Developments in the Legal Profession: Lizotte, Alberta and Green and the Growing Power of Privilege and Professional Regulators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the implications of three decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada in its 2016-2017 term that touch directly upon the of lawyers, that is, privilege issues and legal professional regulation. Lizotte v. Aviva Insurance Company of Canada and Alberta (Information and Privacy Commissioner) v. University of Calgary reaffirm the significant protection our courts accord to both solicitor-client and litigation privilege, such that a legislative provision will not abrogate the privilege unless it is clear, explicit and unequivocal in its intention to do so. In Green v. Law Society of Manitoba, the Court confirmed that, in light of its statutory mandate to protect the public interest in the provision of legal services, a law society has authority to mandate licensees to complete continuing professional development activities, and to enforce this requirement by suspending lawyers who fail to comply. While all three decisions clarify the law, they also raise interesting questions about where the law of privilege is headed, and how professional regulators may respond to this affirmation of their authority.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".