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

For this last week:

1. Dr. Robert Grossman v. The Toronto-Dominion Bank, 2014 ONSC 3578

[25] The Bank submitted the one must assess the legal tenability of the plaintiffs’ negligence claims through the lens of the two-stage analysis re-affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada in Cooper v. Hobart[9] for determining the existence of a duty of care in negligence. Restating the test from Anns v. . . . [more]

Businesses that do not encrypt their information risk losing it. Legal professionals risk private and confidential client information when they do not take steps to secure it properly. Your operating system has encryption built in, through Windows Bitlocker or Mac File Vault II. If you are one of those lawyers on an older version of Windows, use Truecrypt or Diskcryptor to encrypt your hard drive.

Full disk encryption is a baseline now for legal professionals. If you must use portable drives, use your encryption software on them as well. In reality, all computers and drives are portable, which means . . . [more]

I am usually the first person to start fidgeting in any meeting. I blame it on my short attention span and my impatience. But sometimes I blame it on the meeting leader’s poor facilitation skills.

Apparently, I’m not alone in my frustration. According to a May 2014 Harvard Business Review article:

• 15% of collective organizational time is spent in meetings. This percentage has only increased since 2008.
• Executives consider 56% of these meetings to be unproductive
• 49% of attendees admit to doing other, unrelated work during meetings

Meeting facilitation skills will become increasingly important as firms try to become . . . [more]

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on technology, research and practice.

Technology

Canadian Weather Radar Will Answer the Question: Will It Rain Today?
Dan Pinnington

Predicting the weather is both an art and a science, and getting it right in the longer term can involve some luck. But in the shorter-term, knowing for sure whether some rain is coming your way can be very helpful. Should I head to the golf course? Is my kid’s baseball game going to get cancelled? . . . [more]

In April, I summarized an annual spring cleaning process that I recommend to clients in a post entitled “6 Steps for Small Firm Spring Cleaning”. The final step that was recommended for small firms was the development of a strategic plan. In the April post I stated that “Strategic plans do not have to take an inordinate amount of time to develop and they do not have to become unwieldy documents that nobody uses.” I then promised that my next post would include some basic tips for developing a strategic plan and below is my attempt to do so.

The . . . [more]

Many wills include one or more bequests to charitable or religious institutions. In spite of the testator’s good intentions, these bequests often lead to claims when there is confusion over which institution was to receive the bequest. These mistakes often come to light only when the estate is being distributed – and they can lead to costly and time-consuming litigation when charities fight over the bequest.

Many of the claims reported in this area could be avoided if lawyers took steps to confirm that the information given by the testator is correct when the will is being drafted. Often testators . . . [more]

I’m pleased to welcome our newest blogger at Slaw, Nate Russell. Nate will be joining our Monday team of writers.

For those of us stationed on the west coast, you may already recognize Nate as the liaison lawyer at Courthouse Libraries BC. Working with local practitioners, Nate has been involved in a number of CLBC initiatives over the years, including Clicklaw Wikibooks, CPD program development, and initiating new programs to help lawyers access research materials.

In addition to writing for the CLBC blog, The Stream, Nate is also a regular contributor to the widely respected Vancouver Bar . . . [more]

Anyone following the possibilities of visualizing law will be interested in Robert Ambrogi‘s recent cover story in the ABA Journal, “Visual law services are worth a thousand words—and big money.” Ambrogi is a lawyer and consultant who has been writing about legal technology and social media for a couple of decades.

He provides a nice overview of the current players working in the visualization of legal research. He begin’s with Ravel, the “legal research alternative” developed by David Lewis and Nicholas Reed at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. When . . . [more]

What if every law firm and court had a basement lab where developers and designers hung out and built solutions?

That was a question posed by host Margaret Hagan during Tuesday’s CBA Twitterchat on the topic of law and design.

Hagan, who works at Stanford’s d.school and will soon work at the university’s law school, focuses on bringing user-centred design to legal services.

One of the key findings of the CBA’s Legal Futures Initiative is that the client needs to become the centre of the legal universe if the profession is to maintain its relevance in the face of transformative . . . [more]

In episode 6 of season 5 of TV’s Mad Men, there’s a scene where the ad agency is trying to sell Heinz a vision for one of its more lacklustre products, oven-baked beans. Peggy, who’s running the pitch, moves through her mock-up cards and at a measured pace a story unfolds. No matter how unglamorous the legume, it’s the advertiser’s job to win her audience over through storytelling. In this case, she describes how the youth lean in towards one another around the campfire. With their backs to the lonely night, Heinz beans brings familiarity. The product is nothing less . . . [more]

In Canada, the legal community started reaping the benefits of open data not only before it became trendy, but even before governments started becoming familiar with the concept. Indeed, in mid-nineties, when our governments were still jealously protecting their information assets, the free access to law activities begun in Canada. Every crack in the otherwise watertight system of protection was exploited and opportunities were grabbed as they showed up. The Supreme Court is open to freely distribute its ruling: let’ start with that then. Justice Canada is ready to publish the laws for free: let’s go for it. At a . . . [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. Family LLB 2. Blogue du CRL 3. SOQUIJ | Le Blogue 4. ABlawg.ca 5. DroitDu.Net

Family LLB
Can Tardy Dad Force Mom to Move Back to Ontario?

In situations where parents are separated or divorced and share custody, courts are sometimes called upon to decide whether one of them . . . [more]