Blog

This week we are highlighting a successful resolution by our lawyer Will Hume. Our client reached out to our firm for help following a dispute with his spouse that resulted in him being charged with domestic assault.

COVID-19 was a long time ago at this point, and thank goodness for it, but the gears of the judiciary move slowly. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The Supreme Court is one—quite small—body that has to handle appeals from all over the country in any legal field. They only have so much time on their hands, and these cases need to move through usually at least two levels of court before the Supreme Court even considers whether they want to look at them.

If you’ve been charged with a crime, is the crown allowed to bring up your past criminal history to make comments on your character? As is often the case with the law, the answer is that it depends on a couple of key factors. These factors are laid out in the Corbett framework that originated in 1988. A defendant can bring forward a Corbett application to request that the judge exclude such evidence.

What you say to a lawyer is one–hundred percent confidential, nearly all of the time. In, by far, the vast majority of cases that confidentiality is held to tighter than a boa constictor. It is near-absolute in Canadian Law. If past results were predictive of future results, it could be said that if you were charged with a crime it would be a near certainty that this blog would not be at all relevant to you.

The law is a tricky beast of a thing, but you want to be up to date on new developments in the Supreme Court in case you ever get unjustly arrested, where do you go? You go here!

DUI Law is something that we like to keep up to date on, you know, being a DUI-focused criminal defence firm and all that. We work hard to provide all of our lawyers with the most up-to-date information available to secure optimal results for our clients. In the past little while there have been a handful of changes in the world of DUI law, and we figured we’d share our perspective.

Given the recent, let’s say, difficulties at the US border, today feels like as good a time as any to give you readers a glimpse into how seriously we take your information. The Law Society of Ontario (LSO) is a very useful tool for any lawyer in the province (and plenty outside of it). They’ve got a checklist for lawyers crossing into the United States, one that we follow religiously, so we figured we’d share some of the steps here just as generally guidelines for keeping your information private when crossing the border.

Everybody’s heard the phrase “oh, think about the children,” at least a few times in their lives. Oftentimes, it’s used by politicians as a tool to prey on the worst fears of concerned parents in order to sway them toward a policy position. Nowadays it seems to go hand in hand with a desire to censor sensitive material, or otherwise more fiercely regulate the internet.

You wouldn’t expect a sovereign federal state to have provisions for its own parcelization hidden within its legislation, but we do. The existence of the Clarity Act complicates the question of Albertan secession by providing a doorknob on the exit way, but the secessionists still don’t have any keys.

Carney goes after bail in the legal system. Let’s talk about it. First off, this isn’t a shock to anybody who’s been following Carney’s announcements, bail reform was discussed in his public safety plan from April of this year, and frankly it would be hard to imagine this government trying for a second term if this issue remained unaddressed. Advisable or not, there is clear public appetite for this kind of reform.