Law Times

March 12, 2012

The premier weekly newspaper for the legal profession in Ontario

Issue link: https://digital.lawtimesnews.com/i/57833

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 0 of 15

TRAILBLAZER DIES Justice Patrick Gravely helped with first unified family court P4 Billions of dollars invested, not a penny lost. $4.00 • Vol. 23, No. 9 ntitled-3 1 MED-ARB Lawyer responds to critics P7 FOCUS ON P9 Litigation COVERING ONTARIO'S LEGAL SCENE • WWW.LAWTIMESNEWS.COM L AW TIMES 5/4/10 2:49:21 PM ntitled-2 1 BY KENNETH JACKSON For Law Times T he mere mention of a lawyer using anything but a BlackBerry smartphone would have raised a few eyebrows several years ago. Some may have even laughed at the idea. But that's not the case anymore. Times have changed and more lawyers are trad- ing their trusted BlackBerrys produced by Research in Motion Ltd. for an Apple iPhone, iPad tablet or other mobile operating device. For Toronto criminal lawyer David Rose, the issue comes down to what makes his job easier. "I find the iPad is far more powerful as a platform to access documents and the Internet," says Rose of Neuberger Rose LLP. "The BlackBerry is an inferior platform for searching the web, word processing, and looking at documents." Rose still owns a BlackBerry Torch phone. But he only uses it for phone calls. That wasn't always the case. Rose had always been a BlackBerry guy. "I got [RIM's] PlayBook a year ago within its first week of coming out. I was so thrilled to have a tablet," says Rose, who notes things then began to sour. "I soldiered through with the PlayBook. I had two of them before I finally gave up on them." He then switched to an iPad. "I haven't looked back. It's an unbelievably powerful device. Frankly, I haven't had any problems with the iPad and I used to have tons of problems with the PlayBook. I really, really wanted to believe in the PlayBook." RIM came out with the PlayBook a year after Apple released the successful iPad tablet, a device that has since turned Rose into an Apple guy. March 12, 2012 7/7/11 9:10:05 AM Are lawyers ready to give up BlackBerrys? Company's missteps has some switching to Apple products Rose is far from alon e in making the switch. According to The American Lawyer's 2011 technology survey, 96 per cent of responding Am Law 200 firms said they have attor- neys using iPhones. But not everyone is ready to give up on the BlackBerry yet. The reasons often include its security features. "I'm staying with BlackBerry and there are several rea- sons why," says Andrew Feldstein of Feldstein Family Law Group in Markham, Ont. Feldstein refers, for example, to the BlackBerry enterprise server that gives customers significant control over their device. "Your IT people can have access to all the contacts, all the e-mails on your BlackBerry. All the type of central, important things to someone if they lost their BlackBerry can easily be recreated. Even their BlackBerry Messenger contact list can be recreated," says Feldstein. "In other words, you can wipe out the old one, have a new one, and have all of your important information restored, which I understand the Apple can't do as well." Those features are also vital from a central management perspective, says Feldstein, who has been a BlackBerry user since the days of the side dial. "When my IT person looks at our BlackBerry exchange server and someone is complaining they are having a problem, their e-mails aren't going through or their BBMs aren't going through, he can see the last time that BlackBerry was communicating with the office exchange server and know exactly when it stopped working, which can be very important in terms of getting it to work again in a much faster way." But that's not the only security measure that keeps After struggling with the BlackBerry PlayBook, criminal defence lawyer David Rose has since become an avid iPad user. Photo: Laura Pedersen Feldstein with BlackBerry. "Everything with BlackBerry is encrypted when you're See RIM's, page 5 BY KENDYL SEBESTA Law Times T 'From our client's perspective, she was relieved to have another step of the process completed,' says Paul Koven, who represented the plaintiff. he Ontario Court of Ap- peal has upheld a rare Divisional Court decision to award a former Deluxe Windows of Canada employee nearly $470,000 aſt er her supervi- sor sexually assaulted her. Writing on behalf of a unani- mous appeal court panel in the March 2 ruling, Justice Paul Rou- leau dismissed an appeal by a part owner of Deluxe Windows, Mickey Weig. Rouleau found that although a general damages and cost award of more than $400,000 was "high and outside of the generally expect- ed range," it didn't warrant interfer- ence by the court. Weig had argued the damages were "grossly disproportionate" to those the plaintiff in the matter suf- fered. He suggested a review of the case law showed the appropriate range of damages resulting from the sexual assault of an adult victim to be between $75,000 and $125,000. But Rouleau ruled otherwise, fi nding the appeal court couldn't substitute its own assessment of damages merely because it would have awarded a diff erent fi gure. "Although it is certainly gener- ous and may not have been one this court would make, it is not so plain- ly unreasonable and unjust as to sat- isfy the court that no jury reviewing the evidence as a whole, and acting judicially could have reached it." Th e plaintiff moved to Cana- da in June 2002 and worked as a commissioned salesperson from December 2003 to May 2005 at De- luxe Windows of Canada and De- luxe Windows Industries. Weig was her direct supervisor. During that time, Weig inap- propriately touched the plaintiff and forced sexual intercourse on her. Weig also confi ned the plaintiff without lawful authority on two oc- casions and uttered threats to cause her death or serious bodily harm, according to the ruling. Weig was criminally convicted in 2008 of four counts of sexual assault, one count of knowingly ut- tering a threat to cause death, two counts of unlawful confi nement, and one count of uttering a threat to cause serious bodily harm to the plaintiff . According to the appeal court See Plaintiff , page 5 Childview_LT_Jan24_11.indd 1 1/19/11 11:04:05 AM Court upholds $470K award for workplace assault PM #40762529

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Law Times - March 12, 2012