Every year a team under The Honourable Justice Chadwick publishes a table of damage awards in personal injury actions across Ontario. We are pleased to provide this year’s copy of the compendium, updated to October 31, 2015. You can download the compendium here, or on the CCLA website’s Civil Litigation Practice Portal.
Many thanks to Justice Chadwick and Gwendolen Boyle, law student at the university of Ottawa, for compiling the updated list!
We hope everyone is gearing down for a relaxing holiday season! We are busy planning out our research training sessions for next year, and were hoping to gauge some interest from you. Let us know what sessions you might be interested in attending below:
For those who can’t frequently make it to Toronto for CPD sessions, it might interest you to know that we receive copies of the papers from all LSUC, Hamilton, and London programming.
Here are some highlights from the most recent CPD we’ve received; click on the titles to view the full table of contents. If you would like a copy of any of the following articles, feel free to drop by the library to have a look, or email us and we can scan and send it to you.
Practice Gems: Commercial Leasing Essentials 2015 (Sept. 21, 2015)
Commercial Mortgage Transactions 2015 (Sept. 17, 2015)
The Twelve-Minute Civil Litigator 2015 (Sept. 18, 2015)
Practice Gems: Probate Essentials 2015 (Sept. 10, 2015)
Annotated Partnership Agreement 2015 (September 29, 2015)
Find below recently published Ottawa decisions, available for free through CanLII.org.
Family Matters
Cameron v Cameron (2015 ONSC 5698)
costs — proceeding — motion — abandoned — settle
Justice P. Smith
Cesare v Myre (2015 ONSC 6074)
costs — successful — hours multiplied by rates — lawyer — litigants
Justice P. Smith
Gibson v Ullrich (2015 ONSC 5979)
children — process server — school — equalization — spousal support
Justice M. Shelston
Civil Matters
Vachon v Canada Revenue Agency (2015 ONSC 6096)
defamation — email — internet — tort of intrusion upon seclusion — complaint
Justice C. Hackland
Small Claims Matters
Shamar Maintenance Inc. v Bank and Cooper Property Ltd. (2015 CanLII 62396)
defence — set aside — second settlement conference — faxes — motion
Deputy Justice P. Lepsoe
American case law is sometimes quite difficult to track down, as most of the time our basic Canadian database subscriptions do not cover other jurisdictions. (That’s why we added British case law database JustisOne to our subscriptions; check out our introductory post if you haven’t had the chance yet!)
So where can we find free access to American Case Law?
1. Google Scholar is always the first place we look. With a clean interface and a large collection of cases from state and federal courts, it’s a fantastic place to start. From the main search screen, select “Case Law” (or articles/patents if you are looking for those), and enter your search terms. Your results page should look quite familiar to you; you can click through to open a case. Note that you can also click on the “How Cited” link at the top to see any articles or cases that refer to it. Often times even if Google Scholar does not have the case you are looking for, it will still contain a reference to the case as well as alternative citations that you can try elsewhere.
2. Findlaw houses a lot of case law as well, as well as commentary and links to the state and district courts. To search for case law, you can enter a party’s name in the “Search for a Case” box, or alternatively, click on “Advanced Search” to enter in any other information you know. (This is where docket numbers can come in handy!) Results will bring you to a summary page, where you can click on the “Read” button to be linked to the full decision, although sometimes this will be behind a paywall.
3. Justia also offers free access to online American case law, as it brings together decisions from the Federal Courts and many of the district courts websites as well. You can search using the bar at the top right, or browse through the different courts below.
4. Casetext is the CanLIIConnects of the United States, as it features case law and added commentary by members of the legal community.
5. If you happen to know at what court the decision was made, you can often head directly to the State or District Court website to browse a database of their own decisions. Often times these are also included in the databases mentioned above.
6. Let us know! We have access to other libraries and their collections as well, so if we can help track down the case(s) you’re looking for, send us an email!
