On the second Sunday in each month we bring you a summary from Supreme Advocacy LLP of recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers a weekly electronic newsletter, SupremeAdvocacyLett@r, to which you may subscribe.

Summary of all appeals and leaves to appeal granted (so you know what the S.C.C. will soon be dealing with). For leaves, both the date the S.C.C. granted leave and the date of the C.A. judgment below are added in, in case you want to track and check out the C.A. judgment. (June 13 to July 11, 2013 inclusive).

APPEALS . . . [more]

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The recent decision of Justice Fuerst in R v. Lippa has the controversy over the standing of paralegals raging again in Ontario. The decision relates to whether judicial officers have the discretion over which legal professionals will sit in the courtroom, and the order of cases which will be called.

In deciding that paralegals can be treated differently within the court system, Justice Fuerst made some interesting comments. She states at para. 18,

…s. 29 of the Law Society Act provides that every person who is licensed to practise law in Ontario as a barrister and solicitor is an

. . . [more]

Look at any list of current SEO strategies and it will be immediately clear that the #1 tactic relates to content. In my last column on law firm SEO tactics to avoid in 2013, I concluded that more than anything else, we need to ensure a “regular flow of original content (and deep links flowing into that content)” and to “make good choices: on publishing, building audiences, coding, classification, proper description, and most important, connecting with people.”

I stand by those words. The bottom line is that content drives search traffic; this has never been truer than in 2013. . . . [more]

I’m not an online game player — computer games are one of those things that I know I should like, and maybe even would like, because of their high degree of sophistication and the amount of creative energy that gets invested in them, but that I just never got into. (Opera is another of such wrongly-neglected-by-me things.) But I must say I’m tickled and intrigued by an online teaser for an upcoming game from Ubisoft, not so much because of what the game might be but rather because of the ingenuity of the teaser itself.

The game is Watch Dogs . . . [more]

Massive open online courses or MOOCs seem to be popping up everywhere. I first noticed the term in the advance flyer for Law via the Internet 2013. Then I began seeing it more often so I decided to explore this new phenomenon both for myself and to share through this blog. I wanted to learn if such courses could be useful for law librarians, law professors, law students and practicing lawyers

The three major names in the world of MOOCs are:

• edX, a non-profit consortium of universities offering 60 courses, five of which are law-related.
• Coursera,

. . . [more]

The revelations by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden that the National Security Agency has been conducting widespread snooping against pretty much everyone, everywhere, all the time has provoked more than just political and diplomatic fallout.

As can be expected, there are several new lawsuits.

The American non-profit investigative journalism website Pro Publica has created the NSA Surveillance Lawsuit Tracker that lists the “key legal challenges to [U.S.] government surveillance and secrecy” since 2006. The last lawsuit added to the list was filed on July 8th.

For a Canadian take on government whistleblowers, I recommend the work of the NGO FAIR (Federal . . . [more]

We all know someone, or have been someone, who has worked in the restaurant industry under precarious working conditions. Working for tips and less than minimum wage, working long and strange hours and split shifts, dealing with for harassing customers and/or bosses, physically tasking conditions, and most notably having little job security.

In our practice we’ve talked to servers who have been underpaid, discriminated against, sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by their employers and who have been fired without receiving their last pay cheques let alone pay in lieu of notice. We’ve negotiated settlements for some people, drafted human rights . . . [more]

The Quebec government has followed up on its plans to legalize doctor-assisted suicide. On June 12, 2013, the government tabled in the National Assembly Bill 52, An Act respecting end-of-life care, which besides its main goal of ensuring that end-of-life patients are provided with care “that is respectful of their dignity and their autonomy,” establishes specific requirements for certain types of medical assistance to die.

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 Regulation and Innovation in the U.S. Legal Services Market
Ray Worthy Campbell
9 NYU Journal of Law and Business 1 (2012)

Excerpt: pp. 52-54

[Footnotes are omitted but are available in the full article online via the link above.]

V. THE STATE OF INNOVATION IN LEGAL SERVICES: WHAT IS HAPPENING AND WHAT . . . [more]

“Triage” is a very popular word these days in the context of civil justice reform. It was raised in:

• the CBA’s Envisioning Equal Justice Summit in April as one of the possible solutions to ensuring that citizens have access to justice
• the final report of the National Action Committee on Access to Justice’s Prevention, Triage and Referral Working Group
• the Opening the Dialogue session on the phenomenon of self represented litigants in May

“Triage” is a popular concept but what, exactly, does it mean? I have a feeling that it may mean slightly different things to different people.

Merriam Webster . . . [more]

Law librarians, law practitioners, and others interested in thoughts on the future of law practice will be interested in a provocative new piece by Jordan Furlong: The Future is Now: Eight Emerging Roles for Law Librarians. It appears in the July 2013 issue of Thomson Reuters’s Practice Innovations.

Jordan offers thoughts on new potential opportunities for law librarians and knowledge management professionals—often themselves librarians by training—in new law firm models that he foresees developing in response to multi-factored legal market disruptions. He suggests,

Starting now, law librarians and KM personnel have the opportunity to integrate themselves into the

. . . [more]

Techdirt reports on a recent Florida law intended to ban slot machines and internet cafes – but the law is worded so badly that it is broad enough to ban all computers, tablets and smartphones. It essentially bans any machine or device by which someone can play a game of chance.

The law resulted in about 1000 internet cafes being shut down. One of them has launched a lawsuit and is of course using this bad drafting as part of its case.

As Mike Masnick of Techdirt puts it: “Can we just have lawmakers recognize, once and for all, that . . . [more]