Adoption Update

It looks like I've found someone - a group really - who is interested in and well-suited to taking this blog over. I hope to make the transition by the beginning of September at the latest. More news to follow.

Update: 8 July 2016

In the very near future, Collaborative Divorce Vancouver will assume control of this blog. CDV is wonderful group of family law lawyers, family therapists and financial specialists who bring are trained in both collaborative settlement processes and mediation and focus on resolving their clients' legal disputes without going to court. I took my collaborative training in BC and was a member of CDV before I left for Alberta, and I am very pleased to have CDV take over my blog.

CDV has kindly agreed to keep all of my old posts, going back to 2008, live and online, and that all new content they post will be available for all to copy, save, reuse and repurpose on the same Creative Commons non-commercial, share-alike licence I've used for the past several years.

Although I'm giving up this blog, for the reasons I described in my post of 27 March 2016, I'm satisfied that it's in good hands and will continue to provide the same sort of insights and analysis readers are used to. I'll be following this blog after it changes hands, and I'm looking forward to the fantastic new content.

My sincere thanks to CDV and to all of my readers over these last eight years. Without your interest, I would never have kept the blog going as long as I did. Thank you.

 - John-Paul Boyd

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.

"JP Boyd on Family Law" Published

Today, the wiki became a wikibook when the first copies of the first print edition of the 670-page volume JP Boyd on Family Law were delivered to the library at the Vancouver Law Courts. The print run demonstrates the incredible potential behind the wikibook platform for the cost-effective delivery of public legal education. It is, I expect, the first of many editions to be released in the future as the wikibook is updated, by an editorial team of senior and junior family law lawyers, to keep pace with the continuing evolution of the law.

Photo: Clara Richardson

Copies of JP Boyd on Family Law will be distributed by Courthouse Libraries BC to every public library in the province as part of their LawMatters community outreach program.

I am tremendously grateful to everyone at Courthouse Libraries, in particular Johanne Blenkin, executive director, Drew Jackson, director of client services, and Nate Russell, legal community liaison, for their conception of and continuing enthusiastic support for this project. Thank you all very, very much.

Family Law Act Commentary Available

Courthouse Libraries BC has published two articles of mine on the new Family Law Act that may be useful for those in search of additional resources and commetary on the act.

The first, "Varying orders and setting aside agreements under the FLA," is a chart of the tests prescribed by the act to change orders and set aside agreements. The applicable tests differ depending on the subject matter and whether you're talking about an order or an agreement.

The second, "Adapting Joyce and Horn Models for Divorce Act and FLA," suggests some ways that the Joyce and Horn Models of guardianship, models that were commonly used to define the rights and responsibilities involved in joint guardianship under the old Family Relations Act, might be salvaged to define joint custody under the Divorce Act and the sharing of parental responsibilities among guardians under the Family Law Act.

In addition, the page Family Law Act Basics in my new wiki, JP Boyd on Family Law, has a complete plain-language breakdown of the new act.

BC Family Law Resource Relaunched as Wiki with Courthouse Libraries

I am very excited to announce that today Courthouse Libraries BC has relaunched my former website, JP Boyd's BC Family Law Resource, under their Clicklaw Wiki banner as JP Boyd on Family Law. This new wiki is completely up to date for the Family Law Act and the amended rules of the Provincial Court and the Supreme Court.

BC Family Law Resource

In early 2001 I got the bright idea of setting up a public legal education website that would provide a stem-to-stern overview of family law, written in plain language that would be accessible to as many British Columbians as possible. This was long before the Ministry of Justice had put together its brilliant website on family justice and five or six years before the Legal Services Society released its excellent Family Law in British Columbia website.

After months of writing and coding webpages by hand — using the high technology of Microsoft's WordPad no less! — I hit the "send" key in November, and my idea was up and running as JP Boyd's BC Family Law Resource at www.bcfamilylawresource.com.

As time passed, I added more and more pages and more and more features, such as editable templates for common court forms as well as examples of what the forms looked like when finished, child support and spousal support calculators, a table of cases mentioned in the website, an alphabetical index, a glossary of eight- or nine-hundred legal words and phrases, a list of websites run by British Columbia family law lawyers and law firms, an internal search engine powered by Google and more.

As my website grew, so did traffic. Over the past year, traffic has regularly peaked at over 1,000 unique sessions per day during the work week and a total of more than 27,000 sessions per month. Taking my annual expenses and this volume of traffic, plus the traffic to my blog, into account, I figure my costs are around six ten-thousandths of a cent per visitor.

The New Family Law Act

Needless to say, the enactment of the Family Law Act in 2011, though undoubtedly a very, very good thing for most British Columbians, became the source of much soul-searching for me. Not only was I aghast by the prospect of retooling the 58 primary pages and 15 or so subsidiary pages in my website, some of which are really quite lengthy, I began to be concerned about how my website would survive in the event I was hit by a bus, left practice or lost the energy to maintain the website for some other reason altogether.

Courthouse Libraries BC to the rescue!

JP Boyd on Family Law

I've had very a cordial working relationship with Courthouse Libraries for a number of years now and have collaborated with them on a number of training programs for lawyers, public librarians and the general public, working with wonderful people like Janet Freeman (the LawMatters program coordinator), Nate Russell (a legal community liaison), Meghan Maddigan (a legal community liaison) and Drew Jackson (the redoubtable director of client services). One of them, likely Nate or Drew, had the masochistic idea of converting my website to a wiki platform — the rather robust and user-friendly platform that makes Wikipedia work — under the Courthouse Libraries banner.

After some thought, I realized that the proposal was brilliant. It would give me the comfort of knowing that my website would survive any career changes or a cataclysmic loss of enthusiasm; it would expand the pool of people contributing to the website beyond myself, and perhaps create a sense of community ownership; and, the content I had created would be significantly enriched with the input of people with different voices and different opinions. Even better, the wiki platform included a nifty book mode that would allow readers and libraries to make a print copy of all or part of the wiki in a smartly-designed, user-friendly book format. How cool is that? I accepted their proposal and Nate and Drew went to work.

Over the past year or so, Courthouse Libraries has worked to collect the funding needed to buy a new server and the software to go with it, and hire the graphic designers and copy editors needed to take my amateurish efforts to a more polished level. An advisory committee composed of Megan Ellis QC, a senior and well-respected family law lawyer, and representatives from the British Columbia Library Association, the Legal Services Society and Courthouse Libraries was established in late 2012, and has provided invaluable guidance for the transition. More recently, Megan has begun to assemble a stellar editorial team of experienced family law lawyers and family law lawyers new to practice to nurture and grow the wiki into the future.

Thanks

I am extremely grateful for the expertise and time devoted to this project by Megan, Nate and Drew, and the not insignificant resources that Courthouse Libraries has allocated to establishing the new wiki. I am also humbled that the content of my former website, www.bcfamilylawresource.com, could possibly have been worthy of such attention and care.

I would like to extend my most sincere thanks to everyone involved, and in particular to Nate and Drew for their patience, energy and professionalism and dedication to this project. Thank you.

Get Involved!

If you're interested in contributing as as writer, commentator or as a member of the editorial team please contact Courthouse Libraries at:

1.800.665.2570
editor@clicklaw.bc.ca