HeinOnline just announced an upgrade to their Manitoba legislative content – all annual statutes from 1817 to 2016. Their collection also includes consolidated and/or revised statutes up to 1954. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include the 1970 or the 1987 RSM … yet. That’s next on my content request list.
Read the full news here in HeinOnline’s April 2018 newsletter.
Most of the time when I see the word “bot” I think of Russian trolls influencing the U.S. election. But not this time! USA Today investigative reporter Brad Heath has created an automatic Twitter bot that follows selected U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Courts of Appeal, and Federal District Court cases of note and posts documents from new docket entries to Twitter.
In its documentation, the bot is described as follows:
The bot uses PACER RSS feeds to gather the latest filings from 74 U.S. District Courts and five federal courts of appeals and stores the docket entries in a database. It matches new filings against a preselected list of major cases, scrapes matching documents from PACER, uploads them to a DocumentCloud project and posts the results on Twitter.
You must have a PACER account in order to access the documents – we do! So if you want the latest filing on United States v. AT&T and Time Warner, or any other U.S. court case you’re watching, let us know if we can help. There may be a fee for retrieving documents.
And follow Big Cases on Twitter for up-to-date notification.
h/t to Internet for Lawyers.
There’s been a lot of new developments on the litigation front since the last update in December. Highlights from Issue No. 84, February 2018:
A recent decision out of British Columbia drew attention to a novel situation: are prepaid cash cards issued by a financial institution deposit accounts?
All Trans Financial Services Credit Union Limited sold prepaid Visa and Mastercards to customers, who could then use the payment cards wherever Visa and Mastercard were accepted. When the Financial Institutions Commission (FIC) investigated, they determined that this was an unauthorized deposit business, contrary to s.81 of the Financial Institutions Act. The FIC ordered All Trans to cease selling these prepaid cards within 30 days of the release of the order. All Trans appealed to the BCSC, where the order was overturned.
This decision is currently under appeal. As noted in commentary by Robert Dawkins and D. Ross McGowan of Borden Ladner Gervais: Prepaid Cards: Deposit Accounts? Or Something Else?
… The decision on appeal may have a significant impact on financial institutions seeking to use creative FinTech approaches to expand their reach and service offerings, as well as FinTech start-ups. Careful consideration to program design is critical to ensure that issuers and program managers structure their card products to meet the regulatory needs for their specific goals.
Other commentary:
Deposit Accounts – Payment Cards (The Lawyers Daily)
The Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench has issued a notice of amendments to the QB Rules which will come into force on April 1, 2018:
RE: AMENDMENTS TO COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH RULES
The following amendments regarding service, proof of service and default in cases involving the Hague Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters (the Hague Service Convention) will come into force on April 1, 2018.
…
The objectives of the amendments are to clarify the Rules respecting service (including substituted service, dispensation with service and validation and proof of service) and noting default, and granting and setting aside of default judgment, in cases where service is required under the Hague Service Convention.
The full text of these Rule amendments (M.R. No. 11/2018) can be viewed here.
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