Legal complexity is nothing new. The scope of its unhappy consequences, however, seems to be getting ever wider thanks to the internet. Now texts land right in the living rooms — or the pants pockets — of half the planet at a keystroke. And, as a colleague once complained, computers and the internet “grease the skids of prolixity” where lawyers are concerned: ten words can become a hundred or a thousand at no marginal cost.

The terms of service “agreements” governing almost all the software and services you use are famously long and impenetrable. Just to read privacy policies alone . . . [more]

On January 1, 2010, a number of substantial amendments were made to Ontario’s Rules of Civil Procedure. Among the most notable changes were those made to Rule 20, Ontario’s Rule dealing with summary judgment motions.

Prior to the Rule change, judges hearing summary judgment motions were not allowed to assess credibility, weigh evidence, or draw inferences of fact. The result was that summary judgment motions were generally only brought in very straight forward cases where, at least in the opinion of one party, there was no genuine issue for trial.

Starting on January 1, 2010, motion judges were given . . . [more]

The on-going debate on whether women lawyers can hold demanding jobs, especially at senior levels while also raising children, has exploded with this month’s article in The Atlantic magazine, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”. 

This well-written, lengthy article by a lawyer and professor at Princeton who gave up her dream job working with Hilary Clinton at the State Department in Washington, DC to return to Boston to be more present with her teenage sons, has sparked debates from the New York Times to the Globe and Mail. The Atlantic reports the article has broken readership records . . . [more]

Is the fact that the trial judge cuts and pastes 85% of one party’s closing written submissions into his judgment “cogent evidence” displacing the presumption of judicial integrity which includes impartiality?

This is the question the Supreme Court of Canada will be considering in November in Cojocaru.

The trial judge awarded $4 million for brain damage suffered at birth. Of the 368 paragraphs in the trial judge’s reasons, 321 were taken, without attribution, word for word, from the plaintiff’s closing submissions.

Since Simon Fodden’s post here on the B. C. Court of Appeal’s majority decision, leave to appeal to . . . [more]

It has been a number of months since we have blogged about Omar Khadr. The Canadian government promised his return a number of months ago, but they are now delaying.

Senator Roméo Dallaire is running a petition online via the Change.org website:

The case of Omar Khadr—a Canadian citizen and former child soldier—is a stain upon our society and shows a blatant disregard for Canada’s obligations under international law.

…

After years of dragging its feet, Canada finally agreed to his return in 2010, so long as he served one additional year in Guantánamo. No one forced the government’s

To mark this past Canada Day, the National Archives of the UK put online hundreds of old photos of Canada, many of which pre-date Confederation. There’s some amazing shots in there.

Ontario lawyers may recognize this building…

. . . [more]

Why do we care about deleting data from mobile devices? Usually, we are trying to get back data that we inadvertently deleted. It could be that we “fat fingered” an e-mail or text message or blew away a photo that we really wanted to use as a background image. But what about when we are upgrading our smartphones, iPads or other mobile devices? Do you really know what confidential or personal information resides within the memory of your prized possession? As lawyers, we have an ethical obligation to protect the information of our clients. This means that we better be . . . [more]

Our task [as lawyers] must be to understand factual causation as it actually is. We should not be looking for a heuristic model of factual causation that generates liability in accordance with our instinctive feelings, unconcerned whether the model is accurate or not. Simply, lawyers cannot say that C was the cause of E when it was not, or that C was not the cause of E when it was. To do so is, literally, to part company with reality. It is sometimes said that a philosopher is someone from whom a tragedy is a good theory destroyed by the

We hear a lot of talk about access to justice from the judiciary and the politicians who are charged to execute this lofty ideal. But it took an initiative between the National Virtual Law Library Group and the Federation of Law Societies of Canada to found CanLII over a decade ago.

The Free Access to Law Movement could hardly envisioned the rise of mobile technology in the 2002 Declaration on Free Access to Law. When a solo private practitioner uses their own resources to advances the goals of unrestricted legal access and provides it to the public for free . . . [more]

Here’s a small matter, tiny in fact:

I’m collating some material from various Canadian law firm websites, and as part of the project I need to record the firm name along with the material I’m referencing. I imagine I’m not alone in doing this sort of thing: whether it’s a phone number, a lawyer’s name, or something the firm’s proud of and has published, it’s pretty common to grab it with select-copy-paste, and sensible too to select-copy-paste the firm name into the note as well. Yes, I could type McCarthy Tétrault, but I’m as stingy with my keystrokes as the . . . [more]

The best cup of coffee I ever had was made by my cousin in London when we were both impoverished students. I was visiting, and to celebrate he sprang for a slim packet of freshly roasted and ground coffee, which he then brewed by putting it in a chipped juge and pouring boiled water over it. After a bit he ran the back of a cold spoon over the surface of the water, as I recall, causing some floating grounds to sink to the bottom. And then he poured. Lovely.

Of course, it was London. We were young. I was . . . [more]

Summer is here, golf courses are packed, people are at the summer cottage and your marketing department is likely already looking into this holiday gifts. Seems crazy but it’s true. This year the first contact I had from a supplier regarding holiday gifts was just after Victoria Day in May.

Each year marketing departments try to come up with new and unique yet a generic enough gift that will make the masses happy. For smaller firms and sole practitioners this can be somewhat easier as they have the ability to purchase individual gifts and can do it later in the . . . [more]