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

Use Alerts So You Are Never Late for an Appointment
Dan Pinnington

Are you frequently late for meetings and appointments? “My lawyer made me wait” is an all too common client complaint. Being late all the time is something that will really . . .

Research

Never Start From Scratch
Shaunna Mireau

The fastest path is one that you have already traveled. The sign posts are familiar and likely . . . [more]

Most lawsuits end in one of two ways; the court makes a determination on the merits (whether it be a trial or by way of motion), or the parties reach a settlement.

However, there is a provision in our Rules of Civil Procedure that permits a plaintiff to unilaterally discontinue its lawsuit against a defendant, provided the lawsuit has not advanced past the stage of exchanging the claim and the defences (known more technically as the “close of pleadings”).

Even where the plaintiff unilaterally discontinues its claim, the defendant is entitled to ask the court for some of the legal . . . [more]

♫ I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall.
I really don’t know clouds at all…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Joni Mitchell.

The Law Society of British Columbia has now released their Cloud Computing Checklist on the Practice Support and Resources section of their website. This checklist follows on the issuance of their Cloud Computing Report in 2012.

Cloud computing offers many benefits to lawyers including: accessing a vast array of new software services and applications, off-loading hardware and software maintenance and upkeep to others, . . . [more]

Chris Dale, a lawyer-turned-eDisclosure-consultant based in the UK, has taken my two-post series from December on search inside the legal organization (see here and here) and applied the thinking specifically to eDiscovery. In his post Why Don’t We Just Use Google for eDiscovery? he suggests that the complexity of using litigation support tools–with concept searching, de-duplication, e-mail threading, clustering and predictive coding–has lawyers asking why not just use Google, or something like Google?

He gets to to the crux of the problem in this notion:

If the primary point is that Google does not purport to give you everything

. . . [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 second in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

We’ve all done the favour of making an introduction over e-mail. What often follows is a string of e-mails that bear no relevance to the introducer:

Jim: Bob, please meet Alice. You should definitely get to know each other; please take it from here!
Bob: Alice, . . . [more]

One of the great strengths of the common law system is its ability to grow through the dialectical process of judicial determination of conflicting positions. This feature is absent in dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation.

A perfect illustration of the growth of the common law will be the determination by the UK Supreme Court of an appeal to be heard on 5 and 6 March 2013. The case involves a decision in which the English Court of Appeal sharply rejected the practice – adopted and developed in the Family Division over 25 years – of treating the assets of . . . [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. First Reference   2. Small City Law Firm Tech   3. Kelly Santini LLP’s Employment Law Blog for the Suddenly Unemployed   4. ABlawg.ca    5. Entertainment & Media Law Signal

Given the constant flow of events in the world of information and the waves of change confronting librarians, I search for a unifying theme. Can I find something that manages to pull it all together for me? As a law professor I talk to my students about that moment of insight when all of the pieces fall into place, when what had previously been a jumble of unconnected information suddenly shifts into a discernible pattern. Even if the fine details of the final product are unclear, there will be a structure, the subject will make sense. Where is such a . . . [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.

BOSWORTH V. JUROCK, 2013 BCCA 4

1. CASE SUMMARY

Areas of Law: Class Actions; Real Estate Development; Condominiums

Description: Class actions by individual strata lot owners were permitted under the Class Proceedings Act, despite representative action provisions of the Strata Property Act.

Background: The Appellants were Oswald Jurock, David Barnes, Ralph Case, Standard Apartments Ltd., Proper Tee Investments Ltd., and Greenwich Holdings Ltd. The . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
New and innovative drugs / Medical marihuana :

Takeda Canada Inc. v. Canada (Minister of Health) et al. 2013 FCA 13
Food and Drug Control – Drugs – New and innovative drugs – What constitute
The Minister of Health, through the Office of the Patented Medicines and Liaison, refused to list Takeda’s Canada Inc.’s . . . [more]

Slaw is proud to announce that we are collaborating with OnPoint Legal Research Law Corporation so that this Sunday, and one Sunday a month hereafter, we can present their elaborate summary of an important case from the British Columbia, Alberta, or Ontario court of appeal.

OnPoint Legal Research is an online firm that has been offering legal research, analysis and drafting services to Canadian lawyers for more than thirteen years. You can learn more about the firm on their About Us page.

The summaries we will be presenting draw from OnPoint’s newsletters and comprise a full description of the . . . [more]

It’s safe to say that most Slaw readers are familiar with the concept of Stare Decisis in the common law tradition. From the Latin, “to stand by things decided”, the concept of a legal system in which lower courts are bound by the determination of higher courts concerning questions of law leaves little room for the lower courts of a single jurisdiction to influence appreciation of the law across the country.

As Master in Chambers Funduk famously observed in a 1989 ruling:

[51] Any legal system which has a judicial appeals process inherently creates a pecking order . . . [more]