Western Law has established a memorial award to honour Kanika Suri, a 2012 graduate who died last month.

Kanika Suri

Suri was completing her articles at Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP in Toronto when she suddenly passed away on April 27. The cause of death has not been released.

Kara Sutherland, director of professional resources on FMC’s student committee, first met Suri when she started as a summer student in 2010. Suri returned to the firm as a summer student in 2011 and began her articles in January.

“Kanika was someone who had a lot of energy, she was very enthusiastic. She was really excited about starting to practise law,” says Sutherland.

Suri decided to pursue a career in environmental law after having completed her BA in environmental and political science at the University of Michigan and working as an environmental consultant in the Alberta oilsands.

Western Law professor Sara Seck, who taught Suri in first year, remembers her as “very vibrant, energetic, and engaged.”

“Environmental law was definitely a passion of hers,” Seck tells Legal Feeds. Sutherland says Suri had planned to start her own practice in environmental law.

The news of Suri’s death has been very difficult for everyone at the firm, especially her articling colleagues, says Sutherland. FMC posted this message from students on its web site:

Most of us first met Kanika as incoming summer students at FMC in May 2010. Though many of us were nervous to begin working at a law firm, Kanika was unfazed and ready to take on the challenge. She instantly brought us together with her infectious charm and quick wit.

Kanika brightened firm events and the student program with her bubbly personality and her ability to make people feel comfortable. She organized many student social events and we will cherish the many memories we shared with her outside the office — such as participating in a volleyball tournament, attending Blue Jays games, and enjoying a ski weekend together. She was generous with the time she spent on others, and could always be counted on for an honest opinion.

Within the firm, Kanika was seen as vibrant and reliable. Her passion for environmental issues and her ambition to succeed would have contributed greatly to the law. As a colleague, her spirited approach to solving problems and her genuine enthusiasm to learn made her an asset to the firm and a pleasure to work with.

Kanika — you will be greatly missed as a colleague, but even more so as a friend.

The Nidhi Kanika Suri Memorial Award will be granted annually to a graduating student interested in environmental law.

“The student chosen will reflect Kanika’s drive, boldness, endearing spirit, passion for life, and capacity to bring joy to those around her,” states Western’s law faculty.

A Facebook memorial group has also been set up for friends and family.

Canada

Alberta to launch $10-billion lawsuit against tobacco companies, The Globe and Mail

Supplier suing Bixi proposes mediation, Montreal Gazette

Bride's dad cleared in altercation with Windsor cop, Windsor Star

United States

Retired justice says campaign finance ruling made cash king, Reuters

Dewey & LaBoeuf bracing for court battle in bankruptcy, Reuters

International

French appeals court lifts gagging order on former IMF chief, Reuters

Ecuador plaintiffs file Canadian lawsuit against Chevron for polluting Amazon, Reuters

The Globe and Mail has won a $165,000 costs award after an unsuccessful attempt by a University of Toronto law professor to unmask the source of a business story on the 2008 attempted leveraged buyout of BCE Inc.

Jeffrey MacIntosh has been unsuccessful in his efforts to unmask the source of a Globe and Mail story.

In the summer of 2008, a numbered company owned solely by Jeffrey MacIntosh, a professor who specializes in corporate and securities law, took a $36,000 loss on BCE call options that he had hoped may result in a $500,000 windfall.

MacIntosh purchased the call options in mid-June 2008, just ahead of a Supreme Court of Canada decision on the validity of the deal, gambling an approval would boost the share price. The Supreme Court approved the deal, but negative press reports stalled the price.

MacIntosh sold his call options at a loss on July 2, following a June 30 Globe article by Sinclair Stewart, who quoted confidential sources hinting the deal may be in trouble. But by July 4, the tide had apparently turned, and BCE put out a press release announcing an agreement had in fact been reached.

After MacIntosh’s unsuccessful attempt to get the Ontario Securities Commission to investigate, his company launched a $30-million class action on behalf of those who lost money between June 30 and July 4, alleging “misinformation” provided to the Globe by the anonymous sources breached the Securities Act and caused the losses.

As part of the proposed class action, MacIntosh’s company applied for an order that Stewart turn over the names of his sources so they could be added as defendants, along with BCE and its proposed buyers.

