The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has ruled that employees of Ontario’s Office of the Worker Adviser and Office of the Employer Adviser who provide legal services relating to the Occupational Health and Safety Act must be licensed paralegals. The Offices of the Worker and Employer Advisers provide certain legal services under the OHSA to employees and employers in non-union environments.

In Canada parties should understand that rights in marks can arise through use of the mark in commerce even without registration. This complicates clearance of marks and is a reason for doing clearance searches to identify any prior users before the adoption of a mark.

What happens when a user of a mark for one category of goods begins to use that mark in another category of goods – in which a second party has a registered mark. Can those uses survive, continue and co-exist when such conduct occurs over a long period of time?

Canada’s Federal Court addressed this . . . [more]

This year’s CALL/ACBD conference ended about two weeks ago, and we’ve seen a few posts on impressions of the conference and selected sessions.

A frequent highlight is the pre-conference workshop and the opportunity it offers to dive deeply into a topic in which colleagues specialize. This year, as noted previously on Slaw, F. Tim Knight of Osgoode’s library and Sarah Sutherland of CanLII offered a timely presentation on the semantic web and legal information.

I wasn’t able to attend it because of another commitment. However, thanks to the institutional repository at York, Creative Commons licensing, and—most notably—the generosity and . . . [more]

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. R. v. Bal & Sidhu, 2014 ONSC 3063

[36] Guided by the principles of sentencing set out in ss. 718, 718.1 and 718.2 of the Code and specifically recognizing the fundamental principle of proportionality set out in s. 718.1, the sentence to be imposed must be in keeping with the gravity of the offence and the degree of the offender’s responsibility. . . . [more]

The practices of some “form-filler” companies who assisted residential school survivors with filing their claims under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) were described as “unconscionable” in a decision from the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench issued last week.

The form-filler companies were charging a contingency fee of some 15-25% of settlement amounts paid to claimants under the Agreement. The terms of the IRSSA permit lawyers to charge a maximum legal fee of 30% of a settlement, of which the federal government will pay up to 15%. Where form-fillers were used, many claimants paid fees over and above the . . . [more]

Canada’s law societies have long had a reputation for being slow, if not resistant, to change. I’ll leave it to others to argue the extent to which this has been, in the past, a fair characterization. Looking at current initiatives like the Nova Scotia’s Barristers’ Society’s Transforming Regulation consultation and the work of the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Working Group on Alternative Business structures, it is apparent that right now there is significant “big picture” thinking going on at Canadian law societies about how to innovate and modernize lawyer regulation.

It remains to be seen, of course, if . . . [more]

Lawyers may have recently found themselves giving advice to clients about the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. It’s not mandatory, but this new standard is beginning to receive attention as a convenient source of best practices for employers who want to create a psychologically healthy (and lawsuit-resistant) workplace.

It is one of the first of its kind in the world, and has been adopted by several high-profile organizations, including Bell Canada, Rogers, Great West Life Insurance, Manulife Financial, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and some of Toronto’s major hospitals.

But are law firms . . . [more]

Each June, business publications offer up an array of professional etiquette do’s and don’ts. The timing seems right, given the golf tournaments, office barbeques and memos reminding us of “appropriate summer office attire”.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between good manners, etiquette and civility, after fielding a few client queries about social norms. According to Judith Martin (otherwise known as Miss Manners) and her son Nicholas Ivor Martin, manners are “the principles of courteous behaviour” and etiquette “the rules that apply to a particular situation.” Civility, according to Johns Hopkins University Professor and Author P.M. Forni, is “a . . . [more]

I attended a Stakeholder Consultation today for the Alberta Queen’s Printer. Our QP is asking questions of their wide variety of clients to learn where their investments in time and dollars are best spent. My post is not about the outcomes or input shared at that meeting but rather some observations about the excellent meeting facilitation that I observed.

According to Merriam-Webster, a facilitator is one that helps to bring about an outcome (as learning, productivity, or communication) by providing indirect or unobtrusive assistance, guidance, or supervision.

The session I attended was lead by Kim Ghostkeeper. Kim is . . . [more]

How do we understand bad things done to women by men? Through the few men who do them (#Notallmen)? Through misogyny in our culture as a whole? Through the experience of all women living with the risk that such bad things can happen (#Yesallwomen)? The ferocity of recent internet debate on this topic clouds the possibility that harm done by men to women should be understood as about all these things: the men who inflict it, the society in which it occurs and the lives of the women who live with the possibility of that threat.

In this column I . . . [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

Using Two Monitors Will Help Get More Work Done and Save Money
Dan Pinnington

On many occasions over the years I have written and spoken about the benefits of using two monitors in a law office setting – for both lawyers and staff.Once you try two monitors, you will never go back. Having two monitors makes the preparation of documents, particularly complicated legal documents, much easier. . . . . . . [more]

In one of our earliest blogs, we suggested that, if we want Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) to flourish, it should somehow be incorporated into the judicial process. This is not to say that private ODR mechanisms are doomed to fail, but rather that, as many unsuccessful ODR experiments have demonstrated, the incentives to take part in private ODR mechanisms are often lacking, especially with regard to consumer contracts. Other than places like eBay, where refusal to take part in the platform’s dispute resolution process results in exclusion from the community, there is no real reason for merchants to take . . . [more]