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Serious insight for serious situations.

Serious insight for serious situations.

Tweet, Tweet! – “A little bird told me”: Employee dismissed after twitter post comes to employer’s attention

In the latest incident of an employee’s social media activity landing him/herself in hot water with an employer, media outlets reported last week that a Toronto-area mechanic was fired after allegedly tweeting the following: “Any dealers in Vaughan wanna make a 20sac chop?  Come to Keele/ Langstaff Mr. Lube, need a spliff or two to

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What Vince Vaughn teaches us about the workplace

Last week, some members of the Rubin Thomlinson team watched “The Internship”, where the comedic duo of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson moved on from crashing weddings to crashing Google’s summer internship program. The film begins with a pair of outdated salesmen (Vaughn and Wilson) losing their jobs when their employer closes its doors. Instead

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How to tweet your way to termination

Paris Brown was a pioneer for her generation, becoming the first youth police and crime commissioner for Kent in Britain on April 3, 2013. More than 160 young people vied for the position that sought to bridge the gap between teenagers and the police. Paris, who essentially became a pseudo-cop, underwent a background check as

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In defence of social media

These days, I find myself following legal issues involving social media with great interest and, occasionally, with considerable amusement and surprise. My interest isn’t driven entirely by my occupation, and the situations I have read about span far beyond the employment law niche in which I practice. Indeed, social media seems to have found its

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My new job title: Toronto employment and “playbour” lawyer

As I read the paper this morning, I came across an unfamiliar term: “playbour”.  Apparently, this is the brainchild of the media theorist, Julian Kücklich, who coined the term as a result of the confusion between work and play, as facilitated by technology.  As anyone who has responded to a work e-mail from a child’s

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Employee information and social media part two: What about mitigation efforts?

In the last month, two personal injury cases have crossed my desk that have left me wondering how aggressively employers and their lawyers will or should incorporate social media searches to examine a terminated employee’s mitigation efforts.Perhaps this is already happening. In both cases, the social media profiles of plaintiffs who claimed they were injured

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