Law Times

Law Times • augusT 22, 2016 Page 3 www.lawtimesnews.com Canadian A2J apps at the starting line BY ALEX ROBINSON Law Times N eed help navigat- ing the Small Claims Court process? Expect an app for that soon. New apps have been devel- oped to make legal information and services more accessible to the general public and are pop- ping up in Canada. While the Canadian industry is still in its infancy compared with that of the United States, more phone- and web-based apps have started to emerge to tackle access to justice issues. Billing itself as the "Google Maps for Law," Knomos is one such app that allows lawyers to provide their clients with curat- ed legal content. Once it becomes available to the public, the web-based app will use machine learning and data visualization to provide a visual database of the web of le- gal information that exists for both lawyers and clients. "At its core, it taps into the fact that as human beings, we are all visual learners," says Adam La France, Knomos' co-founder and CEO. "The reality of the human anatomy is your brain can process visual information 60,000 times faster than it takes to decode text. We're just hardwired that way." La France says a version of the app that will map publicly acces- sible information, such as court decisions, will be available later this summer, and he expects a paid version geared toward legal professionals will come out by June 2017. The Knomos CEO says that at the heart of his app and others like is the pursuit to tackle access to justice issues. "It's growing because there is the need for it to grow. You wouldn't see this proliferation of apps or an expanding Canadian legal tech marketplace if there wasn't a fundamental demand for it," he says. "We talk about this weird dis- connect in terms of supply and demand in the legal industry. You hear about clients who can't find lawyers and lawyers who can't find work, and I think that is just indicative of a bigger issue on a more systemic level." Knomos was one of five start- ups to deliver presentations at the Canadian Bar Association's "The Pitch" event this August. The event, which was held at the CBA's conference in Ottawa, gave early-stage startups seven minutes to make their case in front of a panel of judges. Beagle, a company that uses machine learning to analyze contracts, won the competition and received a two-week resi- dency with the LegalX initiative at MaRS Discovery District. All of the finalists got the chance to interview with the Chinese Angels Mentorship Program — an incubation pro- gram for startups looking to enter the Chinese market and possibly snag a $200,000 in- vestment. Mitch Kowalski, a lawyer and legal services consultant, says the potential funding that can come out of competitions such as The Pitch can be vital for early-stage Canadian apps. Kowalski says a lack of funding is likely the big- gest reason why the Canadian industry for such services has lagged behind the U.S., but there is a lot of room for it to grow. "Unless you are going to fund it yourself, or you and your friends are going to fund it, it's re- ally hard to get the money to start building this stuff out," he says. Ryerson's Legal Innovation Zone is in the process of holding its own Access to Justice Chal- lenge, which had 10 startups pitch to judges for the chance to be one of six finalists, who will compete for up to $25,000 in seed money. Small Claims Wizard was among the 10 startups that pitched in the initial round. The web-based app walks people through the process of filing a claim in Small Claims Court. JusticeTrans is an app that is one of the six finalists and looks to increase access to justice for the Canadian transgender com- munity by providing informa- tion about transgender rights. Jena McGill, an assistant law professor at the University of Ottawa, says competitions like the Pitch and the Access to Jus- tice Challenge give apps impor- tant exposure. "It brings some of this in- novation that's happening in the private sphere, where indi- viduals are working on this stuff among themselves or on their own. It brings it into the public realm," she says. "It gives it a public face. It gives it public funds, which is the most important thing [and] it also goes a great distance to mainstreaming this stuff." McGill is currently working with other researchers to ana- lyze Canadian apps that seek to bridge the access to justice gap in a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Re- search Council. The project, called Emerging technologies solutions to access to justice: opportunities and risks of mobile and web-based apps, is looking at the oppor- tunities, risks and potential for such apps in Canada. McGill says some of the po- tential risks of access to justice apps her group is analyzing in- clude security, privacy and the unauthorized practice of law. A large challenge to the de- livery of legal services via apps is uneven access to technology, McGill says. "It's great if everybody has a smartphone and can download these apps and knows how to use them, but we know that's simply not the case. The digital divide is still there," she says. McGill and her fellow re- searchers are looking to gather information on these issues while the Canadian legal app indus- try is still relatively small to help guide solutions to potential risks. "We're