BarTalk is the professional magazine for B.C.’s lawyers and a profile-building opportunity for CBABC members.
We’re looking for volunteer authors to write on the following themes and article ideas. Share your perspective and get your profile in front of thousands of BarTalk readers!
Contact us at to let us know what you'd like to write about.
February 2025 — Lawyers as Caregivers
- Ups and downs of practising law.
- Necessary employer supports.
- Maintaining work life balance during — raising children for parents of all ages, elder care, young lawyers.
- Life outside of law and what impacts your ability to work?
- The School Run — dropping off kids and making the 9:30 court appearance.
- Remote Working — Game changer for parents.
- Top Technology Tools to make balancing parenting and lawyering easier.
- That time I decided to hire a home cleaner and how it improved our partnership.
- Managing Partners’ View — creating a parent-friendly workplace.
- Resilient Parenting — tools to build up your superpowers.
- Caring for Parents — a South Asian family’s perspective.
- Legal Tools to help navigate your parents’ health needs — Wills & Estates Section person could do a brief on POA limitations, the need for a Rep agreement, etc.
- Family Caregivers of BC — a review of the tools they offer.
- Childcare and Procedural Fairness — being your child’s advocate.
- How I got my parent into assisted living.
- My Dad/Mom has dementia/Alzheimer/etc. – how our relationship has changed.
- Public or Private Pay care services — What worked for our family.
- Navigating MAID.
- The Law, Standards and Remedies in Long-Term Care Facilities. Long-term care has been under the microscope since before the COVID-19 pandemic. The current avenues for advocacy and redressing problems are limited. All over Canada, creative solutions are being suggested to increase quality of life and give remedies to residents and their families. These solutions include national standards on care and facilities, criminal offences, and using personal injury torts.
- Balancing advocacy and compassion – ethical considerations.
- How can law firms better accommodate caregivers? (i.e., flexible work arrangements, resources, etc.).
April 2025 — Immigration, Citizenship and Refugee Law
- The difficulties of transferring qualifications internationally.
- Reach out to non-lawyer organizations that could write about the legal aspects of their organization regarding the theme.
- A lot of the immigration work you get above the Tribunal level and the immigration lawyers go to federal court.
- Immigration aspects of criminal law and sentencing. It arises and there has been a lot of litigation up to including the SCC over issues some criminal lawyers have to be aware of.
- Sexual orientation and/or gender identity as a factor in refugee claims and decisions and how in plays in.
- Housing accessibility/issues that immigrants may face with housing (this may not be a legal topic).
- Immigrating as a lawyer and the process for becoming a lawyer in Canada.
- Citizen obligations abroad — an overview of international obligations when Canadian Citizens are abroad.
- New citizenship by descent legislative changes (Bill C-71).
June 2025 — Artificial Intelligence
- Directive on Automated Decision-Making. The federal government introduced a directive on automated decision making for administrative tribunals where they can use AI programs to assist them in decision making. Immigration uses it. There has been a couple of federal court decisions about this.
- To what degree should AI be used for litigators?
- To what degree should AI be used for adjudicators?
- Copyright and Trademark Infringement.
- From the perspective of jurisdiction, is AI something that can be brought under control given questions of jurisdiction or is it an international problem? Is it going to require international cooperation and agreement in terms of the ability to regulate it?
- New LSBC practice resource on artificial intelligence tools. The Law Society has released a new practice resource — Guidance on Professional Responsibility and Generative AI — to help lawyers consider the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in their legal practice. The guide is focused on the use of AI tools powered by large language models that can create new content or data based off of the data it was trained on, such as Open AI’s ChatGPT-4 or Google’s Bard.
- Generative AI is about to reshape the entire legal practice, says Microsoft’s Jonathan Leibtag. The senior corporate counsel says artificial intelligence heralds a new era of efficiencies.
- How Can AI Take the Tedium Out of Deposition Summaries? The best use-cases for incorporating AI into legal practice is when you can automate away the parts of practising law that do not require legal judgment – to let lawyers be lawyers.
- AI and Its Impact on eDiscovery: Where We Are Today and Where We Are Headed.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to have a significant impact across virtually every industry and eDiscovery is no exception. How is AI impacting legal and discovery processes today and what does the near future hold? We know that organizations are already leveraging AI across core business functions to support business intelligence efforts. We also know that legal technology providers and law firms are scrambling to determine how to efficiently, effectively and defensibly apply advanced AI tools, such as Generative AI (GenAI), across the legal spectrum. How will these technologies be deployed? What are the hurdles to, not only development and deployment, but to adoption? The impacts are likely to have a ripple effect across the legal services and legal technology landscape…what are those likely impacts? Idea is from a US webinar.
- AI in personal injury law: A balancing act. Charles Gluckstein on risks, unknowns, and why clients will emerge as ultimate beneficiaries. Charles wrote this above article for Canadian Lawyer, perhaps he would like to write an article for BarTalk.
- Learn How AI Can Take the Tedium Out of Deposition Summaries.
- Some of the best use-cases for incorporating AI into legal practice is when you can automate away the parts of practicing law that do not require legal judgment – to let lawyers be lawyers.
- US Deputy AG Announces DOJ's Approach to AI
- Recent regulations about using AI during proceedings. For example, the Silicone Arbitration Centre released such guidelines.
- The Algorithmic Impact Assessment Guidelines.
- AI and the intersection of employment law – for example, if AI is being used in hiring processes, maybe there are human rights concerns involved as we know AI can have biases.
- Liability and accountability for mistakes made by AI – could look at the BCLI report on AI and civil liability.
August 2025 — Starting your Legal Career
- New lawyers and their experience with Law School.
- Why are some schools are doing away with the Law School Admission Test (LSAT)?
- What changes are happening to the Professional Legal Training Course (PLTC)? It went online during COVID and is now staying completely online as it permits the course to be completed anywhere in the world. It is best because of the cost of living being so high in Vancouver.
- What is the National Committee of Accreditation (NCA)?
- The trends law schools are experiencing from student such as people preferring to do their course material online or mental health challenges.
- Qualifying to practice law in Canada.
- The importance of mentorship. Hear from a mentor and mentee.
- Law career stops or unstarts. People who finish law school but never ended up practising.
- The range of things law schools do and how it encourages current law students to be volunteers and how they reach out to members of the Bar to become Mentors or how they supervise at clinics. A state of the union as it where from LSLAP. It would also be great to show that the seeds of pro bono work are being planted early with the students.
- Get Gen Z’s perspective (born between 1997 and 2012, they are now in law school and are even starting to get called to the Bar.) How will they change the profession as lawyers? How do they impact the practice of law as clients? How should the profession change for them as both lawyers and clients? Does legal education need to change for them?
- The costs of becoming a lawyer (tuition, student debt, etc.).
- What is a judicial clerkship?
- Teaching client and practice management — can we do a better job of this in law school?