Vancouver lawyer Geoffrey Cowper today released his final report into reforms to improve the British Columbia criminal justice system:

“In his report, A Criminal Justice System for the 21st Century, Geoffrey Cowper, QC, chair of the Justice Reform Initiative, offers recommendations to government and the judiciary on ways to achieve overall timeliness, improve court and judicial administration and improve the experiences of victims and the community.”

“Included in the review and also released today is a report from the Legal Services Society examining legal aid funding and a review of B.C.’s charge assessment process submitted by Gary McCuaig, QC.”

. . . [more]

I got to tell you. It’s tough being on the same posting day as Mitch and Yosie these days. The bar can sit pretty high when my coastal time zone mind wakes up to see what they’ve posted each Thursday. Such is the evolving quality of Slaw, I suppose — which, of course, makes for great reading.

Case in point, Mitch’s post below shares a wonderful vision for how KM can evolve to be more effective, more business-centric and drive new innovation. Simply fantastic. Please don’t take the rest of this post as a critique of Mitch’s ideas.

One difference . . . [more]

I missed the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference, which wraps up today in Washington D.C. So my thoughts are turning not only to envy, but also to some of my own KM thoughts mixed with those emanating from conference tweets.

Too often Canadian law firms see KM as nothing more than a repository of documents and clauses: Matthew Parson’s so-called “information landfill.” And because KM is seen as nothing more than a landfill site, firms see KM as nothing more than a software solution to assist lawyers sift through the debris.

What a terrible waste!

But, what if . . . [more]

Amendments to the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation (Ontario Regulation 191/11) to address barriers impeding access to outdoor public spaces by persons with disabilities also include proposed minor technical amendments under the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation.

The Ontario government has released part of the Built Environment Standard under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (“AODA”) for public review and comments until October 1, 2012. This is the fifth standard enacted under the AODA.

Recently I published here a case comment on a Quebec tribunal decision involving the admissibility of social media evidence.

One particular element of the argument surprised me, and I would be interested in your views.

In the case, an employee brought a complaint before a labour tribunal against her employer, claimed that the employer had created, or allowed to continue, an atmosphere of harassment. As evidence, she brought printouts of comments made by her work colleagues on the Facebook page of another colleague who was also (for a while) a Facebook friend of the complainant.

The employer objected to this . . . [more]

Although I suspect someone on SLAW has likely already commented on what follows, I couldn’t easily find a post (although Simon Fodden’s post here in 2008 discusses CanLII’s Database Search).

I realized yesterday that if one selects a number of databases on CanLII from the Database Search screen (e.g., all decisions from labour and employment tribunals or all decisions from human rights tribunals), the resulting URL when clicking on “Search” with a “blank” search is a stable URL that can be sent to a user or linked on an intranet to, in essence, create a customized “global” database search . . . [more]

Gary Rodrigues’ recent column Reality Check: Fact, Fiction, and Case Citations, sparked an interesting discussion about the use of case citations: whether using the neutral citation in a secondary source is enough; which parallel citations should be included in case tables; whether we need to cite print reporters at all; and so on.

As long as I’ve been working in the world of legal publishing, we’ve taken for granted that we should include in every publication a table of cases with as many parallel citations as we could rustle up. Our tables of cases still include citations to as . . . [more]

The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario complaint by Dr. Emily Carasco of Windsor Law recently settled after five days of hearing. Background on the case can be found on Slaw here.

Details of the settlement are currently not public, but coverage of the hearings can be found in The Windsor Star. . . . [more]

Having effective passwords for the myriad of sites that we need them for is getting harder. The best passwords are: long, not words, no pattern, include numbers, symbols and caps. We shouldn’t use the same one, or similar ones, twice, in case 1 gets compromised. And we should change them often.

Password cracking is getting easier all the time. This arstechnica article entitled Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger goes into great detail, but the essence of it is:

The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it . . . [more]

With the resignation of Guy Pratte, independent counsel in the Canadian Judicial Council inquiry into the conduct of Manitoba Justice Lori Douglas, the wretched business oppressing her is back in the news again. I’m not about to wade into the dark waters of commentary here — at least, not until this process has run its course — but a Slaw reader suggests, and I agree, that we might point you to the inquiry website. There you’ll find the documents that will let you see the legal issues facing the panel and Justice Douglas, as well as some of the . . . [more]

Dear All,

Once upon a time, a trial judge said that an article I’d written on causation was “complete” and that some of what I’d said was “the current state of the law in Canada”. However, the “complete” adjective was part of a phrase: “complete, if not overly analytical” – see here.

Anyway, starting this week, my “overly analytical”, denser (all implications intended), posts on causation will now appear on my own blog called “The 4th Monkey“. I will still post about important causation issues on Slaw, but those posts will will be shorter and punchier . . . [more]