It has been nearly six months since Chief Justice Morawetz called for an overhaul to Ontario’s Rules of Civil Procedure. One hopes that the delay in starting the process means that change will be more fundamental than a simple rewriting of the Rules. As I wrote shortly after the Chief Justice’s speech at the opening of the courts in October 2022, tinkering with the Rules will not address the access to justice crisis that has been staring us in the face for decades.

Since the changes to the Rules in 2010, cost and delay have simply increased. The principle . . . [more]

Next month’s Bencher elections at the Law Society of Ontario likely will mark a turning point in the regulation of legal services in Canada.

As you’ve probably heard, this is the first Bencher election in Canada to feature rival factions of candidates seeking office, each with political and governance views deeply hostile to the other. I have no idea what the outcome will be; but I believe the damage to the Bencher election model has already been done. One way or another, major (and overdue) changes are coming to the governance of Canadian legal regulators.

The sight of lawyers and . . . [more]

Today’s Tips Tuesday features a tip regarding one of the most under-rated features in Microsoft Word: Read Aloud.

Located under the “Review” tab in the ribbon, Read Aloud does exactly what it sounds like: it will read your document back to you, aloud so that you can hear the grammatical or wording errors you may have made when drafting. 

If you’re like me you like to torture yourself by going back and re-reading through a draft of a document or an e-mail that you just sent, and without fail this is when you catch a typos. It’s embarrassing and . . . [more]

This may sound like a very niche question, but it was one where the answer was not immediately obvious. (The short answer, as it turns out, is “Saskatchewan, The Queen’s Bench Rules” or “Saskatchewan, The Court of Appeal Rules”.)

While the McGill Guide explains how to cite rules of court, it does not include the Saskatchewan rules in its examples. McGill suggests including the indexing information, but the Saskatchewan rules are not regulations (unlike the court rules in other jurisdictions.)

According to the extremely helpful Ann Marie Melvie, the librarian at the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan: . . . [more]

A user-centred tribunal process is a necessary condition of improved access to justice. But it is not a sufficient one. You also need the process codified in rules that ordinary people can understand.

Tribunal rules of procedure are meant to guide users through the process the tribunal has designed to resolve the disputes before it. If the tribunal has an adjudicative mandate, then the dispute often involves two parties, and the process is usually adversarial.

The conventional approach does not work for users

Although they are intended to guide users, the rules are not typically written for the parties involved . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) L’intimé était le seul à subvenir aux besoins de sa famille et une longue peine d’emprisonnement aurait eu des conséquences dramatiques sur l’autonomie financière de celle-ci et sur sa capacité à se trouver un logement; dans ce contexte, la juge de première instance n’a pas commis d’erreur de . . . [more]

Written by Daniel Standing LL.B., Editor, First Reference Inc.

Money and time off work for holidays are naturally important to employees, so when Queen Elizabeth II died and the Prime Minister commented on the importance of mourning her passing, unions and employees alike saw an opportunity for gains to be made. This was a pure question of interpretation, and the dispute in [2023] O.L.A.A. No. 43 was resolved in the employer’s favour based on the language of the collective agreement and the arbitrator’s determination of what a “proclamation” is. . . . [more]

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Fertility: 40 Years of Change. By Maureen McTeer. Toronto: Irwin Law, 2022. ix, 266 p. Includes glossary, bibliographic references, and index. ISBN 978-1-55221-637-8 (softcover) $39.95; ISBN 978-1-55221-638-5 (PDF) $39.95. <irwinlaw.com/product/fertility-40-years-of-change>.

Reviewed by Alexandra Kwan
Digital Services & Reference Librarian
Bora Laskin Law Library, University of Toronto

Fertility: 40 . . . [more]

This submission is part of a column swap with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) bimonthly member magazine, AALL Spectrum. Published six times a year, AALL Spectrum is designed to further professional development and education within the legal information industry. Slaw and the AALL Spectrum board have agreed to hand-select several columns each year as part of this exchange. 

Lessons from the SCALES OKN Project, Including its Cost, Data, and Development Challenges

With the increasing availability of electronic court records, many law librarians have seen more requests from their patrons to pull data from those records to answer . . . [more]

Some lawyers dread the idea of reporting a colleague in the bar to the Law Society. Others are all too eager to file complaints against other counsel, including out of spite or to try to bring down the “competition”. Most of these lawyers share something in common: they have no idea what their professional obligations are when it comes to filing law society complaints.

Not too long ago, I acted for a lawyer in a discipline hearing that stemmed from a complaint by another lawyer. These two experienced counsel had previously been respected colleagues, but for a variety of reasons . . . [more]