But in his April 20 decision, Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba found there was “little to no public interest in compelling disclosure,” adding that in his view, “none of what was said by the confidential sources was clearly or even likely in breach of provincial securities law.”

According to the decision, MacIntosh has also filed a $3.5-million action against Dundee Securities and his former investment advisers for the trading losses that he allegedly sustained over several years because of negligently provided financial advice. MacIntosh had invested more than $1.7 million in his trading account, but by the summer of 2010 the amount had dwindled to $98,000, according to Belobaba’s decision.

The Globe wanted $255,000 to cover its fees and disbursements defending the anonymous-source application, while lawyers for MacIntosh’s company’s claimed no costs should be awarded because of the novelty of the case and the public interest issues raised. An earlier motion for security for costs was settled when MacIntosh’s law firm, Siskinds LLP, agreed to satisfy any costs award.

In his May 28 decision on costs, Belobaba said the case was a suitable one for costs, noting that he would not characterize it as a public interest lawsuit.

“The proposed class action does have a public interest component but it is essentially a private proceeding to recover financial losses sustained in trading transactions,” he wrote.

Belobaba settled on the figure of $165,000, an amount he said “would not be unexpected; nor would it be unfair or unreasonable.”

The main class action suit is still awaiting certification.

Canada

Possible jail time for Quebec student leader, Winnipeg Free Press

Appeal court overturns $17,000 discrimination award, Montreal Gazette

Newfoundland woman charged with assaulting man with broken bottle, The Telegram

United States

Ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman sentenced over child support, Reuters

Magazine insert caused courthouse bomb scare in Idaho, Reuters

International

Court rules Julian Assange can be extradited to Sweden, Montreal Gazette

Pakistan doctor in bin Laden case jailed for aiding militants, Reuters

Lawyers in formal court dress mingled with pot-banging demonstrators of all ages in a central Montreal square yesterday after some 500 jurists took to the streets to protest against Quebec’s Bill 78.

The law, passed in efforts to get protesting Quebec students back to class, restricts freedom of assembly, protest, or picketing on or near university grounds, and anywhere in Quebec without prior police approval. The law also places restrictions upon education employees right to strike.

Some 500 lawyers took to the streets of Montreal to protest Bill 78, which they say tramples Quebeckers’ rights. (Photo: Carl-Philippe Simonise)

Rousing cheers met hundreds of lawyers and notaries as they filed into Place Émilie-Gamelin — one of the focal points for nightly protests in Quebec’s widening political and social crisis — following a solemn march in near silence that began almost two hours earlier at Montreal’s Palais de Justice, the main courthouse.

“We are here to express our concern with the lack of confidence of a growing number of our fellow citizens toward our judicial institutions that are there to uphold fundamental individual and collective liberties and the primacy of the law,” litigator Rémi Bourget, one of the organizers of the march, shouted through a megaphone.

“We are also officers of justice and many of us will be on the front lines of the fight to have the law declared illegal,” said Bourget, calling Bill 78 “a disproportionate attack on our freedom of expression, association, and of peaceful protest.”

Yesterday’s street protest by legal professionals of all stripes really began last week, a few days after Bill 78 was adopted with a few lawyers sharing concerns about its implications on a Facebook page, Bourget said before the march. That quickly morphed into plans for a formal protest to “remind people of the dignity of our function [as lawyers] and our system of justice” in a “spontaneous grouping that is independent of any organization or political party.”

“I am outraged by this law that bullies the rights of association and the individual right to protest that was adopted with the goal of putting an end to the conflict rather than focusing on the problem and settling it,” said Nathalie Belley, a solo practitioner and a litigator with 20 years of experience who travelled from Chambly, a city about 25 kilometres southeast of Montreal to attend Monday’s march. “It erodes the future of democracy and the idea that a special law can be adopted to control the population at large is scary.”

Besides the protest march, hundreds of Quebec lawyers have volunteered their time or sent input for a court challenge on the constitutionality of Bill 78 by some 124 individuals, community organizations, unions, and Quebec’s three main student groups that is set to be heard before a judge of Quebec Superior Court this Friday.

Proposed changes to the review and enforcement of foreign investments under the Investment Canada Act should provide greater transparency to Canadians and make for a more appealing environment for foreign investors.

Proposed changes to the Investment Canada Act are ‘a positive message for foreign investors,’ says Subrata Bhattacharjee.

