[{"url":"https://www.callacbd.ca/CALL-Blog/12957419","source":"Canadian Association of Law Libraries / L'Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit CALL/ACBD Blog","description":"CALL member Erica Friesen, Research and Instruction Librarian & Online Learning Specialist at the Lederman Law Library at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario recently wrote an article on \" Thoughts on the New Lexis+ Brief Analysis Tool: For Law Students and Novice Researchers \". It originally appeared on Slaw.ca on September 28, 2022. It is republished here with permission of the author. New academic year; new legal research tools. Something new always comes out right as another cohort of students is gearing up to begin their law degree. And, as with many new product launches these days, “artificial intelligence” is often a prominently displayed term with accompanying materials. As legal publishers continue to launch AI-driven research tools in Canada, what do students and other novice researchers need to know to be prepared for their first forays into legal research? Lexis recently launched the latest version of their legal research platform, Lexis+ Canada, for Canadian law schools. It features significant updates that employ artificial intelligence, including a “Brief Analysis” tool in line with similar products offered by Westlaw Edge (on the US platform) and vLex (already available in Canada). According to Lexis+, this tool helps researchers “expedite completion of briefs and other legal documents.” Once your document is uploaded, it spits out a report including the following categories: 1) recommended cases, 2) cases and legislation cited in your document, 3) jurisdiction, and 4) extracted and recommended concepts. While I do not intend to comment on the utility of this tool for practitioners, I have no doubt that students beginning law school or working in summer or articling positions are bound to encounter this new feature sooner or later. When you do, you may have questions: should I be using this tool? How or how not? The landing page for this tool in Lexis+ contains no information on how this tool works and the Lexis+ Canada “Help” database so far contains minimal documentation. Confusion or uncertainty is understandable with such opacity. To gain some insight, let’s run an experiment: take two case comments written by different authors on the same Supreme Court case from 2004. [1] An older decision means that we should retrieve an abundance of recommendations from the intervening 18 years. Both comments include an overview of the area of law at the time of this decision as well as an analysis of how this particular decision would change the area of law. Once Lexis analyzed these documents, I exported the resulting report and compared the results for each comment. Here are the two documents, in case you’d like to run the experiment yourself: Comment A: Teresa Scassa, “Recalibrating Copyright Law?: A Comment on the Supreme Court of Canada’s Decision in CCH Canadian Limited et al. v. Law Society of Upper Canada ”, Case Comment, (2004) 3:2 CJLT 89. Comment B: WL Hayhurst, “The Canadian Supreme Court on Copyright: CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada ”, Case Comment, (2004-2005) 41 Can Bus LJ 134. Recommended Cases “Recommendations” is the section of the Brief Analysis report that lists additional case law for you to consider adding to your legal document. Brief Analysis recommended 58 unique cases in total between Comment A and Comment B. However, only 10 of those cases were the same between the two documents (after adjusting for “recommended” cases that were actually cited in the other document). See Figure 1 . Key takeaway: Legal research and writing is an art, not a science. AI-driven tools like these run on the material that you upload, so you can expect substantially different results depending on the quality of analysis and the decisions you made in producing the original document. This does not mean that there is no value in using the tool, but you cannot expect it to help you build something from nothing. Recommendations are based on the content in the document,","pubDate":"Mon, 26 Oct 2026 07:55:49 +0100","id":3241473,"titre":"CALL Member Article: Thoughts on the New Lexis+ Brief Analysis Tool: For Law Students and Novice Researchers"},{"source":"Federal Trade Commission - Protecting America's Consumers","url":"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme","titre":"FTC, States Sue Amazon Over Secret Ad Surcharge Scheme","id":3127461,"pubDate":"Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:10:10 +0200","description":"Today, 22 states joined the Federal Trade Commission in filing suit against Amazon, alleging that the company engaged in deceptive and unfair practices that secretly inflated prices in its online search advertising auctions. The complaint   alleges that, for over seven years, Amazon has covertly and substantially increased the prices that more than one million brands and sellers were required to pay to advertise on its platform. As a result, the complaint alleges that Amazon’s scheme has likely extracted tens of billions of dollars from its unwitting advertising customers. “When one of the world’s largest online retailers engages in unfair and deceptive conduct, the impact can be staggering,” said Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson. “Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices. These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers. The FTC under President Trump won’t allow this deception to continue.” The FTC, along with the attorneys general of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont and Washington, allege Amazon has imposed undisclosed surcharges on its advertising customers, which include over 500,000 small- and medium-sized businesses that participated in auctions for advertising placements on Amazon.com and its mobile app. In these auctions, prospective advertisers bid to place Sponsored Product ads, Sponsored Brands ads and Display Ads alongside the results that appear when a consumer searches for a product using a keyword on Amazon’s store. Placements are auctioned to the highest-ranked bidder for each keyword. As described in the complaint, Amazon has represented to prospective advertisers for years that Amazon runs “second price” auctions where the winner of the auction would only pay “one cent more than the next highest bidder” for each successful bid for an advertising keyword. However, in practice, the complaint alleges that Amazon has charged its Sponsored Products advertisers their own winning bid close to 80% of the time and has effectively converted its nominally “second price” auction into a first price auction. According to the complaint, Amazon’s “second price” auctions have been described by Amazon, and understood by advertisers, to be run as generalized second-price, or GSP auctions, which have been the accepted industry standard for digital advertising placements. The complaint states that Amazon has made these or similar representations on its website, in training videos and in other public-facing materials, as well as in presentations made to advertisers by its hundreds of sales personnel.  