Articles 2024

Beneficiary designations can be a useful estate planning tool with the added benefit of helping to reduce exposure to Ontario’s estate administration tax; however, utilizing them is not without its pitfalls. In this article, Blair Botsford reviews key issues relating to beneficiary designations, including certain drafting challenges.

This article reviews the reconsideration outcome of WSIAT's Decision No. 243/21R which addressed a Tribunal order to provide loss of earnings benefits to the worker to age 65.

This article contains a review of WSIAT Decision No. 339/23 in which an employer sought cost relief (SIEF) for a worker's compensable fatal motor vehicle accident caused by the worker's impaired driving.

This article provides a summary of the Divisional Court's decision in Grisales v. WSIB, in which the worker sought court review of the WSIB's method of calculating the consumer price index (CPI) for the purposes of the annual indexation of benefits.

This article provides a summary of key information provided at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal's stakeholder information event held on September 14, 2023.

Section 21.1 of the Ontario Succession Law Reform Act (“SLRA”) provides a validating power to judges of the Superior Court to remedy situations where testamentary documents fail to meet formalities of execution. In this article, Krystyne Rusek and Matthew Bradley canvas some of the case law to date on the Court’s validating power under s. 21.1.

In May 2022, further to recommendations by the Competence Task Force of the Law Society of Ontario, Convocation voted to wind up its Certified Specialist Program (“CSP”). Following feedback from the profession with respect to its decision, Convocation suspended the CSP windup and instead committed to a consultation with the profession on the issue. Demetre Vasilounis provides an update on the OBA’s submissions in this article.

Jackson v Rosenberg, a recent decision of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, reminds us of the complications that can arise when adding an adult as joint tenant on property for probate planning purposes. In this article, Jennifer Corak reviews the Court’s considerations and conclusions.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Cohere, and DALL-E2 are popular tools that allow organizations to generate images, text, sounds and creative content based on a prompt. While these tools can provide practical benefits such as improved efficiency and productivity, they raise privacy risks which are important to mitigate.

The Federal Court of Appeal recently upheld the ruling of the Federal Court wherein it was held that the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) should apply to Google’s search engine results, as they have a commercial interest in it by way of ads and also connecting two players.