hoping to use this proj- ect to set a research agenda or policy agenda moving forward for how we — being the legal com- munity — need to be strategic and specific and start to think about the apps phenomenon as some- thing that is happening," she says. "So we need to take the bull by the horns and start to think about how we want to address, how we want to regulate and how we want to leverage these apps." LT NEWS Adam La France says the app he created will help tackle access to justice issues. How the legal community in Ontario gets its news Understand cutting-edge legal affairs, discover the latest news and benefit from expert commentary for just 55 cents a day! SUBSCRIBE TODAY AND RECEIVE: • 40 issues a year covering Ontario's legal landscape • FREE digital edition and unlimited online access to past issues • FREE Canadian Legal Newswire, a weekly e-newsletter from the editors of Law Times and Canadian Lawyer Subscribe to Law Times today for only $199*! To place an order please call 416.609.3800 or 1.800.387.5164 Order online at: www.lawtimesnews.com/subscribe *Plus applicable taxes @lawtimes Contact us for more information: Canlawyer.lawtimes@thomsonreuters.com | 416.609.3800 | 1.800.387.5164 Access a free preview at: bitly.com/LawTimes-FreePreview Juror ruling prompts call to look at Criminal Code BY TALI FOLKINS Law Times ith the Ontario Court of Appeal having ruled on jurors' use of extrinsic informa- tion in a recent case, the president of the Criminal Lawyers' Association says it may be necessary to amend the Criminal Code in order to get a better handle on the issue. "You can't say if jurors are or are not doing this at any level that is ap- preciable because you only find out in the rare case where a juror hap- pens to mention something," says Anthony Moustacalis. "Maybe jurors really do obey the judge's instructions. In my experi- ence, it seems that they generally do. But do I really know? The an- swer is no. Maybe they're Googling stuff all the time." The only way to know for sure and assess the necessity of any changes to the jury system, accord- ing to Moustacalis, is to amend the Criminal Code to allow research- ers to interview jury members anonymously about their experi- ences. "The fact of the matter is that people are people and they might not always remember the limits of what they're allowed to do or they might stray," he says. The comments follow the ap- peal court's ruling in R. v. Farinacci, a case that demonstrated the ease with which jurors can now find information about the defendant outside of the evidence presented during the trial. In their ruling on June 3, a panel of three judges re- fused to overturn the convictions of two brothers for possession of the proceeds of crime and conspiracy to traffic in cocaine. The brothers, Lucas Farinacci and Leonard Fari- nacci Jr., had argued their right to a fair trial had been compromised because jurors in the case, with the help of Google and other sources, had come across information about them that hadn't come up in court. The appeal came about as a result of a chance event at a coffee shop. Prior to sentencing but after the brothers' conviction, someone at the coffee shop overheard one of the ju- rors, in a conversation with a friend, mention that another me mber of Emond_LT_June15_15.indd 1 2015-06-10 2:47 PM Zero-tolerance conundrum Lawyers say pendulum has swung too far against accused in domestic violence cases BY TALI FOLKINS Law Times he justice system has taken the idea of zero toler- ance in domestic assault to such an extreme that it's unfair to defendants and no longer works in the best interests of Ontario families, says a 40- year veteran of criminal law. It's an opinion, however, vociferously opposed by at least one lawyer who helps victims of domestic violence. Leo Adler, of Adler Bytensky Prutschi Shikhman, says the issue of domestic assault has become "political football" over the last 25 to 30 years with largely undesirable results. While Adler emphasizes he doesn't want to diminish the tragedy of family violence, he says the situation has now reached a point where police called to family violence situa- tions are unduly afraid to release the defendant even in cases that don't appear serious. "Nobody wants to be the person who says, 'O.K., I'm going to release you,' because you might be the one in a million or whatever the statistic is who might end up killing your spouse," says Adler. "In a lot of these cases, there's no sign of violence, there's no sign of anything having occurred. You simply have the word of the complainant. And the person gets arrested and I can tell you that again in the majority of cases, the police don't even bother to try to take a statement from the accused, usually the male. . . . They don't ask because it doesn't make a difference because they're going to arrest you no matter what." Bail hearings in domestic violence cases, he says, are "a l- ways run on the presumption of guilt" and, if the court does grant bail, it's generally under strict conditions with the de- fendant required to live with a surety. The result, according to Adler, is often a divided family with the added financial strain OBA LAUDED Association honoured for mental-health efforts P4 CAMPAIGN SPENDING Bencher candidate calls for expense limits P6 FOCUS ON Legal Innovation P8 'In a lot of these cases, there's no sign of violence, there's no sign of anything having occurred,' says Leo Adler. Photo: Robin Kuniski See Silence, page 2 See Bail, page 2 There's no way to know if jurors are doing their own research on cases, says Anthony Moustacalis. PM #40762529 & $#&!