Many SLAW readers will already be familiar with the excellent video legal research tutorials that the Courthouse Libraries BC have put together. If you are not I encourage you to check them out. The videos look great and really demonstrate the power of the medium as a teaching tool.

The tutorials provide the novice researcher with an excellent introduction on how to approach researching legislation and case law. For those of use who are librarians or lawyers working with students, the tutorials are a wonderful resource for supplementing and reinforcing our instruction and giving students something short and engaging . . . [more]

Lawyers have not adequately met the vague notion of due diligence when it comes to legal technology, probably because they are unable to. This realization hit me at a CLE seminar when one of the panelists – perhaps me – made the comment that, if lawyers want to use cloud computing, they should perform due diligence about the company they were going to use. The lawyer’s response was, “how do I do that?”

Due diligence is way of showing one has acted reasonably. When it comes to technology, it’s an assessment of all of the variables that impact the . . . [more]

Recently, I made a major life change. After having been at my firm, Norton Rose Canada, for a number of years, I accepted an offer to become senior counsel, employee relations, for a major Canadian retailer. My focus is going from a mostly Quebec-based practice, to one with Canada-wide scope.

In the same vein, I’ve decided to change the focus of the blog I created (the Quebec Labour Law Blog) to give it a national and international scope. I have the benefit now of having collaborators from ex-colleagues from across the Norton Rose Group (Australia, South Africa, Germany, France, . . . [more]

♬ There is no turning back from this unending path of mine…♬

Lyrics, music and recorded by HIM.

The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia has released guidelines on cloud computing for public bodies.

You can view the guidelines at the following link: http://www.oipc.bc.ca/pdfs/public/CloudComputingGuidelines(February2012).pdf

There are several interesting aspects to the guidelines:

In addition to the requirement for public bodies to protect personal information no matter where it is, FIPPA also requires public bodies to ensure that, subject to three exceptions listed in s. 30.1 of FIPPA, personal information is only stored in and accessed

Quebec media is reporting today that the city of Huntingdon, south of Montreal, will be contesting what is commonly known as Bill 101, or officially, the Charter of the French Language (see here or here).

In January of this year, the Office de la langue française (“Office”) received a complaint alleging that the city was sending out bilingual documents in its communications to its citizens. The Office invited the city to respect section 15 of the Charter of the French Language that states:

15. The civil administration shall draw up and publish its texts and documents in the official

In Alberta, we have consumer protection legislation in the form of the Fair Trading Act.

The Fair Trading Act affects how most household purchases can be sold by prohibiting unfair practices and misleading advertising. In specific types of transactions, the Act provides consumer cancellation rights, special contract requirements and a seller’s code of conduct. It also requires specific types of businesses to be licensed.

There are many sources of consumer protection in addition to legislation. A news release from the Alberta Government celebrates the work of Albertans who were named consumer protection champions for 2011.

The reason that I find . . . [more]

Documents are at the heart of any legal system—writing’s the thing, ever since Hammurabi. And though legal documents do change in form and character, there’s a strong impulse for things to remain “the same” or at least sufficiently similar that past experience and rulings can limn the future. That’s on the surface.

The relatively recent introduction of digital documents has, perhaps paradoxically, brought about considerable and continuing change underneath. As the duck seems serene but paddles furiously below the waterline, so it is with legal “duckuments”: it’s all text above the waterline, but underneath there’s much churning as HTML, DOC, . . . [more]

The Law Society of Upper Canada has just announced a program that will provide up to six hours of coaching to assist women leaving and then returning from maternity or compassionate leave. The coaching will be available only to sole practitioners and to women working in law firms of five or fewer lawyers. It is estimated that 35 women will access this program in the first year.

This program is similar to one offered in Manitoba since 2008 where female or male lawyers and their spouses or life partners can receive six confidential sessions with the Law Society Equity Ombudsperson. . . . [more]

After nearly two years since publishing its first proposal on the topic, the North Carolina State Bar has adopted its Formal Ethics Opinion on cloud computing (thanks to Steph Kimbro for the heads up). The opinion, titled 2011 Formal Ethics Opinion 6: Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling the Duties of Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property, concludes that:

a law firm may contract with a vendor of software as a service provided the lawyer uses reasonable care to safeguard confidential client information

Like the Law Society of British Columbia’s Report on Cloud Computing, the . . . [more]

In murder cases in Philadelphia, at least. A study by M. Anderson and Paul Heaton for the Rand Corporation, “How Much Difference Does the Lawyer Make? The Effect of Defense Counsel on Murder Case Outcomes” [PDF] concludes that the quality of the lawyer and the quality and quantity of the lawyer’s work are significant factors in explaining the outcomes of criminal cases.

This conclusion will likely strike any practising lawyer as trivial: one of the beliefs we hold (and cherish) is that our efforts and talents matter, that not all lawyers are created equal. Yet, seen from the . . . [more]

I have been an adjudicator for nearly ten years. This experience has given rise to much food for thought. Training a diverse range of adjudicators from a variety of tribunals has caused me to reflect on why we do the things we do in adjudication. While core processes are similar across tribunals, there is a great diversity in approaches. For me, the adjudicative processes need to meet two, primary objectives: fairness and efficiency. These columns will highlight the diversity in approach and look at best practices in meeting these twin objectives.

Testimony is at the centre of most oral hearings. . . . [more]

On Friday the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario released the paper Embedding Privacy into the Design of EHRs to Enable Multiple Functionalities – Win/Win authored by the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario Dr. Ann Cavoukian and Richard C. Alvarez, President and CEO of Canada Health Infoway.

From the March 2, 2012 news release:

Research indicates that Canadians have a degree of comfort with using EHR information for such purposes, as long as privacy and security protections are in place. The paper underscores the need for transparency in the way EHR information is managed and safeguarded.