As lawyers we write a copious amount of memos and opinions. If you’re like me, you often go back to prior memos and opinions when you’re writing new ones. Perhaps it’s to borrow wording or refresh yourself on that particular area of the law, but no matter what you find yourself looking for and relying upon them.

There tends to be two general organizational systems that I’ve come across with respect to referencing these at a later date. One is the “random memory” approach – which functions like it sounds. It involves relying on your memory to think of what . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Une clause d’une autorisation d’écoute électronique de nombreuses personnes, y compris de l’intimé Frank Zampino, ne protégeait pas adéquatement le secret professionnel de l’avocat; toutefois, cette violation des droits des intimés n’était pas d’une gravité telle qu’elle justifiait un arrêt des procédures, de sorte que la tenue . . . [more]

Written by Daniel Standing LL.B., Content Editor, First Reference Inc.

The recent Supreme Court of British Columbia case 2023 BCSC 1513 (CanLII) concerns the appropriate decision-making process of the Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal when it must make a compensation decision in the face of multiple medical reports. . . . [more]

Businesses are deeply implicated in abuses of human rights defenders worldwide. In 2021 more than “a quarter of lethal attacks were linked to resource exploitation,” according to Global Witness. Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately attacked. Over 40 percent of fatal attacks targeted Indigenous people who make up only 5 percent of the world’s population. One in ten defenders killed were women, two-thirds of whom were Indigenous.

Canada’s record of business abuses of human rights increasingly attracts international criticism. Canada is home to about half the world’s extractive companies operating in nearly 100 countries. When Indigenous land rights defenders protest business . . . [more]

At the beginning of each month, we tell you which three English-language cases and French-language cases have been the most viewed* on CanLII in the previous month and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about. 

For this past month, the three most-consulted English-language decisions were:

1. Reference re Impact Assessment Act, 2023 SCC 23

[1] Environmental protection is a fundamental value in Canadian society and one that is shared by Canadians from coast to coast. The Canadian judiciary, in tandem with the other branches of government, has an important role to play in protecting the . . . [more]

With OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT-3 on November 30th 2022, it very quickly became clear to people that the innocent-sounding Large Language Models (LLMs) had crossed a historic threshold when it came to the intelligence exhibited by Artificial Intelligence. Many were seeing, for the first time, a computer responding to their questions and prompts with well informed and well-formed prose that, apart from the occasional “hallucination,” spoke directly to what was asked or prompted.

The immediate legal question was whether the resulting text, while certainly exhibiting intellectual properties, constituted the sort of intellectual property that the law was intended to encourage . . . [more]

Lawyers read more than ordinary people, and writing is the inverse of reading, so all of that reading ought to make great writers of us. Nevertheless, for many lawyers of my acquaintance, any sort of writing outside of the ordinary business of law can be a source of misery and self-torture. I have a suggestion for you—a book that inspired me to reject my self-created barriers to becoming a more serious and dedicated writer. The book is the second edition of How to Write a Lot, by Paul Silvia. PhD.

Dr. Silvia is a professor of social psychology at the . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : La juge de première instance était fondée à rejeter la requête de l’appelant de «réopter» pour un procès devant juge et jury; l’enquête préliminaire avait pris fin conformément à l’article 549 C.Cr., et la requête avait été déposée après le délai de 15 jours accordé pour choisir . . . [more]

Need to Vulnerability: A Global View

In a summary of recent global developments in access to justice delivered by Professor Avrom Sherr, Director of the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies in London at the International Legal Aid Group Meeting in Boston in June 2023, Professor Sherr observed that there is a movement in service delivery evident in many places recasting the idea of need to include vulnerability. The innovative work being done by the Mobile Rural Law Van in Wellington County and North Halton illustrates this development.

The greater attention to vulnerability is a is part of a wider re-focusing . . . [more]

Written by Christina Catenacci, BA, LLB, LLM, PhD, Content Editor, First Reference Inc.

In September 2023, the Alberta Court of Justice decided that the employer’s termination clause in the employment contract was unclear and ambiguous. As a result, the court found that after the employee was terminated without notice, the unclear clause did not extinguish the employee’s common law entitlement and “oust” the implied term in his employment contract. The employee was indeed entitled to common law reasonable notice, and he did not fail to mitigate his damages. . . . [more]