CanLII is testing a new search interface! Check out beta.CanLII.org. The CanLII Blog reports:

CanLII is proud to present a new search interface designed to unify the functionalities of its search engine under a single form that is at once easier and more powerful to use. This beta site allows our users to get comfortable with this new tool, its functionalities and its organization. As this interface evolves over the coming months, we invite you to send us your comments and suggestions.

Like the single search box on the basic Google page? You will probably like the beta . . . [more]

When we come to a new fork in an old road we continue to follow the route with which we are familiar, even though wholly different, even better avenues might open up before us.

– George Manuel

Yesterday, the Canadian Bar Association invited us to join a conversation about the future of law. The CBA’s Legal Futures Initiative launched last summer and has been in a research and information gathering phase since that time, with the results trickling out now, and to be fully released next month.

In response to their invitation, a few conversations got started on Twitter yesterday . . . [more]

One of the most stimulating and pleasing roles I have, is to be involved with very small numbers of students on Kingston University’s Publishing Masters’ degree, as a supervisor of dissertations and on the advisory board for the course. There are a number of such courses in the UK, including those at City University and University College, both in London, where I have informal links to academics running the courses. I speak to them frequently about their developments.

Over the past several years, such courses have grown, drawing in students from around the world in order for them . . . [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 the week of April 16 – 23:

1. R. v. Duncan 2013 ONCJ 160
   

   5. At heart, Mr. Duncan’s case was unremarkable. A minor alleged Highway Traffic Act offence led to a police-citizen interaction in the parking lot of Mr. Duncan’s apartment building in the wee hours of the morning. A request that Mr. Duncan produce his licence led to an alleged refusal, which led to an

Yes. Most definitely, yes. The harder question is who to take on as your mentee or protégé.

Managing a Mentoring Relationship published by LawPro offers the following summary of mentoring.

Mentoring relationships can be informal and unstructured, more complex and procedure-based, or somewhere in between. But no matter what form they take, the structure of the relationship is not as important as the learning that occurs. We all thrive when we learn in the presence and with the help of others who have gone before us.

Mentors do more than simply pass on knowledge and information. They impart lessons on

Back in 2009, I did a quick check on link rot in Canadian decisions on CanLII. Today I repeated my quick investigation of link rot in Canadian judicial decisions. To gather decisions with URLs I simply searched for the text “http://” in CanLII. I limited my results for 2012 decisions, and sorted by date.

There were 156 court decisions in 2012 that referenced websites by specific URL. I looked at 10 decisions – all of which were decided between December 19 and 31, 2012. There were 4 broken hyperlinks. One reference was missing the colon in “http://”, and once that . . . [more]

These are notes from a panel discussion by George Waggott, Partner, McMillan LLP, Toronto, Nina Barakzai, Sky Media, UK, Lyndsey Wasser, Partner, McMillan LLP, Toronto, and Lewis Gottheil, Counsel, CAW Canada, Toronto, on April 16, 2013 at the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association National Spring Conference 2013 in Toronto.

Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own and not the speakers’. This session included a review of case law which was largely not included here.

The Social Network: What Should Employers Do?

Panelists:

George Waggott, Partner, McMillan
Nina . . . [more]

Not every case has a crisis at its core, but each one has its own raison d’être that by its very existence causes stress for the client, whether it’s someone buying a new house or a firm buying a new company or a class of plaintiffs wanting to sue someone for a real or perceived wrong.

Everyone has an issue.

A lawyer’s job is not just to deal with the issue, but also to deal with the client. So what do clients want?

That’s a question the Canadian Bar Association posed in an online study, with the help of an . . . [more]

On September 11, 2008 N.S., a sexual assault complainant sat in a court room in Ontario and struggled to explain to a judge why she shouldn’t have to remove her niqab, face veil, while she testified. “My face” she insisted, “is not going to show any signs of – it is not going to help, it really won’t.” N.S., though unbeknownst to her at the time, had just pushed up against one of the most strongly held beliefs of our legal system – that faces ought to be visible in court and that credibility could be determined by observing a . . . [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

Canadian Public Weather Alerts Now Available on Google Public Alerts, Search, Maps and Now
Dan Pinnington

Severe weather is a fact of life for Canadians. Thanks to Public Safety Canada, Environment Canada and Google, Google has just announced that Canadians can now receive warnings of drastic weather changes directly to their mobile devices and desktops.
Severe weather notifications for Canada, in English and French, will now appear on . . . . [more]

In January 2012, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that his government would reshape the immigration system to make it “good for Canada”. This begged the questions whether the immigration had been “bad for Canada” up to now and whether this reshaping was necessary. Nevertheless, the government did proceed to institute a series of reforms that have now become part of Canadian law. Since 2012, we have seen increased Ministerial powers to bar individuals from entering Canada for vague public policy consideration, increased Ministerial powers to declare arrivals “irregular” and imprison the arriving . . . [more]

I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I’ve developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the third in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

Keeping on top of e-mail on your smartphone helps you maximize productivity during “down time”on the road and minimize the amount of time you’re spending managing your inbox when you’re at the office. A smartphone keyboard, however, is only really suitable for composing short messages, so you want . . . [more]