The type of auction matters to advertisers because it impacts how they bid. In a sealed first-price auction—the type of auction where winners pay the amount of their winning bid—bidders run the risk that they might overbid. So, in repetitive auctions for the same goods, they will often reduce their bid to determine what the minimum amount needed to win future auctions might be. This is called bid shading. In second-price auctions, bidders are more likely to bid higher, closer to their true value for the product, because they will only be liable to pay the least bid amount needed to win under the auction’s rules.  As alleged in the complaint, Amazon told advertisers it ran a GSP, but for years its auction pricing had “a surcharge hidden in it,” in the words of one internal Amazon document. The complaint alleges that, beginning in 2019, Amazon changed its auction rules without notice by adding an undisclosed surcharge that Amazon referred to internally as a “soft reserve price.” This resulted in advertisers paying substantially more than the price determined by the GSP auction.  According to the complaint, Amazon"},{"source":"Federal Trade Commission - Protecting America's Consumers","url":"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/05/ftc-sends-warning-letters-companies-about-compliance-take-it-down-act","description":"The Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters today to a dozen websites advising them of their obligation to comply with the TAKE IT DOWN Act (TIDA), which requires platforms to give people a way to request the removal of intimate photos or videos shared online without their consent, and to remove the intimate photos or videos within 48 hours of a valid request. “Today we’re demonstrating just how serious we are about protecting the public, especially children, from abusive online conduct,” said FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson. “Platforms no longer have any excuses—they must comply with their obligations under the TAKE IT DOWN Act or face the consequences.” The warning letters were sent to 12 companies that offer so-called “nudify” tools that allow people to take a clothed image of an individual and remove the individual’s clothing to create nonconsensual and sexualized images. The letters note that these companies appear to be in violation of TIDA by failing to provide individuals with a process through which victims can request the removal of nonconsensual intimate images appearing on their platforms. The letters urge the companies to “immediately come into compliance” with the law. Those that fail to do so could face legal action from the FTC, which could result in civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation. The FTC began enforcing the law on May 19. TIDA, which was championed by First Lady Melania Trump and signed into law by President Donald Trump in May 2025, gave businesses one year to come into compliance with the law’s requirements. Chairman Ferguson sent letters last week to major platforms— Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Automattic, Bumble, Discord, Match Group, Meta, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, SmugMug, Snapchat, TikTok and X —reminding businesses of their obligation to comply fully with TIDA. The FTC also issued guidance for businesses about how to ensure they are complying with the","titre":"FTC Sends Warning Letters to Companies About Compliance with the TAKE IT DOWN Act","id":2896369,"pubDate":"Thu, 21 May 2026 08:07:59 +0200"},{"titre":"FTC Chairman Ferguson Advises Companies to Comply with the Take It Down Act","pubDate":"Tue, 12 May 2026 08:07:00 +0200","id":2878537,"description":"Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson sent letters today to more than a dozen prominent technology companies reminding businesses of their obligation to comply fully with the Take It Down Act (TIDA) no later than May 19. Signed into law last year by President Donald J. Trump with the strong support of First Lady Melania Trump, TIDA requires covered platforms to establish a process allowing victims, including children, to request removal of intimate photos or videos shared without their consent.  The letters were sent to major platforms , including Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Automattic, Bumble, Discord, Match Group, Meta, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, SmugMug, Snapchat, TikTok and X. The letters state the definitions and requirements of the law, along with the penalties for non-compliance. “We stand ready to monitor compliance, investigate violations, and enforce the Take It Down Act,” said Chairman Ferguson. “Protecting the vulnerable—especially children—from this harmful abuse is a top priority for this agency and this administration. The Trump-Vance FTC is grateful for the First Lady’s leadership on the Take It Down Act and on children’s issues.”  The letter specifies that covered platforms must provide clear and conspicuous notice about the removal process. They must also take down the nonconsensual images, and all identical copies, within 48 hours of receiving a valid request. Under the law, “covered platforms” include various websites, apps and online services, such as social media, messaging, image or video sharing and gaming platforms. The FTC also has issued guidance about what companies should do as they prepare to comply with","source":"Federal Trade Commission - Protecting America's Consumers","url":"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/05/ftc-chairman-ferguson-advises-companies-comply-take-it-down-act"}]