I just attended the 30th annual Christmas Bureau Breakfast. This local charity has been providing festive meals to Edmonton families in need since 1940. The breakfast, hosted by Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, and sponsored by The Westin Edmonton, Sobeys and IGA was a wonderful event this year.

Field Law has been supporting the Christmas Bureau since the war years and we have participated in the Breakfast since its beginning. I am proud that our firm supports this worthy organization with an annual Craft auction as well as cash donations from lawyers and staff.

Many lawyers and law firms . . . [more]

Here’s the scenario: you’re retained to argue an appeal in the tough U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit; there’s a precedent from that very court that appears clearly to stand in your way; you’re about to prepare your brief for filing. What do you do about the obstinate precedential obstacle?

I’d be willing to be that if you took a poll of appellate advocates, something on the order of 99.4 percent of them would say that, whatever you do, you don’t just ignore it. But that’s exactly what counsel did in Gonzalez-Servin, et al. v. Ford Motor Company, . . . [more]

There was a time, not too long ago, when some in legal and professional publishing would refer to their sector as offering “a license to print money”. The highest quality publishers were renowned for the wonderful reputations of their products and services, their market knowledge and intimacy, their relationships and engagement with their customers and, even though prices were high, compared to other forms of information publishing, they were trusted and supported by their markets. Obviously, customer service was always pretty terrible but that was a quaint characteristic which was recognised and accommodated, partly on grounds that true value . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada announced today that judgment in the National Securities Regulator Reference will be delivered at 9:45 a.m. EDT on Thursday, December 22, 2011. That’s In the Matter of Section 53 of the Supreme Court Act, R.S.C. 1985, C. S-26 and in the Matter of a Reference by the Governor General in Council concerning the proposed Canadian Securities Act, as set out in Order in Council P.C. 2010-667, dated May 26, 2010 (33718)

We’ll link to it and commentary when it comes down.

Perhaps the word “Judgment” implies that it will be the decision of the Court, . . . [more]

This was how David Sterns, one of the panel members at an OBA civil litigation session last week, described the Ontario Court of Appeal’s 5 December judgment interpreting the new summary judgment rule. (See Simon Chester’s post last week for a good description of the amendment and the decision.)

Despite all the energy and resources being devoted in our modern system of civil justice to mediation, alternative dispute resolution and most recently judicial dispute resolution, in its 111 page judgment in Combined Air and four other cases, the Court of Appeal reinforces the primordial elements of the trial in our . . . [more]

The 2011 Apple in Law Offices Survey saw over 750 respondents provide insight on how Apple devices, ranging from the iPhone to the MacBook, are impacting the way they practice law.

iPad

Unsurprisingly, the iPad saw a huge jump in usage. In the 2010 survey, 26% of respondents used an iPad in their law office; in the 2011 survey, that figure jumped to 56%. The remaining 44% of lawyers without an iPad apparently don’t plan on going without one for long: 71% of respondents were considering purchasing iPads for their law office in the next year:

Mobile

On the mobile . . . [more]

‘Tis the season for law firms (and no doubt others) to send out season’s greetings by email, most often accompanied by the usual wordy and sometimes bilingual notices that the content of the email may be confidential, privileged and subject to diverse prohibitions that we are more or less politely admonished to comply with.

Here’s a typical, though polite, version (French omitted):

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The contents of this electronic mail message are confidential and strictly reserved for the sole use of its intended recipients. This message may contain information protected by the solicitor-client privilege. If you receive this message in

[This is the text (updated for SLAW) of a Fraud Alert that LAWPRO sent to Ontario Lawyers December 15, 2011.]

LAWPRO continues to see high numbers of bad cheque frauds targeting lawyers across Canada and the U.S., as well as several other countries around the world. On a monthly basis, 250-300 lawyers advise us that have been targeted by bad cheque frauds. We are seeing the same types of scams over and over again, and on a weekly basis we are seeing two or three new fraudster client names. And these frauds are becoming more sophisticated. Very experienced lawyers have . . . [more]

Creating an annual roundup of legal web technology predictions was never on my personal “to do” list. Rather, it was an accidental offering started here at Slaw a few years ago. Now, much like repeated broadcasts of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” it’s somehow become a holiday tradition.

Some of these predictions pick up on current trends, and extend my own perspective of how that trend might play out in the legal market. Others ideas are clearly more “blue sky,” my honest attempts at swinging for the fences (or more accurately, my emulations of the Mighty Casey). Either way, this is . . . [more]

Words have meaning. The context, tone, and interplay give rise to nuances that is the basis for statutory and case law interpretation. But sometimes the iteration of words have meaning too. The frequency and repetitiveness of certain words can at times given insight into a culture or society.

At Jurix: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems in Vienna, Austria earlier this week, Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Julie Seaman, Adam Candeub & Eugene Agichtei proposed the idea of Legal N-Grams in conjunction with a beta pre-release of Legal Language Explorer, a new web . . . [more]

CanLII has presented us with an early Christmas present. They are offering up their new hyperlinking tool. As the linking page (found under Tools) states:

This tool automatically adds hyperlinks in your document to legislative and case law citations corresponding to materials posted on the CanLII website. This functionality is powered by Lexum’s LexHub, the same technology that is used to add hyperlinks within CanLII’s decisions.

I know, this is just a new version of their Reflex API that Simon wrote about in 2008. I covered the previous source of the API, the CanLex site in 2009. CanLex . . . [more]