The recent floods in Calgary and Toronto have brought considerable attention to the water damage coverage and exclusions of most home insurance policies. Water damage represents approximately 40% of all eligible home insurance claims, and costs the Canadian insurance industry just under $2 billion annually. While most home insurance covers water damage, there are two significant situations excluded in a standard policy: flood and seepage. 

A flood, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, is defined as water flowing overland and entering your home through windows, doors and cracks. This is surface water on what would otherwise be dry . . . [more]

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on technology, research and practice.

Technology

Cool Pics of Cool Things on WhereCoolThingsHappen.com
Dan Pinnington

There are loads of photo sharing and collection sites on the web. One can spend many hours wondering around looking for great pictures. One site worth a visit is WhereCoolThingsHappen.com. It has collections of photos of “cool” places, stays, art, photos, gadgets, transport, outdoor advertisements, food and architecture. . . .

Research

Read About Clients
Shaunna Mireau

The best legal . . . [more]

The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL – the French privacy authority) has recently found a company in breach of its duty to protect the personal information of its employees because the company used unduly short passwords that were too easy to guess and that were not changed often enough. (See the story on Le Village de la Justice)

According to the CNIL, the employer should have had a password policy that required longer passwords composed of letters, numbers and special characters, and that also required that the passwords be changed frequently.

It was not demonstrated that . . . [more]

One of our columnists, Patrick McKenna, is no longer able to write for Slaw. His twenty columns over the years were a valuable contribution for which we are very grateful. His insights will be missed.

Geneviève Lay has informed us that after two years on board she must withdraw from blogging on Slaw. Fortunately her colleague at Norton Rose Fulbright, Maya Angenot, has agreed to join Slaw as a regular blogger.

Maya is an associate at Norton Rose Fulbright who practices in the areas of civil and commercial litigation, with a particular interest in class action matters, as well . . . [more]

I now continue sharing some of the lessons I learned from walking the historic pilgrimage route in France and Spain, the Camino Frances, over six weeks in May and June. Before we started our journey, the question in our minds was how we were going to sustain walking 20 or 25 (or even 30) kilometres a day, carrying all our belongings? We practiced hiking regularly with our backpacks loaded, but could only really manage time for walking two or maybe three days in a row. How would we walk for 35 days?

After the first two weeks–especially walking through . . . [more]

The Canadian Judicial Council (CJC) has just released its 2012-2013 Annual Report, aussi disponible en français, naturellement.

The Report noted the publication during the year of three informational documents related to the role of technology:

• Guidelines on Benchmarking of Costs
• Court Information Management Policy Framework to Accommodate the Digital Environment
• A Comparative Analysis of Key Characteristics of Court Administration Systems

Judicial conduct, one of the key concerns of the CJC, will be the subject of review:

In the coming months, Council will consider how best to engage stakeholders and other Canadians to explore all and any appropriate avenues

. . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada's award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from forty-one recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Legal Post   2. Le Blogue du CRL   3. Environmental Law and Litigation   4. Michael Geist    5. Legal Feeds Blog

We have long been fans of Tom Mighell’s iPad books, which include iPad in One Hour for Lawyers, iPad Apps in One Hour for Lawyers, and now the third member of the series, iPad in One Hour for Litigators. If lawyers have tended to fall in love with the iPad, litigators are becoming obsessed with it.

The small form factor, the ease of use and the ability to compete with large firms which have huge litigation budgets have all been factors. One thing we’ve seen as we lecture is that litigators buy the iPad and only then ask, . . . [more]

It’s not enough that there are some who claim there are already too many law schools in Canada, too few articling positions, and too much competition in the job market for junior lawyers. Now they want to make another law school which appears reserved for homophobes, or at the very least a law school which explicitly states that homosexuality is wrong.

The proposed law school would be housed at Trinity Western University (TWU) in Langley, B.C., a private Christian institution associated with the Evangelical Free Church of Canada, with approximately 3,500 students. The school has a Community Covenant Agreement which . . . [more]

One Sunday each month OnPoint Legal Research provides Slaw with an extended summary of, and counsel’s commentary on, an important case from the British Columbia, Alberta, or Ontario court of appeal.

ALLEN v. AINSWORTH LUMBER CO. LTD., 2013 BCCA 271

1. CASE SUMMARY

Areas of Law: Employment; Wrongful Dismissal; Constructive Dismissal

~Employers as well as employees could take the benefit of the doctrine of constructive dismissal. Whether the departure of an employee was properly a termination or a repudiation of employment was a finding of fact for the trial judge~

Discussion: This wrongful dismissal case was unusual in that the . . . [more]

Those of us who write for and read Slaw spend a lot of our time deriving meaning from books or other documents, not an easy task some of the time, particularly when the tomes are old and the language archaic. Imagine, then, how frustrating it must be for scholars when they come up against a text that utterly defies comprehension. Such is the Voynich Manuscript.

Created around 1420, likely in northern Italy, the 200 vellum pages are beautifully inscribed with line after line of what would appear to be text written in characters that are unique to the book. It . . . [more]

At the end of June the Attorney General of Ontario announced that Alvin Fiddler, deputy grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation would co-chair a new panel intended to help rectify the severe underrepresentation of First Nations peoples in Ontario’s justice and jury. The panel will oversee the implementation of seventeen recommendations made by former Chief Justice Frank Iacobucci in his report “First Nations Representation on Ontario Juries”. The report, which was released to the public last February, was initially intended to examine the narrow issue of First Nations peoples and jury representation. However, with Iacobucci drawing the . . . [more]