Course or Seminar Category: Dispute Resolution - Civil Legal Process and Professionalism

Legal Ethics

This course introduces students to ethics and professional responsibility in the legal profession. A core question will involve how we – individually and collectively – should act. Our focus will be both conceptual and practical. Students will be expected to participate extensively. The course has three main learning objectives.

Knowledge. The first objective is two-fold: to look at what the landscape of the legal profession is, can and should be; and then to situate lawyers and their conduct in that landscape. We will look at ethical codes that govern lawyers, their relationships with clients and the profession. We will also look more broadly at various aspects of lawyering and the profession, including self-regulation, the nature of the adversary system, demographics, ethical tensions between zealous representation and a commitment to the public interest, various practice contexts, access to justice and innovation.

Skills. The second objective of the course is to help students to think about what ethical issues arise in practice, how they arise and how they can – and in some cases must – be dealt with. To help develop these skills and identify available tools and resources, in addition to the assigned materials, we will regularly use hypothetical problems and exercises to spark thinking and active in-class discussion.

Reflection. The third objective – primarily through participation, a group presentation and a final paper – is to encourage students to identify and reflect on issues and topics of specific interest to them.

Legal Information Technology: Data Analysis & Coding for Access to Justice

In this course, students will engage with law as data, using new legal technologies that promise to shift how lawyers practice in coming years, with a particular emphasis on exploring implications for access to justice. The aim is to examine not how the law regulates new legal technologies, but rather how these technologies can or should be used by legal professionals to advance the rights and interests of marginalized groups.

The course will use a hands-on experiential pedagogy. That is, students will engage directly with new legal technologies – including by completing several small coding projects involving legal data analysis. In addition to exploring these technologies, students will critically reflect on their ethical, professional, social, and economic impacts, focusing on implications for low-income and otherwise marginalized groups.

No prior coding experience is required. The course recognizes that students may bring a range of prior skills and knowledge. Both learning and evaluation have been designed to allow students who are beginners to coding and legal data analysis opportunities to successfully explore a new area, while also allowing students who already have relevant technical skills – as well as students who want to push their skillsets further – to take on more advanced projects. As such, participation is weighted heavily and final projects can be completed with limited coding.

The course involves both synchronous and asynchronous components. After an initial synchronous introductory class, the first half of the course will be delivered asynchronously, through online modules and small coding projects. The instructor will be available for online troubleshooting sessions and for other support during the hours notionally set aside for classes in the weeks when modules and small coding projects are completed. Once the initial modules are completed, a synchronous discussion class will be held to explore ethical, professional, social and economic impacts, with some critical readings provided. The second half of the course will involve students working independently on a final project either individually or in groups (with the course instructor available for troubleshooting), presenting a draft of that project to colleagues for feedback, and finalizing the project.

Synchronous sessions will be delivered in a hybrid (hyflex) format, meaning that students can elect to attend any given synchronous session either in person or remotely via Zoom. Classes will be scheduled in 3-hour blocks.

Topics:

(1) Introduction to Coding & Access to Justice (Module 1: Automating the boring stuff)

(2) Data Gathering & Cleaning (Module 2: Finding legal datasets and creating new ones)

(3) Data Analysis (Module 3: I have some legal data, now what?)

(4) Artificial Intelligence (Module 4: Using generative AI to advance access to justice)

(5) Student Presentations of Draft Final Projects

Legal Drafting

This course is designed to help students develop practical skills in drafting clear and effective legal documents.  The focus will be on the form and substance of formal agreements supporting corporate and commercial transactions as well as certain dispute resolution scenarios.  Students will work with document precedents, review, draft, revise, and discuss various legal documents.  The work will include class discussions and take home assignments.

Legal Ethics

Truly, consideration of legal ethics will be an integral part of everything that you do and say in your career as a lawyer. Legal ethics define your relationship with your client, your relationship with other lawyers, your relationship with the Law Society, and your relationship with the public at large.
Using readings, class discussions, group presentations and a take-home exam, we will consider the concepts found in the Rules of Professional Conduct, and in the principles of confidentiality, competence, loyalty, interests, access to justice, professionalism, and self-regulation.

