Articles

Topics covered this week included sale of goods, wrongful dismissal, family law (access by the birth mother to an adopted child) and municipal law (interpretation of a zoning bylaw relating to lot coverage).

Our brains are constantly processing the information that bombards us. We need to make sense of the world—and fast—so we use stereotypes to fill any gaps. These stereotypes lead to biases that can affect our judgement and the way we make decisions. Is there something we can do to reduce these biases and prevent them from influencing our choices?

I gave birth to my fourth child on March 9 2019 and when he was barely a month old I did something I wouldn’t have done with any of the babies before: I travelled downtown to attend the Women’s Law Forum’s CLE entitled “Rethinking having it All, a Solo and Small Firm Perspective on Parenting While Lawyering”.

For lawyers looking to become more effective in the workplace, a new study suggests that the answer may be found in a practice not typically covered in law school: mindfulness.

Restrictive covenants, particularly non-compete clauses, are regular features in franchise agreements. When franchise agreements often span many years, facts and circumstances may change with a franchisor’s reorganization, expansion of the franchise system, assignment of franchises, and any other number of factors that change the landscape within which the franchise agreement must be interpreted.

Following are the summaries for this past week’s civil decisions of the Court of Appeal for Ontario.

The Construction Lien Amendment Act was passed in December 2017 and substantively changed the Construction Lien Act, now the Construction Act . Its primary purposes were to: (i) modernize the existing Construction Lien Act; (ii) provide prompt payment legislation throughout Ontario; and (iii) introduce adjudication provisions for disputes arising in the course of a contract.

A lawyer shares her technology practice tips.

The Supreme Court of Canada recently held, in its highly anticipated decision in Telus Communications Inc. v. Wellman, that business customers of Telus cannot avoid the terms of a mandatory arbitration clause by joining a class action with consumers who are not bound by the arbitration clause.

In this global marketplace, where business across borders has become commonplace, in litigation it is to be expected that some parties or key witnesses may reside outside Ontario. In this article the author describes the tools available to obtain evidence outside Ontario, and the criteria that apply to each of them.