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]

Because we must read so much, it’s rare for you or me to come across a word we don’t know. I suppose there are at least three reasons we might: the word is old, obsolete; it’s a jargon word, proper to some trade or art we don’t practice; or it’s slang from a crowd we don’t hang with (such as young people, for example). All three explain “ligger”.

I came across it in a recent novel, used as a slang term originating in the British music scene that, according to the Urban Dictionary, means among other things:

An individual

. . . [more]

Among his many other activities – including practising law – Robert Ambrogi has been writing a blog on legal technology issues, LawSites, since 2002. His posts are always interesting and often very informative. His posting at the end of last year, entitled The 10 Most Important Legal Technology Developments of 2014, particularly caught my attention.

Several developments, such as those relating to legal research, legal hacking, encryption, and searching court dockets, are outside my particular area of interest, knowledge management. Three, however, were of particular interest to me:

• Businesses and technology are changing the nature of law practice

. . . [more]

In June of this year, the Magna Carta will be travelling to Canada.

Considered a foundational document outlining fundamental rights, it was signed in June 1215 by King John of England.

The Magna Carta, along with its companion document from 1217 known as the Charter of the Forest, will be exhibited in Ottawa/Gatineau at the Canadian Museum of History from June 11 to July 26, 2015, before making stops in Winnipeg, Toronto and Edmonton.

The Library of Parliament has prepared a “HillNote” on the Magna Carta‘s legacy:

“The idea that a legal document could

. . . [more]

On December 4, 2014, an Alberta labour arbitrator decided that an employer owed a grievor $5,000 in damages for breach of privacy due to the disclosure of the employee's presumed mental illness during the formal review of a workplace conflict.