With the acquisition of Canada Law Book, Carswell has acquired a handful of publications that are similar to its own publications and that have been marketed as alternatives to each other. A few of them are best sellers and significantly strengthen Carswell’s overall position in the market for legal information. However, some of them could become a future concern for Carswell if they continue to be published and marketed as they have been in the past.

Competition between two of them, Martin’s Criminal Code and Tremeear’s Criminal Code, has led them to become virtual clones of each other. How . . . [more]

The Australian Attorney General has recently published a discussion document “to explore the scope for reforming Australian contract law”.

The document asks for comments on whether and how contract law impairs economic activity within Australia and separately for international economic activity. Australia’s contract law is basically the English Sale of Goods Act and common law, of course with legislative changes and the contributions of Australian courts. Australia is a member state of the Convention on the International Sale of Goods.

The consultation document starts off well, in my view, with this statement: “Our legal system is a form of infrastructure . . . [more]

I hate puppets and you should too. Here’s why:

Puppets are silly. Puppets are trivial little distractions, designed to amuse. In short, puppets are for child’s play. Nothing terribly vile there, but such things are the antithesis of what our legal system is about – important, frequently life-altering matters as well as critical issues of public policy. And because the legal system lags behind the public’s expectation of transparency, puppets are now being used to showcase the law. I kid you not.

The case that gives rise to my screed originates out of Ohio. According to a recent Wall Street . . . [more]

I was involved with managing a litigation file not too long ago. The client had a budget that required its large law firm to be tightly controlled and had asked me to assist in this regard.

Things went off the rails very quickly when the lawyer in charge became angered by the client’s desire to control how he ran the file.

“I’ve heard about you,” he said to me. “And I’ve read some of your stuff. You have a low opinion of lawyers.” It was clear that he was taking the client’s attempt to decide how the file would be . . . [more]

Canada Post has begun legal proceedings against Geolytica Inc. (carrying on business as Geocoder.ca), a small Ottawa business that offers a mix of free and commercial geocoding services. The claim is that Geolytica has infringed Canada Post’s copyright in the postal code dataset by offering it for sale. (The full statement of claim is available here, as published on the defendant’s website.) Geolytica, by way of response, asserts on its website that:

Since 2004 we have crowdsourced* the generation of the “Canadian Postal Code Geocoded Database.” When you make a query to geocoder containing for example this

. . . [more]

Slaw is proud to let you know that Mitch Kowalski has joined our already great roster of regular bloggers. Mitch is a lawyer, a writer and an entrepreneur. He is the author of Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Law for the 21st Century just published by the American Bar Association, and holds a LL.B. and a M.A. in Political Science from the University of Western Ontario as well as a LL.M. from Osgoode Hall Law School. For much of his 20-year legal career, he practiced law with the Toronto office of Baker & McKenzie, before moving to Aylesworth LLP, which later became . . . [more]

Currently, the Canadian Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on a person’s sex and sexual orientation, among other grounds. However, the prohibited ground of sex and sexual orientation is considered by advocacy groups as inadequate to clearly inform the public at large that unreasonable discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression is prohibited; hence, the creation of Bill C-279.

In part one of this article series I posed the question of whether clinical legal education can provide the solution to two difficulties facing the legal profession in Canada today. These two issues include a call from the legal profession for students that are better prepared in their academic training to take on the rigours of practice and a call from the community at large for the cost effective delivery of legal services. In part one I maintained that clinical legal education could play a valuable role in preparing students for practice by providing upper level students the opportunity to . . . [more]

We have seen a few published cases where a court will order the service of a document by way of a defendant’s social media account.

I had the occasion today to talk to a couple of lawyers who do collection work. Anecdotally at least, the actual practice seems to vary by province and location. That is not surprising considering how new the concept is, how traditionally lawyers and judges tend to think, and how rules of practice differ.

A lawyer from Alberta mentioned how they routinely obtain orders to serve documents by facebook. He commented that it is acknowledged that . . . [more]

[UPDATE (April 20, 2012): I’m happy to report that I was incorrect in assuming that the Legal Journals Index (LJI) would be discontinued along with the Current Legal Information service. The LJI will continue as part of Westlaw UK. Please see the comments from Westlaw UK below.]

Like most law librarians I’ve been a strong advocate of the use of journal indexes in research. While full-text searching on Hein, Lexis and Westlaw is the fastest and preferred way of finding journal literature, especially if you know exactly what you are looking for, I think there is still a place for . . . [more]

Here are the three most-consulted English-language cases on CanLII for the week of April 1 – 10.

♨ 1. Wynn Las Vegas, LLC v. Teng 2012 ONSC 1927

[1] The Defendant Teng resides in Ontario. The Plaintiff operates a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Teng applied for and was granted a line of credit from the casino totalling $300,000. In June and July of 2010 Teng drew on this line of credit for the full amount of $300,000 and signed two markers in the form of cheques for that amount. When Teng checked out of the Plaintiff’s hotel

. . . [more]

At a recent gathering of the profession, while bemoaning the lack of demand for legal services, the pathetic state of the economy and begrudging the increasing power of clients, one discussion centered around metrics – financial and performance-oriented measures. While we are all familiar with the usual billable hour, collections, matter profitability, and so forth, this discussion provoked me to think about some of the more unfamiliar and unorthodox, but vital metrics that I believe law firm management should be looking at. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the late father of modern management, Peter Drucker, reminded us . . . [more]