Last month CodeX hosted a “video demo event” called EVOLVE LAW. CEOs from eBrevia, Casetext, Traklight, LawGives, Ravel Law, Wizdocs, Hire an Esquire and ClearAccess IP were invited to talk about the “nuts and bolts of starting a legal tech business, funding experience, marketing and sales strategies and brief video demos of their products.” The session is almost two hours long so I thought I’d break it down and give you a chance to jump into the video where it might interest you most. However, if you have the time . . . [more]

Like many areas of practice, family law is going through a period of change. Both clients and their lawyers are questioning traditional modes of practice. Economic woes both cause legal problems, and leave clients with limited resources with which to resolve them. Stress – for both families in crisis and for their lawyers – is a constant reality. Still, within this challenging climate, family lawyers are expected to work diligently and professionally in the service of their clients’ interests.

To understand how the bar is coping with the demands of modern family law practice, LAWPRO invited a sampling of lawyers . . . [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. Legal Feeds  2. The Ontario Condo Law Blog  3. Excess Copyright  4. Western Canadian Business Litigation Blog  5. Combat Sports Law

Legal Feeds
Native cultural preservation used to justify mixed-marriage ban, evictions

The collective right to cultural preservation cannot be presented as justification for depriving individuals of their basic . . . [more]

A friend of mine is concerned that the existence today of excessive executive compensation is leading to the accumulation of disproportionate wealth and economic and political power in the hands of a few.

No one doubts that individuals try to better their condition.

Business leaders such as Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway are critical of excessive executive compensation.

Munger states that Berkshire Hathaway, a large holding company, owns many companies with boards of directors. Munger says that Berkshire Hathaway does not pay directors fees to non-executive board members of its subsidiaries. Munger said that if you start . . . [more]

Ontario’s Municipal Conflict of Interest Act (MCIA) has played a central role in some of the legal disputes around some of our mayors.

The 2013 appeal of the conflict of interest case for Rob Ford illustrated some of the shortcomings of the MCIA. Prior to that, Justice Cunningham made recommendations over the MCIA in context of a judicial inquiry into Mississauga’s Hazel McCallion.

The Toronto Star reported this week that some much needed changes may be coming to the Act,

The ministry is reviewing the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, and is considering Justice Cunningham’s recommendations as well as stakeholder

This is a follow-up to a September 18, 2014 post on Slaw.ca entitled American Association of Law Libraries Report on Access to Justice that referred to a white paper about what U.S. law libraries are doing to assist self-represented litigants (SRLs).

The blog of the National Self-Represented Litigants Project funded by the University of Windsor Faculty of Law has a recent guest post on the role that Canadian law libraries can play to help SRLs.

It is written by Annette Demers, Acting Law Librarian, University of Windsor, Melanie Hodges Neufeld, Director of Legal Resources, Law Society of Saskatchewan, and . . . [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:
Evidence – Criminal Law – Practice

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 ) : Du délai de 45 mois retenu pour évaluer la demande d’arrêt des procédures présentée par le requérant, 34 mois sont jugés imputables aux actes de la poursuite; compte tenu du préjudice subi, ce dernier, qui était directeur des services de police à l’époque des faits, ne . . . [more]

Over 100 Titles To Be Published by 2015

A milestone is fast approaching for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.When the Society was founded in 1979, no one could have imagined that so extensive a collection of original research and writing on Canadian legal history would be the result. Bravo to Roy McMurtry and his merry band of authors and editors who have created a body of work that is the envy of the legal publishing world in just over fifty years, and to the university presses and commercial publishers that have supported this venture, including most notably . . . [more]

I’ve long thought that law and poetry share a number of interesting features, or, to put it another way, live on the same language axis. Look at what’s valued in both:

• concision: indeed a parsimony, a precisely “shaped charge,” if you will, brought about in law’s case by the notion of relevance and the wish to do as little harm as possible, and in the case of poetry brought about by the poet’s wish to capture and express something real and true and specific.
• precision: by this I mean taking very great care, word by word, to choose

I recently visited Nth Wales the land my grandfather left 105+ years ago. Many of the original 3,000 workers in the Penrhyn Slate Quarry where he worked also left due to industrial disputes that dragged on and off for years. Such disregard for customers by the quarry owners meant customers found other suppliers in France and elsewhere, or simply alternative products, such as cheap mass-produced tiles.

My grandfather was not alone in abandoning the slate mining industry. Better conditions elsewhere, World War I, and lost skills resulted in a shortage of the skilled labour needed to extract the slate in . . . [more]

In August 2014, the CBA published its final report entitled “Futures: Transforming the Delivery of Legal Services in Canada”.

In January 2013, the Futures Committee published a very comprehensive report entitled “The Future of the Legal Profession: Report on the State of Research”. This report summarized research conducted around the world by or about Bar Associations, Other Legal Associations, law schools, firms and legal futurists, articles, books, conferences and blogs. The methodology makes it clear that the focus was “the future of the legal profession and law firms”, access to justice and the role of bar associations. The . . . [more]