Our Blog

• The SCC Leave Project: Predictions for March 25, 2021

  Here’s a look at the leave application decisions that the Supreme Court of Canada will be releasing on March 25, 2021. Each week, we’ll be providing a short blog post that summarizes some of the upcoming cases and gives a prediction, of the probability that leave will be granted. These predictions will be based on our proprietary machine learning model and dataset of every leave application decision released by the Supreme Court of Canada from January 1, 2018 onward.

  March 23, 2021
  Paul-Erik Veel
• The SCC Leave Project: A Machine Learning Algorithm to Predict the Likelihood of Getting Leave to the Supreme Court of Canada

  In the spring of 2020, we posted an analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2019 Year in Review and summarized some of the statistics found in that document. Unfortunately, the general statistics found in the 2019 Year Review were high level and limited the analysis we could provide about what was happening at the Supreme Court of Canada. We also could not find any publicly available and current datasets that would allow us to provide a more detailed analysis. 

  March 22, 2021
  Paul-Erik Veel
• Getting Leave to Appeal to the Supreme Court: Empirical Insights from Tax Cases

  As I have posted before, I’m a fan of using empirical data to inform legal practice. Much as the evidence-based medicine movement has taken hold in the field of medicine, the practice of law should, wherever possible, rely on objective data to inform our decision-making. Unfortunately, empirical legal work remains at an early stage. While there are some academics embracing empirical analysis, much of legal academic scholarship does not involve the quantitative analysis of empirical data. In my view, it is important for lawyers to test our intuitions whenever we can by reference to whatever data is available.

  January 20, 2021
  Paul-Erik Veel
• A Quantitative Look at the Supreme Court of Canada

  Lawyers are trained to do close and careful reading of cases. We are experts in textual analysis of individual decisions, and we can spend hours arguing over what individual paragraphs in Supreme Court of Canada decisions mean. Yet while individual decisions are important, so are the aggregate trends. Quantitative data can reveal important information that lawyers can use to engage in more effective advocacy and better inform our clients as to what to expect.

  May 4, 2020
  Paul-Erik Veel