On May 25, the Industry Minister Christian Paradis announced three main proposed amendments under the act.

Of most significance is an amendment to the regulations which will, over a four-year period, change the financial threshold for review under the ICA from $330 million in asset value to $1 billion in enterprise value. This is to ensure the review process focuses on the most significant transactions, says Subrata Bhattacharjee, a partner with Heenan Blaikie LLP in Toronto.

“This is a positive message for foreign investors,” says Bhattacharjee. “The previous standard of $330 million in asset value was probably seen to be too inclusive. It caught too many transactions in the net, which raised no serious net benefit let alone any national security issues. There is some legitimate questions to be raised on what exactly enterprise value will mean and when the draft regulations come out stakeholders will have a chance to see how it will work in practice.”

Once the regulations are in force, the investment review threshold will immediately rise from $330 million in asset value to $600 million in enterprise value for two years, then up to $800 million for two years, then to $1 billion (subsequently, the threshold will be indexed to reflect changes in Canada’s gross domestic product as is currently the case under the ICA).

The change was seen as critical to reducing the number of transactions subject to review on the perception that foreign investors in non-contentious acquisitions would find it as a barrier.

The current standard is based on the value of the assets according to the business’ financial statements, or book value.

A second change incudes the issuance of mediation guidelines that make formal mediation procedures available under the ICA as an alternative means of voluntarily resolving disputes when the minister believes a non-Canadian investor has failed to comply with an undertaking given in connection with an investment.

“Most foreign investors would not want to see a situation as happened in U.S. Steel, where several years after making the acquisition you’re engaged in litigation that goes all the way to the appellate courts about your Investment Canada undertakings,” says Bhattacharjee.

For many years, if a foreign investor agreed to maintain employment at a Canadian plant it intended to acquire, it was required to so for a period of time unless circumstances were out of its control. What began to happen, partially as a result of the recession, was as some foreign investors made significant acquisitions in Canada they began to try and rationalize operations. In the case of U.S. Steel Corp., the government litigated to try and hold the company to employment obligations it said it had made when it bought Canadian steelmaker Stelco.

“U.S. Steel was indicative of a new era in how we treated commitments foreign investors made when they came into Canada,” says Bhattacharjee. “Part of the criticism at the time was there was concern foreign investors were walking away from employment or financial commitments they had made.”

The amendments will also include publication of an annual report by Industry Canada on the administration of the ICA.

“One of the comments that has been made about the Investment Canada process is that it’s fairly black box. That works to the advantage of the foreign investor and the government but, having said that, we have had a stream of high-profile cases where Canadian companies have been acquired by foreign investors and two high-profile blocks with MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates and BHP Billiton Ltd. bid for Potash Corp.,” says Bhattacharjee.

In both MacDonald Dettwiler and Potash the government did not provide a comprehensive statement on the reasons for blocking those deals.

“Transparency is another perceived issue the government is trying to address with these changes. In general the government wants to try and liberalize aspects of our foreign investment regime and so the announcements are consistent with those goals,” says Bhattacharjee.

At the same time, he says the changes are seen as strengthening the act.

“I think there has certainly been criticism about the ability of the minister to ensure that foreign investors who make commitments or undertakings as a condition to getting a net benefit determination are actually upheld.”

Canada

B.C. RCMP officer charged in fatal collision, Abbotsford Times

Sask. has highest number of criminal cases: StatsCan, The StarPhoenix

N.B. couple charged in narwhal tusk case back in court, CBC News

United States

Law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf files for bankruptcy, Reuters

W.Va. man charged with murder in deaths of 4, Associated Press

International

Ex-Bank of Italy governor's sentence reduced, Reuters

British court to rule on WikiLeaks founder's extradition, Reuters

The top lawyer at Research In Motion Ltd. has resigned and will soon leave the struggling BlackBerry maker, RIM said on Monday, joining a parade of long-time company executives to depart since Thorsten Heins took over as CEO earlier this year.

(Photo: Mark Blinch/Reuters)

The loss of chief legal officer Karima Bawa — who litigated numerous patent disputes and helped write many of RIM’s commercial deals — follows the resignation of RIM’s head of global sales, Patrick Spence, last week.

The resignations come ahead of what are expected to be massive layoffs this year as the company prepares to launch BlackBerry smartphones run by an operating system completely different from that used in its legacy phones.

