I would like to thank my colleagues at Harrison Pensa for being Firm Guest Bloggers on Slaw this week. Their articles focus on emerging issues both in substantive law, and the practice of law itself.

I’d like to share some thoughts on the emerging field of social media law, which includes both of those aspects.

Social media has created many challenges for business, including disparate issues such as violations of copyright, trade-marks, confidential information, and privacy, as well as pushing the boundaries on things such as defamation and employer control over employee actions.

Businesses, including law firms, are racing to . . . [more]

If the maxim Ignorantia juris neminem excusat (“ignorance of the law excuses no one”) means something in a society governed by the Rule of law, legislative materials ought to be made available in a manner that makes the most out of current information technologies. Before the invention of the printing press, such technologies included a stone stele put in a public place in ancient Babylonia or parchment documents issued in several handwritten copies to English medieval barons. Up until 15 years ago, the most efficient technology to disseminate Acts, regulations and related proclamations to wide audiences has been printed sessional . . . [more]

I have been working with some very talented folks planning the CIAJ Annual Conference. The conference will take place October 10-12 at the Fairmont Palliser Hotel in Calgary.

The program (English PDF) for the conference “The Courts and Beyond: The Architecture of Justice in Transition” is very exciting and features a keynote on building justice with architect Jack Diamond, dinner with award winning journalist Paula Simon, and an opening reception at the beautiful, Calgary Courts Centre. The program features fantastic speakers from the bench, the bar, and the academy, including Slaw Columnist Nicolas Vermeys.

I am looking forward to . . . [more]

As readers of Slaw will know, we approached Maritime Law Book a little over a year ago with the idea of a collaboration in which MLB would select certain of its case summaries for Slaw to make freely available online. Slaw converts the summary to HTML and places a precis of it online, along with a link to the full summary in PDF on Slaw’s site and a link to the free version on the MLB site of the unedited case report. (The more than 300 such summaries are available here; the criteria by which MLB selects them can . . . [more]

For a variety of reasons, lawsuits tend to drag on for a very long period of time. It is the plaintiff’s obligation to move the lawsuit forward. When acting for a defendant in a case that has dragged on (through no fault of the defendant), I am often asked whether we can ask the Court to have the lawsuit dismissed for delay. I tell my clients that they can bring a motion to dismiss the action for delay (provided one of the enumerated procedural defaults have occurred), but that winning such motions are extremely difficult. The governing principle taken by . . . [more]

The federal government has announced proposed regulations that will allow banks to opt out of a national customer ombudsman service in favour of private ADR services that they will choose and pay for.

This seems like a bad idea.

If banks can simply shop around for another ADR service provider whenever they are unhappy with the decisions of the current provider, how can consumers and small businesses have any confidence in the integrity and impartiality of decisions?

The Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments (OBSI) currently has more than 600 participating firms including banks, credit unions, trust and loan companies, . . . [more]

Between 1993 and 2003, Canada’s overall divorce rate fell by more than 11%. The most recent statistics available, compiled in 2005 by Statistics Canada, indicated that the divorce rate was hovering around 40%.

However, the same study found that divorce rates for persons over 50 years of age had increased markedly. Similarly, a recent study conducted by Bowling Green State University confirmed that American divorce rates among couples over 50 had doubled within the last 20 years.

The conclusion is clear: Boomer marriages are falling apart at a growing rate, bucking an overall trend towards fewer divorces among members of . . . [more]

The new issue of LAWPRO Magazine includes an article entitled Diversify without dabbling: before expanding your practice, expand your competence!. It looks at how how lawyers who are considering expanding the scope of their practice can do so safely and avoid a malpractice claim (dabbling outside one’s comfort zone is often a cause of claims). Watch for the full version of this article at www.lawpro.ca/magazine.

Here are five tips from the article on how to expand your practice skills safely.

1. Expand purposefully
If you decide to expand your scope of practice, make sure that the decision to . . . [more]

Last week news broke of the epic hacking of Gizmodo’s Mat Honan. By exploiting security flaws in both Amazon’s and Apple’s account verification and reset procedures, a hacker was able to obtain access to a wide variety of Honan’s accounts, including his iCloud account. Once they’d gained control of Honan’s iCloud account, the hackers were able to remotely wipe his iPhone, iPad, and his Macbook, destroying his personal data, including irreplaceable pictures of his one-year-old daughter:

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my

Now this could be seen as a pretty strange question for one to ask . . . if it weren’t for the fact that so few law firms seem to have effectively answered this question.

Twice a year I have the privilege of conducting a one-day master class for new practice group leaders, usually held at the University of Chicago and hosted by the Ark Group. Over the years I have now conducted about a dozen of these sessions and in all cases the participants comprise firms of over 100 attorneys in size including the likes of Jones Day, . . . [more]

Until very recently, most knowledgeable class actions practitioners in Canada would have said that there have been very few full-blown class action trials in this country. The conventional view was that any plaintiff who could achieve a certification order in a class action would shortly arrive at a settlement agreement in the case. Trials and verdicts? Like Sasquatch, they were more frequently cited than sighted.

In 2011, after undertaking a well-contested 45-day class action trial of our own, and with another of our class action matters scheduled for trial shortly thereafter, my colleagues (Sarah Graham, Genevieve Meisenheimer, Lauren Nielsen) and . . . [more]

It’s an ongoing debate in the law firms that actually care. How do you measure your law firm diversity? Is it based on actual lawyers, looking at an associate/partnership ratio, or do you look at diversity and inclusion policies and procedures?

The former approach has become a standard now among American firms, where young recruits routinely scan diversity statistics when considering employers. Many young lawyers and law students review diversity figures even if they are not “diverse” themselves, because they prefer working in a supportive and open environment.

Canadian firms have not been so forthcoming primarily because the base numbers . . . [more]