BARE BONES BRIEFS: Crown seeks juror challenge for transgender bias | Dismissed: first privacy class action heard on merits | Young lawyers suicidal | GC workload crisis: EY | PainWorth expands | Best law firm webinars
By Julius Melnitzer | April 8, 2021 Dismissed: first privacy class action heard on the merits Quebec Superior Court Justice Florence Lucas has dismissed the first class action regarding the loss of personal information that has been heard on the merits in Canada. Anne Merminod in Borden Ladner Gervais LLP’s office in Montreal, lead counsel […]
Cybersecurity: Nine tips to Mitigate legal and regulatory liability
April 2, 2021 | By Reciprocity Labs staff With technology’s numerous benefits come ever-increasing cybersecurity risks. As hackers devise innovative methods of infiltrating business systems, devastating cyber-attacks have become prevalent. Due diligence and compliance are more important than ever. To be sure, compliance is a challenge for some businesses, but one that fades in the […]
Women GCs on boards double up on men: Blakes study
By Julius Melnitzer | March 18. 2021 Women constituted 66 percent of the general counsel who sat on the boards of Canadian public companies in 2020, outnumbering their male counterparts by 2:1, according to a study by Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP. The surge has been remarkable: since 2016, women GCs represent 75 percent of […]
Anticompetitive regulatory risk on the rise: COVID’s role
By Julius Melnitzer | March 2, 2021 COVID-19 and its economic aftermath have cast a dark shadow of regulatory risk on businesses coping with Canada’s competition laws. There are two reasons: the first is that regulatory enforcement of corporate laws tends to be at its highest in bad times; the second is that that our […]
The new way for in-house counsel to ID legal disputes early
September 28, 2020 | By Julius Melnitzer The Deep Tech Resolution Lab (DTRL) at Oxford’s Faculty of Law is building an artificial intelligence (AI) system to search corporate data for signs of trouble before they emerge. According to the Law Society Gazette, DTRL is asking in-house lawyers to help them with the project. “The idea […]
When law firms need lawyers, whom do they call?
September 21, 2020 | By Julius Melnitzer This is the second of a three-part LegalWriter.net series on lawyers who represent lawyers When lawyers get into trouble, the reputation of an entire firm may be at stake. But the concerns of the individual lawyer and the firm can diverge. They may have different views of the […]
Reciprocal insurance exchange raises ethical, access to justice questions
Friday, May 05, 2017 Whether lawyers have class is open to question. But a select group does have CLLAS. CLLAS is not a typo. It is the acronym used by an elite group of about 15 law firms comprising some 5,000 lawyers who have banded together to incorporate a reciprocal insurance exchange, known as the […]
Judicial independence and the media
Thursday, May 18, 2017 Is there an “unstated compact” between the judiciary and the media? Should there be? And if so, what should it be? The notion of an “unstated compact” found its way to me from a bit of a distance, emanating from a speech given by Justice Barry Leon, who sits on the […]
Branding, skillful mergers the keys to Big Law success
Friday, June 02, 2017 It used to be that beyond name recognition — logos and the like — branding served only a limited purpose for law firms who sold services based for the most part on the individual expertise of their lawyers or their practice groups. But as personal contact declined in a globalized, connected […]
Efforts to cool hot housing markets target ‘foreigners’ instead of speculators
Thursday, June 22, 2017 In an era where anti-immigration policies are picking up steam, “foreign” is a dangerous word. And therein lies the problems with the Ontario and British Columbia measures that impose additional taxes on non-residents buying residential property in the Toronto and Vancouver regions. Notice that, on a quick reading, it appears that […]