Short of a historic influx of legal aid funding to pave the way forward, any trans-Canada highway to equal justice must be cobbled together piece by piece, steppingstone by steppingstone. Progress is likely to be slow and painstaking, but should eventually come from a mix of incremental enhancements and bold reforms. In the spirit of resolute movement forward, I offer two ideas imported from the old world—one relatively challenging and the other relatively mundane—for balancing the scales of justice for Canadian civil and family litigants:

1. embrace the civil law principle of equality of arms; and
2. introduce legislation permitting pro bono

. . . [more]

So much of our lives today are available online: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, text messages.

At the same time, I wonder whether our requests for documents in civil litigation have kept with the times. E-mail requests now are routine. But requests for social media information seem (to me at least) to be comparatively rare.

The issue recently arose in an Ontario Superior Court decision called Garacci v. Ross, 2013 ONSC 5627. The defendant sought to require the plaintiff to produce 1,100 photographs from her Facebook account. The defendant argued the pictures were relevant to the plaintiff’s claim that . . . [more]

One of the most significant threats to client confidential and private information in law firms is bad passwords. Unless lawyers and paralegals are substantially different from the general public, we’re using the same bad practices when we create and re-use passwords as everyone else.

You’ve already heard all the suggestions on using better passwords, so I will leave that dead horse alone. In fact, I’ll suggest that you forget it. If you think you can create sufficient secure passwords for all of your offline and online accounts and devices, you’re a better person than me. The rest of us should . . . [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

Don’t Waste Your Money on Expensive HDMI Cables – the Cheaper Ones Are Just Fine
Dan Pinnington

After spending money to buy a new TV, you want to do everything you can to get the best possible picture. One of the tempting additional purchases – often pushed . . .

Research

Look a Little Harder
Shaunna Mireau

Today’s Tip is inspired by my colleague Jane Symons. As we occasionally . . . [more]

From Microsoft, it was about great developers (see here for a really geeky reference). For employment lawyers, it’s about great investigations. Employment lawyers often harp on the need to do proper investigations into workplace incidents even when “everyone knows” what happened. Even where the person likely did do something improper that would justify termination, the failure to investigate properly and give the employee the chance to tell their side of the story can be fatal to a wrongful dismissal suit.

The recent Ontario case of Ludchen v. Stelcrete Industries Ltd., 2013 ONSC 7495, is a great example of . . . [more]

The ABA Journal has a story about a law firm falling victim to a cyber attack that locked up the firm’s computer files for ransom. Here’s the text of the article:

The good news: No law firm or client data was taken.

The bad news: Attorney Paul Goodson and his staff can’t access his Charlotte, N.C., law firm’s files after they were locked up by a computer virus, WSOC reports.

Like other businesses in the city, the firm was targeted via email. Once an attachment was opened, the Crypto Locker virus took over. Thousands of documents stored on his computer

. . . [more]

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Linked Data Platform Working Group is working on “a specification [that] describes the use of HTTP for accessing, updating, creating and deleting resources from servers that expose their resources as Linked Data. It provides clarifications and extensions of the rules of Linked Data.” Last week they released Linked Data Platform Use Cases and Requirements. This new Working Group Note builds on the working draft they released in October 2013 and aims to “motivate a simple read-write Linked Data architecture” through a collection of stories and use cases.

We all love stories right? Unfortunately . . . [more]

Welcome Legal Sourcery from the Law Society of Saskatchewan Library to the law blog scene. They are posting several times a week on ” legal research tricks, interesting legal research news and what’s happening at the Library.”

Today they explain the blog name:

Putting our heads together and thinking creatively, we took a vote and decided to call this blog Legal Sourcery. Legal Sourcery is the expertise and capability we bring to legal research. It represents the multitude of legal resources we provide and the skills we use to wade through these resources.

So far they have pointed out interesting . . . [more]

The recent decision of the Supreme Court on summary hearings in the courts has sparked discussion within civil litigation circles, including on slaw.ca. But what, if anything, does the decision tell us about the court’s possible approach to summary processes in the administrative justice system?

The court appears to be open to new models of adjudication:

[t]he balance between procedure and access struck by our justice system must come to reflect modern reality and recognize that new models of adjudication can be fair and just.

The court also noted the importance of public adjudication of disputes for the development . . . [more]

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Michael Geist   2. ABlawg.ca   3. University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog   4. Environmental Law and Litigation    5. Youth & Work

Google now lets you search a news archive that consists exclusively, it seems, of newspaper archives, digital or scanned, provided they aren’t held behind a paywall. This may have been available before now, but I’ve only become aware of it today. And I have to say that for anyone seeking to inquire into the last hundred years or so, this is a treasure trove. Google doesn’t say how many newspapers are in the database, but I count something like 120 beginning with “A” alone (among which is a plentiful supply of Canadian publications). For each publication, you’re told how many . . . [more]

This week's summaries concern: Expert evidence / Retroactive maintenance / Stay of proceedings: