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This week's summaries concern: Workers' compensation / Copyright fees / Labour law:

Areas of law: Insurance law; Subrogation; Income replacement plan; Statutory exceptions ~The Insurance Act’s provisions excluding subrogation in cases where the insured receives income continuation or replacement payments apply where the party paying the benefits is an insurer under an insurance contract, but do not extend to employers ~

Requête en jugement déclaratoire afin de faire déclarer la Loi sur le recouvrement du coût des soins de santé et des dommages-intérêts liés au tabac inopérante. Rejetée.

The Ontario Court of Justice recently had occasion to consider the different grounds on which documentary evidence might be admitted or not admitted into evidence in a criminal case, in HMQ v Mondor.

Mr. Mondor was charged with accessing child pornography via a web site. The police had reconstituted the web site in order to trace certain purchases to the accused. As a result, the electronic records they used were not business records of the seller of the pornography for the purposes of s. 30 of the Canada Evidence Act. The Crown looked instead to what both it and . . . [more]

I’m guessing that of the readers of Slaw that there is a substantial subset that are fans of the BBC series Sherlock. So, fair warning if you haven’t seen the 3rd episode of Season 3 – “His Last Vow”, stop reading before you make the jump.

Now that I am sad that there will not be any new episodes for about two years, I have been thinking more about past episodes and I have a very simple question based on Episode 3. Let’s just say for the sake of my flight of fancy that Mary shoots Charles Augustus Magnussen and . . . [more]

Everybody wants to be somebody else. At least it sometimes seems that way to me. I must lack the drive to alterity that motivates a lot of folk: so, for instance, on Twitter I am @fodden — than which few handles could be more staid and stolid — while the Twitterverse is decorated with millions of colourful keladinyms, such as @DeweyDecibel, @sarahcuda, @brundle_fly, @TheTweetOfGod, @sassygal22 (arriving a little late, it seems), and @etcetera.

Now, were I to pick a nickname, I wouldn’t go for brevity but rather for sonority — what someone (Twain? Dickens?) describing a law firm name . . . [more]

Remember the childhood game of chasing all of your friends in an attempt to merely lay a finger on them so they could assume the role of the “it” person? It doesn’t feel much different these days when dealing with technology. There are a ton of “bad guys” trying to compromise your technology for a variety of reasons. Once your computer is infected it may be a long time before you are even aware of the compromise.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)

There are so many definitions of APT that it can make your head spin. It can refer to an . . . [more]

The English Law Commission earlier this week released its report on Contempt of Court: Court Reporting.

The report is part of the Commission’s Contempt of Court Project that also looked at juror misconduct on the Internet and contempt in the face of the court.

Under the Contempt of Court Act 1981, publication of material which has the effect of risking serious prejudice to active court proceedings can in some circumstances be punished as a contempt of court. Liability can arise irrespective of whether the publisher was aware that the publication would create such a substantial risk.

The Commission’s . . . [more]

Maybe it’s something that happens to your brain at 5,000 feet above sea level. Maybe it’s the fresh mountain air. Or maybe it’s the frontier, no-one’s-gonna-help-me-so-I-just-gotta-do-it-myself, spirit of the West. Whatever it is, some of the most entrepreneurial Canadian lawyers I’ve met to date, are from Calgary.

Over and over again I’ve heard that if you have a great idea in Calgary, you can find partners to help make it happen.

We live in an age of cloud computing, greying of the bar, and underserved populations living on mobile devices, and many of us have also been commenting on the . . . [more]

Why can’t we all be more like Australia, was Mitch Kowalski’s opening salvo as he hosted a CBA Futures Initiative Twitterchat on Tuesday.

“What’s in their water to allow them to be so innovative?”

Australia, Kowalski noted in a blog post ahead of the Twitterchat, pioneered outside intervention in law firms, which has been allowed since 2001, and is also the home of the first publicly-listed law firm, Slater and Gordon.

“Why do those who raise the unsubstantiated issue that outside investment will erode the core values of Canada lawyers, ignore the fact that nothing of the sort has happened . . . [more]

On January 2, 2014 Justice Perell of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice certified a class proceeding by 527 wrongfully terminated employees led by Bob Brigaitis and Cindy Rupert (represented by Ted Charney of Charney Practice Group) against their now bankrupt employer, IQT Solutions and the officers, directors, shareholders John Fellows, Alex Mortman, David Mortman, Renae Marshall and affiliated companies IQT Canada, Ltd., JDA Partners LLC, and IQT Inc. The employees seek to recover $20 million in unpaid wages and severance plus aggravated and punitive damages of $10 million.