RIM’s shares have fallen some 75 per cent in the last year while its market share has shriveled against competition from iPhone maker Apple Inc and a slew of manufacturers using Google Inc’s Android operating system.

Bawa, who joined RIM in 2000, was promoted to general counsel and chief legal officer in late 2010. RIM said in a statement Bawa planned to stay on to support the hiring and transition of a replacement.

Analysts and former employees have long complained about what they viewed as a hyper-cautious corporate approach at RIM. That grew out of a drawn-out patent dispute early in the company’s rise and was exacerbated by the hiring of a slew of in-house lawyers afterwards.

RIM is quietly cleaning out layers of management and recruiting new people to fill important roles in a new structure being fashioned under Heins, who himself replaced longtime co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie in January.

The Waterloo, Ont.-based company currently employs around 16,500 people globally. Two sources with close connections to RIM have told Reuters that RIM plans to bring its workforce closer to 10,000 by early next year.

The sources asked to go unidentified because their disclosures would hurt their relationships with RIM.

The cuts will affect RIM’s legal, marketing, sales, operations, and human resources divisions, one of the sources said.

Bill 40, the Legal Profession Amendment Act, 2012 providing much needed updates to the Legal Profession Act (1998) has passed in the British Columbia Legislature and will give the Law Society of B.C. powers to suspend or disbar lawyers for crimes committed outside Canada.

'The passage of this bill is the result of a significant effort on the part of the Ministry of Justice,' says Bruce LeRose.

It will provide the LSBC with more “authority to regulate the legal profession in the public interest,” a news release said.

“The passage of this bill is the result of a significant effort on the part of the Ministry of Justice,” said Bruce LeRose, president of the LSBC.

The amendments to the act include:
•    An updated mandate that highlights the commitment of the LSBC to protection the public interests in the administration of justice.
•    Decisions of LSBC hearing panels are subject to review by a board that will include persons who are not lawyers.
•    Where it is in the public interest, the LSBC will have the authority to suspend a lawyer under investigation or impose conditions on the lawyer’s practice.
•    Maximum fines for lawyer misconduct will be increased to be more in line with those of other professional bodies and to act as a greater deterrent.
•    The LSBC will have the ability to require witnesses to answer questions and produce records in an investigation into a lawyer’s conduct.
•    The LSBC will be able to suspend or disbar lawyers convicted of a wider range of serious crimes, which will also be extended to include those committed outside Canada.
•    The elected and appointed board of governors, not all lawyers, will set the annual fees paid by lawyers to fund the LSBC.

More on the amendments here.

The independent counsel in the Canadian Judicial Council’s proceedings against Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench Associate Chief Justice Lori Douglas has until tomorrow to file the notice of allegation against her.

Guy Pratte, the lawyer acting as independent counsel, was to submit the notice of allegations by May 25 with Douglas’ response to it due by June 1. However, an update from the council last Friday noted the inquiry committee has now extended the notice deadline to tomorrow and Douglas’ response to June 5.

The extension comes as the committee has been making its way through preliminary issues last week as the proceedings got underway in Winnipeg.

The inquiry committee is investigating a sexual harassment and discrimination complaint filed against the judge in September 2010. Alex Chapman, a client of the judge’s husband, Winnipeg lawyer Jack King, issued the complaint that claimed King showed him nude web photos of Douglas performing sexual acts and pressured him to have sex with her.

Among the preliminary issues addressed so far, the committee has decided to hold its hearings in Winnipeg against the submissions of Douglas’ lawyers. They expressed concern about the media attention on the case, but the committee has decided to keep the case local. It has also decided in favour of appointing and funding counsel for Chapman “for the limited purposes of allowing him to make further submissions for an application for standing and associated funding.”

Other issues relate to the review panel’s reasons for deciding to constitute an inquiry committee. Pratte and counsel for Douglas will have until June 15 to make their submissions on the use the committee should make of the information and whether it should be part of the evidentiary record.

The proceedings so far have included submissions by various member of the public seeking intervener status. According to a CBC report, they include citizen blogger Clare Pieuk. The committee is to make its rulings on Chapman, Pieuk, and Douglas’ submissions on the intervener issue by June 25. Hearings in the matter are to take place June 25 to 28 and then during the weeks of July 16 to 27.