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) : Dans le contexte où l’accusé faisait l’objet d’une plainte disciplinaire, parallèlement à une accusation criminelle, la syndic de l’Ordre des chiropraticiens du Québec a divulgué notamment à l’enquêteuse, malgré des ordonnances de confidentialité, une décision de son conseil de discipline; puisque la décision de la juge de . . . [more]

On May 7 I received some very good news about the Library of the Supreme Court. “David S. Mao has been named the new Librarian of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Mao will be the 12th Librarian of the Court. He succeeds Linda Maslow, who retired in August 2022 after serving 10 years as Librarian and 33 years at the Supreme Court. William Sleeman, the Court’s Assistant Librarian for Technical Services and Special Collections, has served as Acting Librarian since July 2023. Mr. Mao is expected to assume his new duties on July 1, 2024. As Librarian, . . . [more]

For those of you who are watching the regulatory environment for AI, here are some of the latest additions to my Guide to AI Regulation.

Federal

Updated – Notice to the Parties and the Profession: The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Court Proceedings, (Federal Court of Canada, updated May 7 2024), online.

Robert Morrissey, Chair. Implications of Artificial Intelligence Technologies for the Canadian Labour Force: Report of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, 44th Parl, 1st Sess (House of Commons of Canada, May 2024).online . . . [more]

Each month, we tell you which three English-language cases and French-language cases have been the most viewed* on CanLII in the previous month and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this past month, the three most-consulted English-language decisions were:

1. Dickson v. Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, 2024 SCC 10 (également disponible en français ici)

Aspen Publishing, until the end of 2021, was part of Wolters Kluwer’s Legal & Regulatory information publishing business unit. Around that time, it was sold, for $88m, to Transom Capital Group, a private equity firm. A mere two years later, it has been moved on again, this time to UWorld, a US-based online learning business, which was established in 2003, by a medical doctor.

UWorld’s existing learning resources and methods are offered in certain undergraduate, graduate and professional environments, such as accounting, finance, medical, pharmacy and nursing, as well as for some aspects of US legal training. In . . . [more]

The recent CBA national conference for immigration lawyers passed as though COVID is a distant memory. Crowded rooms full of professionals who serve the Canadian immigration system and our diverse mosaic of communities, in some way or another. Past practices of social distancing or meeting remotely have gone the way of the Dodo bird. At this recent conference, I was struck by one of the huge benefits of in-person learning: presenters can be candid and forthcoming, without fear their comments are being recorded. Speakers were able to share their thoughts and opinions freely without potential negative repercussions to them personally… . . . [more]

I am very happy to be writing for SLAW again after 10 years of absence. I ended my time with SLAW in 2014 writing about general practice management issues and return in 2024 with a specific focus on risk management for artificial intelligence. My last column was posted in 2014 and bore the title “Risk Management Revisited”. In that post I briefly discussed the value of risk management for law firms and set out some basic steps that firms could take to begin the risk management process. I also observed at that time that “[u]nfortunately, in my experience, . . . [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 tribunal rejette la requête en arrêt des procédures présentée par l’accusé, qui marchait sur un trottoir du centre-ville de Montréal avec un pistolet de marque Glock 19 caché dans un sac à bandoulière de type «man purse» avant d’être interpellé par les policiers; ces derniers avaient . . . [more]

“This is the largest theft in the United States, period.” Such is the judgment of author and scriptwriter Justine Bateman who has complained to the US Copyright Office that the AI industry has scraped her work, much as it has everything else, having exhausted Wikipedia and Reddit it is moving on YouTube transcripts and Google docs. This is what it takes to assemble the trillions of words needed to expand the training of ever-more-powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). As a result, Bateman’s complaint has become a common charge. Authors (notably Sarah Silverman and John Grisham), publishers (Universal Music . . . [more]

Written by Christina Catenacci, BA, LLB, LLM, PhD, Content Editor, First Reference Inc.

In February 2024, the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador certified a privacy class action. The representative plaintiffs, on behalf of 260 individuals (first 240 individuals, and second 20 individuals), alleged that their privacy was violated when an employee of the defendant employer (a health authority) accessed the private information of these individuals that was outside the scope of their employment. The employer became aware of the first and second alleged breaches in 2020 and 2021, respectively. The main claim against the employer was that there . . . [more]