By Julius Melnitzer | April 16, 2024
DLA REDUCES PATERNITY LEAVE IN WAKE OF ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY
The Daily Mail reports that global firm DLA Piper has reduced non-partners’ (other than birth mothers) paternity leave by six months, leaving them with 12 months’ eligibility, four less than the 16-week average of most major law firms. “It comes as law firms engage in a jobs bloodbath and hiring freezes sparked by economic uncertainty”, the Daily Mail opines, with hiring in the UK down 35% in 2023 compared to 2022. Indeed, a study shows a 17% drop in the number of organizations offering paid paternity leave in that period, with maternity leave falling 35% and 53% since the pandemic emerged in 2020. In a statement, DLA Piper said the firm’s aim was to “strike a balance” between offering competitive benefits and ensuring coverage for clients.
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BARBIE DOLL, BARBIE KEN, MORE SUCCESSFUL IN COURT
A University of Illinois study of more than 1,000 US court cases has concluded that “good looking lawyers really are more likiely to win their cases and receive favourable rulings from judges”, according to the Daily Mail. The findings held regardless of age, race or gender of the lawyers and judges, although “attractive female lawyers appeared to receive a slightly greater advantage, especially when arguing before male judges.” Study author Nicholas Waterbury told PsyPost that these conclusions raise “significant concerns” about the justice system’s fairness.
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OHSA VIOLATIONS DRAW NEAR MAXIMUM FINE FOR COMPANY DIRECTOR
An incident involving the death of six workers and catastrophic injury to another that spurred Ontario Health and Safety Act prosecution has resulted in guilty pleas from Eastway Tank, Pump and Meter Limited of Ottawa and its owner and director Neil Greene, attracting total fines of $680,000 plus automatic 25% surcharges producing $850,000 in penalties for what Cheryl Edwards and Jeremy Warning of Toronto, writing in a Mathews, Dinsdale & Clark LLP client bulletin, describe as “one of the worst workplace accidents in Canadian history”. Greene, convicted of failing to take reasonable care to ensure Eastway did not use contaminated diesel fuel, received a $100,000 penalty composed of an $80,000 fine – close to the maximum $100,000 – and a 25% surcharge, which, Edwards and Warning observe, “represents the highest penalty for a corporate director on a single OHSA charge in Ontario, indeed, Canadian history.”
In his sentencing submissions, Edwards and Warning note, the Crown prosecutor pronounced that “in Ontario corporate directors are increasingly being charged and prosecuted under the OHSA”, adding that holding Green accountable “was intended to send the message that corporate directors cannot take a hands-off approach to health and safety”. The authors conclude that these comments “clearly demonstrate the intention of Crown prosecutors to, more frequently, seek OHSA fines against the most senior personnel in corporations”. Even so, Greene lucked out, as the offence occurred before July 1, 2022, when the maximum fine increased to $1.5 million.
As it turns out, Eastway, which pleaded guilty to two offences, incurred the “the highest penalty against such a corporation for a first offence”, which the authors characterize as “an extraordinarily high amount for a small corporation”. The total fine of $600,000 is also the eighth-highest ever imposed under the OHSA, with the greater fines involving “significantly larger corporations – most of which had multiple prior convictions. “Unquestionably, the accident was terrible, but as noted by the judge, this sentence should serve as a warning to all Ontario businesses, regardless of size, about increased OHSA penalties”.
FOUR-YEAR DELAY IN PROCESSING RCMP HARASSMENT COMPLAINTS IS OK: FEDERAL COURT
The Federal Court has turned down applications by 16 members of the RCMP requiring the force’s External Review Committee to deal with their appeals of internal harassment complaint or disciplinary proceedings, all filed before 2020, within 30 days. The court found that the delays were not “a prima facie refusal to act”, but resulted from “increased caseload combined with staffing and administrative shortages” that constituted “reasonable justification for the delay”. As well, the ERC was “actively addressing the backlog in a methodical and principled manner”, the applicants’ cases fell “within the lowest three priorities in the ERC’s prioritization system” and were the consequences were “not exacerbated by the delay”.
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DELINQUENT CLIENTS FUEL DEBT SPLURGE FOR LAW FIRMS
Some C$9.3 billion in debt burdened the UK’s top 50 law firms in 2023, according to City A.M., representing an increase of $304.5 million over 2022. Mark Turner, a partner at Lubbock Fine, the accounting firm that shared the data with the media, said that economic turmoil has resulted “in clients taking longer to pay their lawyers,” meaning law firms have to borrow more.
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