Lawyering lessons at Santa’s knee
By Marcel Strigberger · December 27, 2025 Until a recent experience at my local Tim Hortons, I did not know that there were striking similarities between judges and Santa Clauses. I was sipping my medium double-double when I overhead a group of young children at an adjacent table. They sounded a lot like lawyers sizing up judges at […]
AI-Driven Trademark Searches: A Necessity Turned Weaponry?
By Julius Melnitzer | December 22, 2025 “More things are becoming potentially discoverable in trademark searches, and faster, because of how interconnected we are and how much we live our lives, and conduct our commerce, over the internet” — Tamara Céline Winegust Artificial intelligence (AI) is turning trademark (TM) watching from a tedious necessity to a strategic […]
Art & IP Law in the Digital Age
By Julius Melnitzer | December 21, 2025 “The digital age simply provides a new context for traditional IP questions around authorship, originality, ownership, and the fair use of art” — Eloise Calder In an increasingly digital world, technologies like generative AI have made efficiency key, amplifying the desire for instant gratification and shortening attention spans – […]
How to take the (second) guesswork out of lawyering
By Marcel Strigberger | December 4, 2025 Hey, Your Honour, I can see what’s under your wig. Actually, this talent is not that farfetched. AI is getting us there. I’ve recently heard about apps that transform curated collections of judicial orders, thereby giving lawyers an idea of how judges rule in different scenarios. Are the […]
Whose Client is it Anyway?
Photo by Ogo Johnson: at Pexels By Murray Gottheil | December 3, 2025 The people who make the most money in law firms are not necessarily the smartest lawyers, or the most strategic lawyers, or even the highest-billing lawyers. It’s the lawyers who bring in clients who rake in the largest slice of the profit pie. […]
True legal library confessions: Much overdue about nothing
By Marcel Strigberger | December 1, 2025 Did I commit a crime? If so, I want to come clean. Which gets me to a book entitled The Law of Horses, Including the Law of Innkeepers, Veterinary Surgeons, &c., by one George Henry Hewitt Oliphant. Shortly after being called to the Bar in the mid-1970s, I borrowed the […]
What are the legal considerations for Canadian employers requiring cross-border travel in the Trump era?
By: Julius Melnitzer | November 25, 2025 With travel to the U.S. becoming anxious, if not risky, for many Canadians, employers are facing the prospect of employees refusing to travel south of the border. But can employers require employees to do so, and do employees have a basis on which to refuse? “My advice to employers […]
Moving on Up
Photo by Kampus at Pexels By Murray Gottheil | November 24, 2025 One of my former partners checked out my profile on LinkedIn the other day. Since he is a litigator, my paranoid streak – honed to perfection during my 40-year career – got me thinking that perhaps he was trying to find an address for […]
BARE BONES BRIEFS: Rapper Drake accused of promoting illegal gambling | AI replacing arbitrators | Trump: lawyers’ public service work “illegal” | Government convicted of ignoring itself | Cozen beefs up estates practice
By Julius Melnitzer | November 23, 2025 DRAKE SUED FOR “GLAMORIZING” GAMBLING Justin Killham, a Missouri resident, has initiated a class action against Drake and others for promoting Stake, an online casino. The claim alleges that the Curaçao-based platform violates gambling laws by using a “dual currency” system designed to evade gambling regulations, and that […]
Three certainties: bureaucracy, taxes and bagels
By Marcel Strigberger | November 13, 2025 A sudden impulse struck me recently at my nearby Sobey’s supermarket, causing me to buy a package of bagel chips. For the uninitiated, this product consists of about one bagel or so, toasted, thinly sliced, and packaged. Unlike its one-piece version, which sells for about a dollar, this […]