In the Vancouver Sun, Ian Mulgrew writes about the Law Society of British Columbia’s musings to open legal services to more competition.
Category British Columbia
Technology-Assisted and Remote Evidence Presentation: A Practice Resource for BC Lawyers
The British Columbia Law Institute resource on technology-assisted and remote evidence presentation has just been posted to the Social Science Research Network.
BC Family Justice Social Lab
By: Nicole Aylwin
An exciting new approach to addressing access to justice issues in BC’s family justice system is underway!
Read about BC’s pioneering Family Justice Social Lab in Kari D. Boyle’s great SLAW post.
The idea for the BC Family Justice Social Lab grew out of a two-day workshop funded by the BC Law Foundation/Legal Services Society Research Fund and facilitated by Adam Kahane and Monica Pohlmann of Reos Partners.
Some resources from this workshop are attached to this post as a pdf document.
Legal Aid and International Human Rights Standards
By: John-Paul Boyd
Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada has just released a draft report for public comment, “The Right to Legal Aid: How BC’s Legal Aid System Fails to Comply with International Law.” The authors argue that reductions in funding leave “even the most basic legal aid needs of British Columbians” unmet, with a disproportionate impact on women and marginalized groups, which ultimately undermines the “entire justice system.” The authors note that the inadequate funding of legal aid has social impacts that extend far beyond the justice system to affect the “social fabric of British Columbians and their economy.”
Read the LRWC’s statement on the new report. Download the report in Word format or as a PDF.
Read Ian Mulgrew’s article on the new report from the Vancouver Sun.
Online Interest in BC Family Law Surges With New Family Law Act
By: Mark Benton
From Jacqueline Wood at LSS:
It’s been a year since the Family Law Act came into force and that year has been a big one for our Family Law in BC website (FLWS). On March 18, 2013, the Family Law Act (FLA) came into force, bringing major changes to family law in BC. Leading up to that date, the FLWS was completely overhauled so that it was 100% accurate for the new law.
With a change in law that big, you’d expect the FLWS to get some extra attention. We did. What we didn’t expect though was the scale of the attention and how sustained it has been.
To put it in perspective, in the year leading up to the FLA, the FLWS got just under 1,100 visits a day. That’s a solid number. When the FLWS first launched in 2002 — a long time ago by Internet standards — we averaged 2,500 visits a month. So 2,500 in less than three days isn’t bad. On the day the act came into force, the FLWS got just shy of 3,500 visits. That’s not too surprising, though. It’s a big change in law and the FLWS is the go-to reference for family law in BC.
What was surprising? The number of visits didn’t really drop back down. We thought at the time that there would be a surge in numbers as people heard about the FLA in the news, but after a while everything would go back to normal. That hasn’t really been the case, though. In the year following the launch of the FLA, the FLWS has been getting roughly double the amount of visits as it did before.
It turns out that a complete revision of the law not only raised public awareness, but also changed the way people use online resources to find legal information.
ajrn.org 