking Hryniak, delivered a caustic attack on delay and the Toronto “motions culture” (see my post here – “Old Brain Thinking”).

The decision of Myers J. in Pinto v. Kaur last week, applies the Hryniak  “culture shift” in the context of costs.

Pinto was a  . . . [more]

The beginning of May marks the arrival of summer students in law firms. My firm, like many others, includes library training as part of the first week’s summer student orientation. Summering is often the first real exposure that law students have to legal research in a real world context, so it is important to ensure that the students have access to the information and the library tools they need to make the summer a success.

What do they already know?

Library training is a delicate balance between providing too much information and not enough. When designing training, we need to . . . [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. Social Media for Law Firms 2. Canadian Privacy Law Blog  3. Ontario Condo Law Blog 4. Michael Spratt 5. Canadian Securities Law

Social Media for Law Firms
Why Google Wants to Rank Facts Instead of Links

According to recent news across the web, Google wants to rank websites based . . . [more]

Today is International Women’s Day. Although there is much to celebrate, there is much more to be done as well.

Natasha Bannan notes that women in the U.S. are still employed in precarious work. Minorities, especially Latinas, are overrepresented in the lowest paid segments of the economy.

The situation isn’t much better in Canada. In some ways, it might be worse.

A new report by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) slams Canada for its inaction over Aboriginal women. The study was prompted by inquiries by the Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA) and Native Women’s . . . [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.

CONSTITUTIONNEL (DROIT) : Les arguments constitutionnels invoqués par des commerçants anglophones de la région de Montréal ayant enfreint les dispositions de la Charte de la langue française en ce qui concerne l’affichage, l’emballage et la commercialisation au sein de leur entreprise sont tous rejetés.

Intitulé : Quebec (Attorney General) c. . . . [more]

One of the key characteristics setting family law apart from other civil matters is the extent to which outcomes are based on a fog of factors not necessarily obvious from the plain text of the legislation. The only result I would ever guarantee to a client involved in a family law dispute was the amount of child support that would payable, and I would only make this guarantee if: the child was under the age of majority; the payor was not self-employed; the payor earned less than $150,000 per year; the payor was not a stepparent; the child’s special expenses . . . [more]

After many hundreds of Friday Fillips, I’m going to try something different in this space. For the next while I’m going to do a “Boz” and publish a crime novel in episodes. Those of you who read the Fillip for leads to “interesting stuff” I’ve found on the internet needn’t fear: I’ll lift a theme out of each episode and interpolate notes on fresh findings that touch on that theme. I’m also going to gather the accumulating episodes on another website, so that people coming late to the Fillip can catch up with the story. My . . . [more]

In a February 6 article in the Toronto Star, Olivia Carville stated that Ontario law schools are failing in providing domestic violence training for their students.

Unfortunately, the outcome of her article was predetermined by the narrow scope of her question. Her focus on whether there is a mandatory subject in which the topic is addressed cannot capture the many things that law schools do, in curricular and in extracurricular ways, to help students learn about and respond to domestic violence and violence against women. What is worse, the ‘single compulsory course’ inquiry is based on a too simplistic . . . [more]

It is rarely that I read the opinions and perceptions of Gary Rodrigues and not almost entirely agree. This was very much the case with his article Legal Publishing and Market Research – Getting It Right, in which he succeeds in identifying “form over substance” motives in some publishers’ research and in so doing highlights something short of honesty behind much of it. It set me thinking about the extent to which, in more general terms, form over substance is a familiar feature of the actions, decisions and priorities of some of the legal and professional publishers. Whether or . . . [more]