No matter what the area of practice, the number one source of claims at LAWPRO is a breakdown in communication between the lawyer and client.

Between 2008 and 2013, nearly 4,600 communications claims – an average of 762 a year – have been reported to LAWPRO. The total cost of these claims to date is about $158 million – and likely to rise as more recent years’ claims are resolved.

In the Fall 2011 issue of LAWPRO Magazine we asked LAWPRO claims counsel with expertise in the various areas of law to provide insights into the communications mistakes they see . . . [more]

Jian Ghomeshi just hired a brilliant and fearless “shark” of a lawyer, Marie Henein, to defend him against criminal assault charges. There is a school of thought in legal ethics that maintains Henein is professionally obliged to play by the criminal defense playbook, right up to the point of transgression, and directly or indirectly enter the complainants’ sexual histories into evidence. If she can also get their medical records and the clinical notes of their therapists in, she must put all personal moral qualms aside and do everything within the confines of the law to get her client off. It’s . . . [more]

The Semantic Web in Libraries (SWIB) annual conference took place last week in Bonn, Germany. This event set out to:

“… provide substantial information on LOD developments relevant to the library world and to foster the exchange of ideas and experiences among practitioners. SWIB encourages thinking outside the box by involving participants and speakers from other domains, such as scholarly communications, museums and archives, or related industries.”

And it looks like they’ve done a good job fulfilling that aim. Thankfully the sessions were live-streamed so I was able to participate at least in a small way and, even better, . . . [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. Slater Vecchio Connected 2. Canadian Securities Law 3. The Court 4. Lee Akazaki 5. Rule of Law

Slater Vecchio Connected
10 Holiday Hosting Safety Tips

Making sure your guests stay safe this holiday season is just as important as finding the right décor. Under the Occupiers Liability Act, home . . . [more]

This past summer, the Canadian legal profession was presented with yet another edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation/Manuel canadien de la référence juridique, aka the McGill Guide. This new edition, the 8th in 28 years (an average of one edition every 4 years since its first publication in 1986) was expected, though not anticipated with any enthusiasm. Fellow Slaw columnist Susannah Treadwell has recently posted a review of the work. It seems to me that the changes to the previous edition are few, inconsistent, and not obviously necessary (Another colleague has told me that . . . [more]

As I like to tell users who come to my library, law reform commission reports can be a legal researcher’s best friend.

Law commissions consult widely with stakeholders, they may compare how other jurisdictions have dealt with the same problem that has you stumped and they frequently dig into the history of an issue.

Here are a few recently released reports that caught my attention.

• Law Reform Commission of Ireland Issues Paper on Cyber-Crime and Cyber-Bullying: “The Commission seeks the views of interested parties on the following 5 issues: 1. Whether the harassment offence in section 10 of the

When the new tort of the intrusion upon seclusion first emerged in 2012 in Jones v. Tsige, many of us wondered how exactly it would be invoked in litigation. Many of us assumed reasonably that this would be an additional head of damages claimed, given the modest amount recognized by the court as reasonable for privacy breaches.

Since that time we have seen this tort employed in several cases with varying success. One of the more intriguing applications is where these small heads of damages can be advanced in the aggregate, namely in through class proceedings.

The ideal scenario . . . [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:
Civil Rights – Criminal Law – Indians, Inuit and Métis – Contracts – Practice

R. v. Pardy (T.) 2014 NLCA 37
Civil Rights – Criminal Law – Crown – Government Programs – Statutes
Summary: The accused was charged with first degree murder, using a firearm in the commission of an offence, and, being a . . . [more]

For those readers who don’t follow labour disputes in Quebec, there’s been trouble brewing over the Province’s attempts to reign in municipal pension costs via Bill 3. Because Quebec (and all other provincial) labour laws don’t allow “essential services” unions to strike (not surprisingly, because people could die), police, EMT and firefighter unions have been trying creative ways to get their point across. In the Municipality of Chateaugay (just outside of Montreal), the police force has taken to wearing cowboy outfits (photo credit here):

Not surprisingly, the Municipality protested and filed a grievance. Yesterday, the Quebec Labour Relations Board . . . [more]

Nothing works the way it’s supposed to. At least it can seem like that sometimes. And the things in our life have been fractious long before they were also chip-driven. You can bet that the homo erectus who carved this lovely pattern into a shell more than half a million years ago had more than one shark tooth scribe split or crack or just plain resist the plan. And it doesn’t bear thinking how many stone axe heads have flown off at critical junctures over the millennia.

Things, as we all know, have minds of their own, typically modelled on . . . [more]

Canadians do not have access to justice. Access to justice is of foundational importance to Canadian society; access to justice is essential to the social and economic wellbeing of civil society. The civil justice system is too complex, too slow and too expensive. It is too often incapable of producing just outcomes that are proportional to the problems brought to it or reflective of the needs of the people it is meant to serve. The system is in crisis. The reforms to date are inadequate; change of a fundamental nature is required. An overhaul of the current system is required. . . . [more]

Between October 20^th and 24^th, as it does every Autumn, UNCITRAL’s Working group III on Online dispute resolution met to try and finally draft procedural rules for ODR providers. Unlike previous sessions, this year’s was rumoured to be a “make it or break it” meeting. This could be gleaned from the restatement of the directives given to participants in July of 2012 by UNCITRAL:

(a) the Working Group should consider and report back at a future session of the Commission on how the draft rules would respond to the need of developing countries and those facing post-conflict . . . [more]