31 March 2016

Save the Date! New Course on Difficult Family Law Issues Coming to Vancouver

A new one-day course on difficult family law issues, "A Rock & A Hard Place: Complex Issues in Family Law Practice" is coming to the Pan Pacific in Vancouver, British Columbia in April. The course is being put on by the Trial Lawyers Association of BC and is being chaired by lawyers Magal Huberman and Zara Suleman.

Here's how the promo material from TLABC describes the course:
Family law practice can be challenging. Sometimes (or often) we can have files that have no easy answers. TLABC's 2016 Family Law Seminar A Rock & A Hard Place: Complex Issues in Family Law Practice is designed to address some of the more advanced issues in family law. With problems to solve that are as diverse as our clients, we benefit from the enriching perspectives of the judiciary, family counsel, criminal lawyers, Crown counsel, community advocates, police and the Ministry of Justice.
Faculty include:
  • Megan Ellis, QC and Bill Story, noted Vancouver family law lawyers;
  • The Honourable Judge Patricia Bond, from the Surrey Registry of the BC Provincial Court;
  • Professor Margaret Jackson from Simon Fraser;
  • Vicky Law from Battered Women's Support Services;
  • Dr. Susan Gamache, a marriage and family therapist based in Vancouver;
  • Jack Hittrich, a noted Surrey family law lawyer; and,
  • Penelope Lipsack from the BC Ministry of Justice.
Topics include:
  • family violence and projections orders;
  • using counselling and collaborative tools in litigation; 
  • interjurisdictional issues in custody matters; and,
  • allegations of child alienation.
Here are the details...
Date
22 April 2016
Place
Pan Pacific Hotel, Vancouver
Price
$111.60 to $471.60, varying depending on membership status with TLABC and year of call; additional discounts available to articled students and law students
Register
www.tlabc.org

27 March 2016

Interested in Adopting This Blog?

It's becoming more and more difficult for me to maintain this blog, and I'm looking for a British Columbia family law lawyer who's interested in taking it over. The blog gets between 400 and 600 pageviews per weekday, less on weekends, has 1597 published comments and this is its 383rd post.

Unfortunately, my job at the Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family is taking up an increasing amount of my time, and I'm afraid I'm just not able to keep this blog as up to date as I'd like to. I'm doing more writing for organizations like Slaw and LawNow, which is letting me focus on theory, access to justice issues and topical public legal education, but is also robbing me of the time I normally have to write here.

Ideally, you'd write an article or two each month focussing on developments in family law, practice and procedure, commonly misunderstood legal issues and common legal needs and so forth. You'd expect that your posts will be read by the bench and bar -- incidentally, this blog was the first legal blog cited in a Canadian court judgment! -- as well as the public, and that you'll occasionally provoke some controversy with your writing. One of the things that's set this blog apart, I think, has been my interest in taking positions on legal issues, not just passively reporting on them or treating bad options as equal to good options. I'd hope that you'd make recommendations, promote best practices and discourage foolish, self-centred behaviour.

You should also expect to reply to two to three comments a week. Most of the comments this blog receives are spam from spell casters (believe it or not), lawyers (for shame), scammers (hardly a surprise) and the illuminati (or so they say). The rest are a mix of genuine commentary that contributes to the dialogue and questions about readers' personal situations. You can't give legal advice through this blog, of course, but you can give legal information.

You'll also need to expect that your writing will be copied and republished. Use of this blog is subject to a Creative Commons licence that allows readers to save, store, copy, reuse, repurpose and republish its contents as they wish, without the need to obtain my permission, subject only to three restrictions: that they do not copy or republish this material for commercial purposes; that they cite this blog as the source of the material they have used; and, that they publish the material they create with material from this blog available for others to copy and republish on the same terms. It will be condition of my transfer of this blog that you continue to publish on the terms of this licence.

Another condition will be that you keep the primary name of the blog as "JP Boyd on Family Law" in order to maintain consistency with the branding of the wikibook of the same name. You can add whatever you'd like to after that to identify it with yourself or your form.

A final condition will be that all articles published prior to you taking the blog over continue to remain published and that I continue, except for guest posts, to be identified as their author. You can of course add whatever editorial comments you want to make to those posts if you take a different view.... as long as you're clearly identified as the author of those comments!

So... anyone interested? If you'd like to talk, call me at my office at 403-261-0341. Otherwise, send me an email at the address you'll find on www.jpboyd.com.