Nearly 30 legal professionals – and who knows how many lurkers – participated in Tuesday night’s Twitterchat about legal technology and access to justice.

What if it were this easy, wondered Casey Hall from Thomson Reuters Legal, to pool time to answer those in need?

That strikes straight to the heart of the access to justice conundrum: everyone has lots of ideas about what the basic problems are and what could be done to fix them, but there appears to be more eagerness to discuss the issue than to deal with it.

That there are areas of overlap in the . . . [more]

Quebec’s Charbonneau commission into corruption in the construction industry has revealed numerous failings in the province’s regulatory regime, which the government is attempting to address with new laws. For instance, professional regulatory bodies have found they have little or no power to discipline members (e.g., engineers, lawyers) who have been charged with or have confessed to corruption in relation to construction projects in Quebec. These regulatory bodies have to wait until a disciplinary board (syndic) investigates and the disciplinary committee decides the individuals should be punished

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

“Rethinking Contributory Negligence,” in Tort Law: Challenging Orthodoxy, Stephen GA Pitel, Jason W Neyers and Erika Chamberlain Eds.
James Goudkamp
Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2013

Note: The book is based on papers that were presented at the Sixth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations at Western University in London, Ontario in July 2012. . . . [more]

Yes, it’s that time again. For 2014 I’ve decided to give you a head start by providing you a shopping list of tactics you can use to give your marketing efforts a boost in the year ahead. To make it easier still, I have broken them down by difficulty level. Can barely lift your head off your desk after the soul-destroying race to the finish line to meet your year-end billing target? Dip a toe into the shallow end by Googling your own name. As long as you’ve still got a pulse, you can manage that one. Or — if . . . [more]

Administrative tribunals, in making decisions, are sometimes required by legislation to provide reasons for their decisions. Even where there is no legislative requirement to give reasons, principles of procedural fairness may require that a written explanation be provided for the decision reached (see Baker v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 1999 CanLII 699 (SCC).)

While one might presume the question of when reasons are required would have been well-settled since addressed by the Supreme Court in Baker, Manitoba’s Court of Appeal has twice this year addressed that question, in both cases, in appeals from decisions of The . . . [more]

It will be no surprise to anyone that one of the reactions to the NSA/Snowden revelations would be attempts to evade spying. Many organizations have looked at their systems to determine where the vulnerable weak points are. For example, even if certain internet communications are encrypted, there may be points along the chain where it becomes unencrypted and vulnerable.

This article talks about efforts by Microsoft and others to encrypt more than they have before. Those interested in this topic can learn more by following Bruce Schneier and the EFF.

The EFF, for example, recently published a chart that . . . [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. Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board 2013 HRTO 440
   

   [1] This is an Application made under s. 53(5) of the Ontario Human Rights Code, R.S.O. 1990, c. H.19, as amended (the “Code”), dated May 18, 2009. The underlying complaint was filed with the Ontario Human Rights Commission (the “Commission”) on November 24, 2004.
   [2] In a prior decision, 2012 HRTO 350 (CanLII), 2012 HRTO 350

. . . [more]

Following release of the October 17, 2013 Hearing Panel decision in the prosecution of Torys LLP lawyers Elizabeth DeMerchant and Darren Sukonick, I raised the question here of why the Law Society continued with the prosecution for as long as it did. Those views were based on information contained in the reasons of the Hearing Panel. Now that the parties have exchanged cost submissions, a fuller review of the evidence is available.

In their lengthy submission, Philip Campbell and Ian Smith, counsel for Ms. DeMerchant and Mr. Sukonick, take the position that the Law Society should pay much of the . . . [more]

Recently I was preparing a talk on using social media for client development and I noticed something interesting in the LinkedIn company page. In order for me to see contact information for a law firm who had status updates I had to “chase” the “About” information down the page, as it appeared below the updates. The more updates there were, the more I had to wait for them to load and then scroll farther down the page to the “About XYZ Law Firm” text. Then, despite some other descriptive information about the firm itself, the only contact information in the . . . [more]

For those of you who have colleagues who do any estate or trust litigation in Toronto, the estate court has essentially been merged with the commercial list effective November 18. Unfortunately, no formal communication about this has been made and it does not appear that any such communication will be forthcoming.

The court must assume that everyone who should know, will know.

There are different forms, procedures and timelines to follow now. Also, all estate matters will now be heard at 330 University (and not 393 University). Adjust your schedules.

The executive committee of the OBA’s Trusts and Estates . . . [more]

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing about some initiatives of the Alberta Ministry of Justice and Solicitor General. One of the topics that Minister Denis addressed was the shortage of Justices in Alberta.

Our province has had incredible population growth, 36% since 1996, and we have a delays in our courts. Check out this Lawyers Weekly article from August 16, 2013 by Cristin Schmitz for coverage of the issue.

Minister Denis encouraged Albertans to write their Members of Parliament to ask for appointments of Court of Queen’s Bench Justices.

Alberta Justice & Solicitor General has a blog . . . [more]

I know it hasn’t been discussed much generally, but I think it’s an appropriate time for me to talk about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford on Slaw. I’m not breaking any news by saying that it has been reported that Rob Ford may have have a substance abuse problem. While John Stewart, Jay Leno, David Letterman and everyone else have made light of his somewhat public gaffes, any form of substance abuse issue (real or perceived) is sad.

I’m an employment and labour lawyer, so I am often required to look at substance abuse issues through the lense of human . . . [more]