&jmmm$cYa[bbWh$Yec ntitled-4 1 12-03-20 10:44 AM $5.00 • Vol. 26, No. 20 June 15, 2015 Follow LAW TIMES on www.twitter.com/lawtimes L AW TIMES T W Juror ruling prompts call to look at Criminal Code BY TALI FOLKINS Law Times ith the Ontario Court of Appeal having ruled on jurors' use of extrinsic informa- tion in a recent case, the president of the Criminal Lawyers' Association says it may be necessary to amend the Criminal Code in order to get a better handle on the issue. "You can't say if jurors are or are not doing this at any level that is ap- preciable because you only find out in the rare case where a juror hap- pens to mention something," says Anthony Moustacalis. "Maybe jurors really do obey the judge's instructions. In my experi- ence, it seems that they generally do. But do I really know? The an- swer is no. Maybe they're Googling stuff all the time." The only way to know for sure and assess the necessity of any changes to the jury system, accord- ing to Moustacalis, is to amend the Criminal Code to allow research- ers to interview jury members anonymously about their experi- ences. "The fact of the matter is that people are people and they might not always remember the limits of what they're allowed to do or they might stray," he says. The comments follow the ap- peal court's ruling in R. v. Farinacci, a case that demonstrated the ease with which jurors can now find information about the defendant outside of the evidence presented during the trial. In their ruling on June 3, a panel of three judges re- fused to overturn the convictions of two brothers for possession of the proceeds of crime and conspiracy to traffic in cocaine. The brothers, Lucas Farinacci and Leonard Fari- nacci Jr., had argued their right to a fair trial had been compromised because jurors in the case, with the help of Google and other sources, had come across information about them that hadn't come up in court. The appeal came about as a result of a chance event at a coffee shop. Prior to sentencing but after the brothers' conviction, someone at the coffee shop overheard one of the ju- rors, in a conversation with a friend, mention that another me mber of Emond_LT_June15_15.indd 1 2015-06-10 2:47 PM Zero-tolerance conundrum Lawyers say pendulum has swung too far against accused in domestic violence cases BY TALI FOLKINS Law Times he justice system has taken the idea of zero toler- ance in domestic assault to such an extreme that it's unfair to defendants and no longer works in the best interests of Ontario families, says a 40- year veteran of criminal law. It's an opinion, however, vociferously opposed by at least one lawyer who helps victims of domestic violence. Leo Adler, of Adler Bytensky Prutschi Shikhman, says the issue of domestic assault has become "political football" over the last 25 to 30 years with largely undesirable results. While Adler emphasizes he doesn't want to diminish the tragedy of family violence, he says the situation has now reached a point where police called to family violence situa- tions are unduly afraid to release the defendant even in cases that don't appear serious. "Nobody wants to be the person who says, 'O.K., I'm going to release you,' because you might be the one in a million or whatever the statistic is who might end up killing your spouse," says Adler. "In a lot of these cases, there's no sign of violence, there's no sign of anything having occurred. You simply have the word of the complainant. And the person gets arrested and I can tell you that again in the majority of cases, the police don't even bother to try to take a statement from the accused, usually the male. . . . They don't ask because it doesn't make a difference because they're going to arrest you no matter what." Bail hearings in domestic violence cases, he says, are "a l- ways run on the presumption of guilt" and, if the court does grant bail, it's generally under strict conditions with the de- fendant required to live with a surety. The result, according to Adler, is often a divided family with the added financial strain OBA LAUDED Association honoured for mental-health efforts P4 CAMPAIGN SPENDING Bencher candidate calls for expense limits P6 FOCUS ON Legal Innovation P8 'In a lot of these cases, there's no sign of violence, there's no sign of anything having occurred,' says Leo Adler. Photo: Robin Kuniski See Silence, page 2 See Bail, page 2 There's no way to know if jurors are doing their own research on cases, says Anthony Moustacalis. PM #40762529 & $#&!&jmmm$cYa[bbWh$Yec ntitled-4 1 12-03-20 10:44 AM $5.00 • Vol. 26, No. 20 June 15, 2015 Follow LAW TIMES on www.twitter.com/lawtimes L AW TIMES T W Check out lawtimesnews.com for insight from our regular online columnists Monica Goyal discusses the latest gadgets and trends in legal technology in Bits & Bytes From trade deals to foreign investment, Patrick Gervais keeps you up to date on business issues in Trade Matters Darcy Merkur brings a plaintiff-side perspective on insurance matters in Personal Injury Law

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