At a recent talk at the University of Ottawa by Cynthia Petersen, the Law Society of Upper Canada Discrimination and Harassment Counsel, raised the idea that women who go on maternity leave are severely disadvantaged upon their return, unlike their male counterparts who take similarly long leaves for other personal or professional reasons. Are mothers or women who choose to go on maternity leave (“lawyer-mothers”) in consequence, viewed as less valuable lawyers? Like Ms. Petersen, I can readily acknowledge the immense progress in the legal profession towards gender equality. However, without sounding too severe on my own sex, I . . . [more]

On the face of it, interviewing should not be all that difficult – particularly for lawyers. As members of a profession who primarily make their living either writing or speaking, the idea that having a conversation about your interests and abilities in your own profession sounds both logical and easy.

But throw the words “job interview” into the mix and a whole new paradigm emerges. With seemingly so much at stake, job interviews take on a new meaning for people who ordinarily would not shy away from talking about the field they have chosen and the background that they bring. . . . [more]

Law schools are starting to look more like a mosaic of people from different backgrounds. Private law firms? Not so much. This is especially true when we look at the senior positions at these firms.[1] Whatever diversity we see in the entry points of these companies decreases dramatically when we look at the older cohorts.[2] The residual effects of a time when the legal profession was only governed by white males explains merely part of these concerning statistics. There exists a double glass ceiling – one for women and one for racialized minorities. The intersectionality of race and . . . [more]

My answer to the perennial question of which comes first, the chicken or the egg, is a resounding: egg. Yes, I enjoy a roast chicken, that celebratory meal, as much as the next carnivore. But I am enamoured of eggs.

So are the rest of us, if Agriculture Canada is to be believed. They tell me that the average Canadian eats a whopping fourteen dozen eggs a year in one form or another. Good for us, bad for us: the terrible science journalism in the newspapers keeps whipping back and forth on the subject; and all the while the . . . [more]

In 1983, the American Bar Association adopted the ABA Model Rules that are the basis for most of the current codes of conduct in the United States. The drafting body was known as the Kutak Commission. The Kutak Commission proposed a rule permitting, but regulating, non-lawyer ownership of law practice entities. Proposed Model Rule 5.4 would have permitted a lawyer to be “employed by an organization in which a financial interest is held or managerial authority is exercised by a non-lawyer . . . but only if the terms of the relationship provide in writing that”:

(a) There is no . . . [more]

As part of the CBA’s Reaching Equal Justice initiative, CBA just released 6 Legal Health Checks for members of the public. Similar to LAWPRO’s Annual Legal Health Check-up, these are intended to ensure people have the information and tools they need to recognize and avoid legal problems in the first place, and/or to prevent small problems from becoming bigger than they might have been.

There are 6 different health checks:

• 5 steps to legal wellness – speaks to the reasons why smaller legal problems can snowball into much larger and more complex problems, particularly for already vulnerable people

“If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend” is an often cited quote from Benjamin Franklin. But what does it mean? It could mean that our friends will eventually become our enemies and, thus, should not be trusted with our secrets. In contrast, it could mean that humankind has an inherent inability to keep secrets, or it could be interpreted simply as a commentary on our hardwired propensity for gossip. In any case, these interpretations have strong implications for the legal profession and, in particular, the duty of confidentiality legal professionals owe to . . . [more]

With his latest project Fargo, Dave Winer puts outliners where they belong: everywhere. Fargo runs in your web browser and stores your data in your Dropbox folder. This combination of browser and cloud puts the outliner everywhere making it a good choice for anyone looking for ubiquitous note taking and writing capabilities.

Why an outliner?

The short answer is that you can reduce most writing to an outline, a series of expandable points or topics. If you think about it for a minute it is easy to see most legal writing as an outline. Many of those course outlines . . . [more]

Alexandra Kozlov graduated from the Queen’s Faculty of Law in 2012 and articled with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeal Tribunal

We all know what law school stress looks like. Come exam time, we see its physical manifestations: the law student, hibernating in the law library, subsisting on a diet of coffee and candy, sits surrounded by mountains of books, empty cans of energy drinks and an arsenal of highlighters. We recognize the bloodshot eyes and the anxiety-ridden knuckle cracking. Stress is synonymous with law school, but it’s important to remember that stress is merely the interaction between a situation . . . [more]

On April 9, 2014, the Quebec Superior Court ruled that businesses in the province of Quebec may continue to display their trademarks on public signs outside their premises in a language other than French if no French version of the trademark has been registered.

Facts of the case

On November 13, 2011, during an enforcement campaign called “Une marque de respect de la loi” (A sign of respect for the law), the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) took the position that the trademark exception found in the Charter of the French Language (loi 101) does not . . . [more]

Many people are only starting to get used to the idea of ODR – Online Dispute Resolution. ODR uses increasingly familiar things, like online communication and information sharing, and uses the internet to combine them with dispute resolution. But what is stopping us from combining ODR with our justice systems?

In his CBA Legal Futures Initiative report, Key Trends in the Marketplace, Professor Richard Susskind invited us to contemplate whether court is a service or a place. If we commit to the view that it should be a service, then ODR would seem poised to become a key delivery . . . [more]

The most admired superheroes are usually courageous and persevere despite the odds. Interestingly, these characteristics are also readily apparent in defence lawyers. For example, when balancing their ethical duty to the client against not misleading the court, defence lawyers need to be courageous and have strength of character.[1] Thus, defence lawyers are arguably our modern day superheroes. However, defence lawyers are not recognized as superheroes because of misunderstandings that surround their ethical duties such as, “how can you defend a guilty client”?![2] Society has failed to realize that defence lawyers are like superheroes as they engage in ethical . . . [more]