Our own Alice Woolley, writing at Canadian Lawyering Mag, offers us the Top Ten Canadian Legal Ethics Stories of 2013. (Here is her 2012 list.) Go check out the full list, but No. 1 is:
On July 5, 2013 the Supreme Court issued its judgment in Canadian National Railway v. McKercher LLP, in which it affirmed the “bright line rule” that “a lawyer may not represent one client whose interests are directly adverse to the immediate interests of another current client – even if the two mandates are unrelated.” It also limited the rule so it only applies where the new representation is directly adverse to the immediate legal interests of the client and where it would not be “unreasonable for a client to expect that its law firm will not act against it in unrelated matters.”