Patent Pruning: Aligning Portfolios with Commercial Value
By Julius Melnitzer | June 30, 2026 “Patent pruning aligns a portfolio with its commercial value, ensuring that patents, individually and as a set, still have enough value to justify their ongoing cost.” — Bhupinder Randhawa Patent pruning is the exercise of examining and reviewing a company’s patent portfolio and cutting out patents that no longer […]
Career tip: What to do when the Sunday evening blues start on Friday afternoon
By Marcel Strigberger | June 27, 2026 On my first day of practice, I bought a leather armchair that I fully intended to use forever. Retirement was something that happened to senior partners, disgruntled lawyers, or cranky old judges. Years later, I realized Shakespeare had already mapped it out. As he observed in As You Like It, […]
BARE BONES BRIEFS: Norton Rose bigwig leaves for Torys | LSO liable for costs of “unarguable” prosecution | Complaints against lawyers at record high | Study: Legal Aid is essential poverty relief | Rotfleisch releases new edition of Canadian Tax Facts
By Julius Melnitzer | June 23, 2026 NORTON ROSE ENERGY CHIEF JOINS TORYS Robert Froehlich, who led Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP’s energy practice and was chair of the firm’s business law group from 2019 to 2025, has joined Torys LLP’s Calgary office as a partner. His experience embraces some of Canada’s most significant and […]
BARE BONES BRIEFS: Women in law, silent suffering | Hallucination catcher? | Court: AI can’t replace workers | AI beats law profs | Arbitration Place launches in Brazil
By Julius Melnitzer | June 21, 2026 EXHAUSTED WOMAN LAWYERS FEAR SPEAKING UP Some 70% of women in law suffer frequently from exhaustion or low energy, and 65% of those affected, fearing the impact on their careers, won’t speak up, says a report from the Law Society of England and Wales that surveyed 533 legal […]
AI Disruption in the Gaming Industry: An IP Perspective
By Julius Melnitzer | June 15, 2026 AI models have helped studios create [a host of gaming elements] or helped to create them faster and more efficiently, but they have also created uncertainty regarding IP issues, including ownership, authorship, infringement, and responsibility — Gurbir Sidhu From an intellectual property (IP) perspective, the emergence and evolution of […]
IP & Video games: Lots to protect
By Julius Melnitzer | June 8, 2026 Most video games entrepreneurs think about copyright or trademarks, and many don’t realize that IP protection in this sector can extend much further, such as, patents for technical systems, trade secrets for backend tools and data, design rights for interfaces, and contracts governing AI tools, user-generated content, vendors, […]
What employers need to know when seeking medical documentation for accommodation requests
By: Julius Melnitzer | June 4, 2026 Recent decisions in Ontario and British Columbia demonstrate the balance between employers’ need to know and employees’ right to privacy at the heart of the employee accommodation process. “Arbitrators look to confine requests for medical documentation to what is reasonably necessary to determine the legal elements of accommodation,” says […]
What B.C. employers need to know about modernizations of province’s employment standards branch
By Julius Melnitzer | June 2, 2026 In what amounts to a major procedural overhaul, British Columbia has introduced legislation aimed at modernizing the way its Employment Standards Branch handles workplace complaints from non-unionized employees and temporary foreign workers. “Although the government’s press release does not mention this, my understanding is that these amendments come […]
Court decision in surplus pension case has no precedential value for plan sponsors
By: Julius Melnitzer | May 31, 2026 A recent Ontario Superior Court decision related to surplus pension assets was a rubber stamp of the monitor’s recommendations, rather than a decision with precedential value impacting pension plan sponsors. The judge awarded $4.7 million in surplus pension plan funds to former employees of vehicle parts manufacturer Accuride Canada […]
How Agentic Prior Art Searches Have Changed Patent Practice
“What stands out about agentic technology is the extent to which it has allowed penetration of a system that has so frequently seemed impenetrable.” — David Hughes It’s no surprise, perhaps, that the advent of AI-driven agentic prior art searches marks a turning point in patent law practice. How, after all, were mere humans going to […]