One of the most frequent services we provide here in the library is the locating of old case law, quite often old British cases that are not available on the basic Lexis or Carswell subscriptions. We have been keeping our eye out for an affordable solution to having to trudge through and scan the old British case reporters, and after demoing JustisOne for the past month we are pleased to announce it as a new subscription available for use here at the CCLA library!
With JustisOne we now have electronic in-library access to a wealth of British case law and legislation, including noted up links to Canadian case law as well.
Beyond the access to British materials, JustisOne also re-envisions the case law search, eliminating boolean searching in favour of a category searching system that gives more applicable and refined search results. Some of my other favourite features include the Precedent Maps, which visualize how the case law has been treated, and the Key Paragraphs, which eliminates the guesswork of noting up by directly linking to the paragraphs that have been quoted in subsequent decisions.
We’ve greatly enjoyed playing around with this new software, and we are excited that it is now available for library users as well! If you need access to British materials you can feel free to come and try it out yourself, or as always you can get in touch with us and we will be happy to send them to you.
I’m sure most of you are well aware of the valuable Continuing Professional Development programs that are held by the Law Society in Toronto every year. Perhaps you’re even aware that the CCLA Library receives the materials from these programs in our collection. What is lesser known we find, is the fact that most of these papers are available online through a service called Access CLE. Access CLE provides LSUC articles since 2004, and articles that are older than 18 months are free of charge. Some of these papers include:
The unfortunate part of all of this is that the search engine for Access CLE is somewhat frustrating to use and many find it difficult to locate what they are looking for. Instead, the best way to search for articles is by using the Infolocate search engine, which integrates Access CLE into its collection. You can search as follows:
If you prefer, you can also browse what is available by going to the Access CLE website. Click on your area of law under “Browse Collections”, and select which year you would like to browse.
As mentioned, the CCLA collects all of these materials in print as well, so if there is something you would like that was released in the past 18 months, we can get that for you for free. Just give us a shout!
Research made even easier! We are pleased to announce that you can now contact the CCLA Library through our new chat service. Simply click on the “Chat Now” button to connect with one of our Library Staff.
Now during regular office hours (8:30am – 5:00pm, Monday to Friday), you can chat with a Librarian and get case searches, precedents, historical legislation, secondary sources, document retrieval, and more, all free of charge.
So make sure to bookmark this page for the next time you need legal resources!
We are always excited to welcome new students to the CCLA Library! In anticipation of the influx of new summer and articling students we have scheduled some tours for the end of May and beginning of June.
These tours are a great opportunity to meet library staff and learn about library resources, training opportunities, and legal services which may support and assist you in your practice. We also encourage any and all to sign up for the CCLA Newsletter to begin learning about news, events, and opportunities in the East Region.
Tours will be held beginning May 12 on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:30 AM, and usually take between 15 to 20 minutes. Please email library@ccla-abcc.ca or call 613-233-7386 x221 to schedule a tour.
Perhaps long overdue, the E-laws Ontario website for provincial legislation has revamped its user interface in favour of a more modern and accessible look and feel. Fortunately, the new interface is much cleaner and easier to navigate; unfortunately, not all of the valuable content made the transfer.
So what’s new for you? You can now Browse or Search current or source law conveniently by selecting the tab on the left-hand sidebar. An advanced search is now available, through which you can use boolean operators (AND/OR, etc.). A full explanation of the advanced search operators can be found here. Point-in-time legislation is also available back to January 2, 2004, and previous versions are now linked on the statute/regulation pages themselves.
The Table of Public Statutes and Responsible Ministers has moved, and is accessible from the ‘Legislative Tables’ link on the homepage. Unfortunate casualties of the migration were the Detailed Legislative History tables, which provided legislative history information for each statute by provision number and which are no longer available. As these tables were the primary reason I used e-Laws previously, for now there will be little motivation for me to use the new site over CanLII, which houses much of the same content.
Speaking of which, the CanLII site administrators have also notified its users that there will be a slight delay in updating the site with Ontario law, as they work to interface with the new e-Laws. No document versions will be missed and they are working to resolve the issue.
As always, if you have any difficulty or have any questions, let us know!