Having spent the last 3 weeks in Australia and Hong Kong, I will be using Slaw to discuss some of the ideas and the firms that I met while out in the Wild East. *** Listen for the audible sigh of relief from everyone at the Law Society of Upper Canada as they learn that I won’t be throwing any more daggers at them – this year ***.

Australia is a beautiful country with a legal market not that dissimilar to Canada. Although with a population of about 20 million people and about 37 law schools, Australia is ripe for . . . [more]

The Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. has published a new comparative report on the handling and adjudication of sexual offenses in the military.

The report examines how the military justice systems of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Israel and the United Kingdom deal with alleged sexual offending by service members.

The Library occasionally publishes reports that compare the laws on a given theme in a number of countries.

Earlier comparative law reports from the Law Library of Congress have covered topics such as:

• Bioethics
• Campaign Finance
• Children’s Rights
• Constitutional Provisions on Women’s Equality
• Education of Non-Native Language Speaking

. . . [more]

If ideas and discussion about access to justice in Canada interest you, consider setting aside your next fifteen-minute break (or 13:35 of it) to hear a good presentation. Andrew Pilliar,a PhD student at UBC Law, recently delivered a TEDx talk on “why you should care about access to justice.” Andrew addresses the widespread unaffordability of legal services—including for people who would not qualify for legal aid but whose circumstances might turn dire were we to find ourselves in need of legal help.

He directs the talk to the general public, to the profession, and also specifically to law . . . [more]

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]