Canadian Lawyer

10 F e b r u A r y 2 0 1 5 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m t he Ontario Court of Justice says it's taking steps to better assess estimates of trial times after Jus- tice Lesley Baldwin lamented "a chronic problem" of counsel lowballing the time it would take to complete a matter. In obiter comments at the end of two separate rulings, Baldwin said trials were running for much longer than counsel estimated they would, resulting in delayed justice for litigants. In R. v. Smith, Baldwin took issue with a trial scheduled for one day that ended up taking five. "This is yet another case of counsel seriously under- estimating the time their trial will take from start to finish. This has become a chronic problem in Halton Region that has resulted in reserved judgments being delivered months after the evidence in a trial has ended due to the continuing pile- up of reserved judgments." In another matter decided around the same time, Baldwin reiterated her concern. "Counsel estimated 2.5 days of trial time to complete the matter. This is another seri- ously underestimated trial that has led to reserved judgments being delivered with delay here in Halton Region. Justice is not well served when it is delayed," she wrote in R. v. Ivashinnikov. Court spokeswoman Jane Warwick told Law Times: "Steps are being implemented in several court locations in the central west region to better assess hearing time estimates given by both Crown and defence counsel through a focused judicial pretrial regime," said Warwick. "Alternative sched- uling practices are also being considered. Bench and bar meetings are occurring to discuss the options." Criminal lawyer Todd White says it's tough to estimate the time it would take to see a trial from start to finish. "It is very, very difficult to estimate how long a trial would go simply because of the vol- ume of evidence that is now presented in most criminal trials. It's no longer simply calling the main witnesses. The Crown now calls expert evidence and forensic evidence and cellphone records and cell tower records and videos. There's a much greater volume of disclosure that defence counsel gets," he says. It's not a new issue but it has become more important given the backlog in the court system, says White. It already takes six to months to get an available trial date, he notes, "and that gets into unreasonable delay territory because on top of that, it \ At L A N t I C \ C e N t r A L \ W e s t regIoNAL WrAp-up Judge calls out bad estimates on trial times Deposit cheques on your terms. Introducing BMO DepositEdge™ – the seamless and secure cheque scanning solution for business. Visit bmo.com/depositedge, or call 1-866-497-3456 to speak to a BMO Representative today. ®/TM Registered trademarks of Bank of Montreal. Untitled-4 1 2015-01-14 1:21 PM

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