Heuristica Congratulates Winner of Legal Research Award

Heuristica is pleased to congratulate Tyler Holland, the winner of the 2026 University of Calgary Faculty of Law Heuristica Discovery Counsel Award for Legal Research.

This $2,000 award is presented annually to an undergraduate law student who authors the best research paper in the Faculty’s Law 693 undergraduate E-Litigation course. Tyler’s winning paper is entitled, “Recognizing Spoliation as an Independent Tort in Canadian Civil Law.”

Heuristica also congratulates the School, Dean Laura Spitz, past Dean, Dr. Ian Holloway, and Professor Gideon Christian for their initiative in establishing and maintaining this important course — a first for a Canadian law school. … Read More

Canadian Commissioner of Competition v. Canadian Real Estate Association

Martin Felsky

Of Counsel

July 28, 2026

Canada (Commissioner of Competition) v Canadian Real Estate Association [2026 FC 574]

Summary

The most interesting aspect of a recent Federal Court decision involving 26,000 privilege claims may not be the law of privilege, but rather what the case reveals about the increasingly industrial nature of modern eDiscovery.

Following the issuance of an order compelling the Canadian Real Estate Association (“CREA”) to produce records and information to the Commissioner of Competition, CREA produced approximately 50,000 records, and a privilege log containing approximately 26,000 entries, 5,000 of which were redacted.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on document review, which employed large-scale eDiscovery processes to ensure that every document withheld on grounds of privilege had been properly reviewed.… Read More

Heuristica to Attend RelFest London 2026

Heuristica Discovery Counsel LLP is pleased to share that Crystal O’Donnell and Kelly Friedman will be attending RelFest London 2026, taking place on June 15 and 16.

RelFest London brings together leaders, practitioners, innovators, and technology professionals from across the legal data intelligence and eDiscovery community for two days of education, collaboration, and discussion about the future of legal data practice.

This year’s agenda is particularly timely. Artificial intelligence is moving quickly from discussion to implementation, and legal teams are increasingly being asked to explain how AI-enabled tools are being used, how their outputs are tested, and how technology-assisted workflows can be supervised and justified in a defensible way.… Read More

Rethinking Reliability of Digital Evidence

Kelly Friedman

Partner

April 30, 2026

Digital evidence often looks authoritative. A system-generated report, an email chain, a spreadsheet, or a chat export can appear objective and complete. But in litigation, the real question is not whether digital evidence looks reliable. It is whether its reliability can be proven.

As litigation becomes more data-heavy, and as AI-generated or AI-assisted content becomes more common, the reliability of digital evidence deserves closer attention. A digital record is not trustworthy simply because it looks technical, precise, or system generated. Its reliability depends on the system that created it, the controls that preserved it, and the surrounding information that allows it to be tested.… Read More

Deepfakes and the Evolving Duties of eDiscovery Counsel

Martin Felsky

Senior Counsel

April 28, 2026

The long-standing view that electronic discovery and disclosure can be treated as purely procedural or technical exercises distinct from the law of evidence is no longer tenable. That position was already difficult to sustain in an era of emails and databases. It becomes untenable in the age of synthetic media.

E-discovery (and here I use the term broadly to include disclosure in criminal and regulatory procedure) is about shaping the evidentiary record. What is preserved, collected, filtered, and produced defines what may ultimately be tendered in court. A small but critical subset of that material will be relied upon as evidence.… Read More

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