Evidence

This course will introduce students to the law of evidence in Canada. It will examine how the common law, statutes, and the Constitution interact to govern the proof of facts in both civil and criminal trials. Topics to be addressed include: burdens of proof; the role of the trial judge in managing the introduction of evidence; methods of presenting evidence; witness competency and compellability; relevance; and the various exclusionary rules that operate to limit the kinds of proof that can be received at trial (i.e. the rules governing hearsay, privilege, expert opinion evidence, etc.). The course will engage ethical issues that arise in the context of evidence law. It will consider how some rules of evidence have evolved historically, and it will attend to the social, political, and institutional contexts in which evidence law operates. The course will encourage critical reflection on the theories, purposes, and justifications that animate evidentiary rules, and on how those rules impact different individuals and communities.  

To prepare for each class, students will be asked to view pre-recorded lectures and/or complete assigned readings. Students will also complete 10 short online (eClass) exercises outside of class time, designed to help reinforce the material as the semester progresses. Class time will be dedicated to further lectures, discussions, practice exercises, and in-class evaluations.

Evidence

This course is an introduction to the law of evidence. What is evidence? When is evidence admissible? How does it get admitted? In this course, we will learn about the specific rules that apply to many categories of evidence, like hearsay, expert opinions, and privilege. But we will also learn about the general principles that inform the overall structure of our rules of evidence, and the common sense assumptions that underlie them. We will see what happens to the rules when those assumptions are challenged or proven untrue, the role Parliament has played in efforts to reform the rules of evidence, and the balance the court has struck between competing interests in light of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Civil Procedure II

This advanced course in Civil Procedure explores in greater depth certain topics dealt with in introductory civil procedure courses, and delves into other more advanced topics not previously studied. The subject matter includes the lawyer-client relationship (including conflicts of interest), motions, disposition without trial, cross-border litigation, discovery, insurance aspects of litigation, certificates of pending litigation, and interlocutory injunctions. Examination of the leading jurisprudence and recent case law under each topic is supplemented by extensive discussion of the practical aspects of and advocacy techniques associated with each procedure.

Legal Ethics

Legal ethics may be one of the only subjects in law school that every lawyer will encounter in practice. This course invites students to deeply engage, both conceptually and practically, not only with foundational principles of legal ethics, but also with lawyers’ duties and responsibilities to clients, to the profession, and to the wider community.  We will discuss and evaluate the tools lawyers may (or may not) have in approaching complicated legal ethical problems that present themselves, often unexpectedly, in a lawyer’s professional life. We will explore current practical dilemmas in selected practice areas.  We will also explore the influences of the adversary system on the pursuit of justice. (Please note that cameras are required to be on during class time in this remotely delivered course.)

International Commercial Arbitration

As the preferred means of resolving international commercial disputes, arbitration embodies the pursuit of excellence in dispute resolution. This new course examines the theory and practice of international commercial arbitration from its foundation in the New York Convention and the parties’ agreement to the way that procedural fairness is achieved across the legal traditions. It considers the arbitral process from delivery of the notice of arbitration through constitution of the tribunal and design of the arbitral process on to the hearing, the award and recourse against it. Through a combination of lectures and discussions, guest presentations, and exercises based on mock scenarios, students will gain insight into a growing area of practice in Canada that is critical to the functioning of the world economy.

Legal Drafting

This course is designed to help students develop practical skills in drafting clear and effective legal documents. The focus will be on the language, structure and organization of documents that create and support legal relationships such as formal contracts, letter agreements and licenses. Students review, analyze, prepare, present, and discuss various legal documents in corporate/commercial law and other substantive law areas. Students will work on selecting and adapting document precedents. The work will include class discussions and take-home assignments.