Personal Injury
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June 20, 2025
OBA awards gala celebrates service to the legal profession and community at large
Toronto lawyer Angela Ogang had a good excuse not to attend the Ontario Bar Association’s annual awards gala June 19: She’d given birth to her baby the night before.
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June 20, 2025
Selling faux antiques to Versailles? A case of caveat emperor
“Things are seldom as they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.” — Buttercup, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. Which gets me to Bill Pallot. Vanity Fair called him “the world’s leading expert on the works of 18th-century France.” However, Paris Match recently branded him as “the Bernie Madoff of art.”
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June 19, 2025
FCA sets aside decision that declared Ottawa must fill judicial vacancies ‘within a reasonable time’
A novel Federal Court action that tried to compel Ottawa to fix its chronic tardiness in filling superior court vacancies has been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction by the Federal Court of Appeal; however, the law firm that launched the case to help its clients and other litigants says its efforts were not in vain.
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June 17, 2025
CBA backs constitutional amendment to constrain federal use of Charter’s ‘notwithstanding’ clause
In a rare move, the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) has thrown its support behind a Senate public bill (S-218), which proposes a constitutional amendment to restrict and structure the discretion of the federal government to breach Charter rights via the contentious s. 33 “notwithstanding” clause.
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June 16, 2025
Insurance Bureau says unchecked increase in litigation funding could drive up insurance costs
The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) is calling for restrictions on litigation funding on the basis that it is being used as an investment tool that uses the court system to generate profits for large financial firms.
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June 16, 2025
Ontario judge allows health services board to intervene in private clinic's $290K repayment appeal
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has allowed the Health Services Appeal and Review Board to intervene in an appeal of its own decision requiring a private health facility to repay more than $290,000 to the Ministry of Health.
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June 13, 2025
SCC rules admissibility of Crown-led ‘sexual inactivity’ evidence must be decided in a voir dire
Holding 9-0 that evidence of a complainant’s “sexual inactivity” forms part of their “sexual history” — and is therefore presumptively inadmissible at trial — the Supreme Court of Canada has also clarified that the common law screening procedure for Crown‑led sexual history evidence “should mirror” the s. 276 Criminal Code regime that applies in a voir dire for defence-led sexual history evidence.
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June 13, 2025
Kramer v. Kramer?
We are all familiar for example with the iconic 1932 House of Lords case of Donoghue v. Stevenson, where the court broke the ice on the law of negligence enabling the customer to successfully sue the manufacturer of a bottle of ginger beer that contained a non-invited snail. AI will generally give you a decent summary of the case. But what might happen if in our search we throw in some random word, like say “Seinfeld”?
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June 13, 2025
Injury law in the digital age: Embracing new tools and technologies
From wearable devices that track health in real-time to AI summarizing dense legal contracts in plain language, injury law is being transformed by technology. Courts increasingly admit digital evidence, meaning injury law faces unprecedented opportunities and ethical pitfalls. As a result, lawyers who fail to adapt risk leaving clients at a disadvantage.
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June 12, 2025
Reducing CRR burden: Keep ‘relevance’ as standard, reduce judge-presided conferences
The Civil Rules Review Phase 2 (CRR) report mandates judicial case conferences in two forms: directions conferences and scheduling conferences. In addition, it proposes a completely new standard for productions while removing discovery, which is a cornerstone for ensuring necessary and adequate production. The CRR proposes a new production standard: production of “reliance” and “adverse” documents rather than keeping the current standard of relevance. The net result will be more ambiguity as to which documents are proper productions, and given the absence of discovery, a greater need to obtain full production of all “reliance” and all “adverse” documents.