In my opinion, “co-author” remains too document-level — it is unnecessarily flattened insofar as it does not provide an opportunity to truly appreciate what happened. For me, the more important question is elegant in its simplicity: who ORIGINATED/INITIATED each movement? In ARF, a model for authorship can be compressed to 6 stations:

[Zero] -> [Read] -> [One move] -> [Reread] -> [Settle] -> [Return to Zero]
Zero — no moves preloaded; no authority nor obligation to act.
Read — perspective reflecting the interpretation of one’s context: the field, extant constraints, issue(s) at hand, relationships, and so on… Reads can exist along continua: simple complex; drifting accurate; vague precise; instantaneous sustained over time; and many others.
One move — one action. Each action is bounded to the read.
Reread — assessing how the action landed in the shared field: what happened? How did it manifest? Who was affected? Where are deltas observable?
Settle — the wonderful synthesized place where “okay, this is done” happens. It’s where the One move’s jurisdiction ends, settlement is confirmed, ownership and carry tested, and so on… this is where responsibility lives.
Return to zero — after the move is resolved, one returns to Zero at the centre… the same person, with a new perspective (they witnessed one full cycle).

So, that offers a VERY compressed test. If the Human owns [Read] and [One move], then the move was human-authored, even if AI later rewrites it. If AI owns [Read] and [One move], the move was AI-authored, even if someone later rewrites it. It is that simple, but the simple does come with a big asterisk — this can only hold if the AI rewrite does NOT introduce a new material movement. Compression, translation, arrangement, formatting, and restatement do not shift the original paid movement; new material propositions, however, introduce new movement and thus warrant the creation of a new account — AI would then own [Read] and [One move] attached to that movement. The reverse case, of course, holds as well.

I, of course, subject myself to this test. I have a simple receipt to offer: first I did the work blind, then I read the article; next, I wrote from a scaffold. AI read this essay before me and authored an adversarial read environment that resembled a D&D/video game “dungeon” incursion; I remained blind to the article. At each waypoint, I [Read] each encounter and authored [One move] responses. This happened independently of the [Read] and [One move] stations that AI paid to generate the “dungeon” experience itself. AI then provided the adversarial [Reread], later comparisons, retrieval, arrangement, and compression; I [Settled] surviving claims.

A more thorough articulation of the underlying process lives in its own place:
https://tonyhttsang.substack.com/p/who-moved

In that essay, I offer my receipts. I enjoyed the handle you offered into the discussion. I grabbed it knowing it may naturally invite a provenance question. As far as the model I offered is concerned, if it drifts, corrections are welcome; if it lands, the underlying provenance is available for inspection. I am maintaining a claim that I retain [Read] and [One move] for every material proposition contained in this comment even after declaring that my process involves substantive AI facilitation, which includes “prose, compression, retrieval, arrangement, dungeon construction, and any other movements identified in the provenance record”. That prose was an example of AI-provided compression.

I don’t know the answer but would be interested. The case-law is replete with investigations infected with tunnel vision that lasted for a very long time. Indeed in some cases there has been a reasonable inference that the delay in charging an accused has promoted tunnel vision once a viable suspect has been identified.

I am not sure the connection between delay and risks to objectivity is obvious.

By 1982, the entire building was officially non-smoking, though I still have a vivid image of my property law professor pacing at the front of the room from one no smoking sign to the other, lit cigarette in hand.

You are right, communication is the layer underneath the layer I was describing.

It is something I have been writing about for years, from client understanding and executive communication to knowing your audience and multichannel communication. My more recent piece on client understanding in legal communications gets particularly close to what you are describing.

Perhaps that’s the bigger challenge. Many firms still struggle to create consistency around the fundamentals of communication: expectations, timelines, risks and follow up. Asking them to then create a consistent client experience becomes even harder.

Client experience may be the outcome, but consistency is one of the mechanisms that produces it.

Thanks for pushing the conversation one layer deeper.

In Figure 1 there is a marked shift in self-representation frequency between 2019-2020. Does your data suggest any reason for that change?

I have currently unpublished data that indicates a significant shift in Canadian appellate court activity around that point, a substantial decrease in the frequency of self-represented appellant activity. However, that shift then reversed, suggesting a temporary COVID-19 pandemic related effect.

Much to yet learn and understand about what is happening in Canadian courts.

This argument sounds good to me, as the idea of waiting ‘x’ amount of years for a trial always seemed at best unnecessary and at worst extremely painful (I can’t imagine being a plaintiff and ruminating for years about getting my justice).

But a question I have about this flexible jurisdiction system is how it might be used as a tool for the powerful to create favorable circumstances for the trial.

My question is: could attorneys go to a certain jurisdiction because they know they will have a better chance of getting a judge whose interpretation of the law more aptly suits the claims they will make?

Then we have poorly trained immigration consultants. These are basically paralegals who do the work of lawyers. There are roughly 12,000 consultants and 600 immigration lawyers. I speak with folks almost every week who are victims of scams by immigration consultants. They pay $60k for a work permit.

I recently assisted a wonderful family who hired a consultant to handle a A34 allegation. This is a complex matter and the consultant was completely incompetent. We did our best to reverse the Deportation Order but the damage was done at the hearing stage. They were basically SRLs, except they were not. They made the decision not to hire a lawyer and it burned them.

Much more on this, in Hedgewitch Part 3: LLMs Should Challenge, Not Obey, at
https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2026/06/07/hedgewitch-part-3-llms-should-challenge-not-obey/

This is particularly true for SRLs who are victims of IPV and family violence facing litigation abuse, where perpetrators continue their coercive control through the misuse of legal processes and the manipulation of legal actors as bureaucratic proxies.

What continues to astonish me is that the judiciary often appears to expect SRLs to produce pleadings, evidence, legal arguments, and procedural compliance at a level approaching that of trained lawyers. That expectation raises an obvious question: what practical value are law school, articling, mentorship, and years of professional experience supposed to provide if survivors are expected to perform similarly without any of them?

The expectation is especially absurd when imposed on people navigating trauma, financial depletion, and ongoing litigation abuse. It creates a Kafkaesque situation in which individuals are denied meaningful access to counsel, denied meaningful and legally required accommodations for the realities and resulting medical conditions they are facing, and then judged against standards developed for legal professionals—a comparison that, in almost any other context, would be recognized as both ridiculous and unjust.

The result is not access to justice. It is access to procedure, with justice remaining out of reach for many of the very people the justice system exists to protect.

If courts, legal actors, and justice institutions continue to treat meaningful access to justice as secondary to procedural compliance, they should not be surprised when public confidence in the administration of justice continues to erode. A justice system derives its legitimacy not from the complexity of its procedures, but from its ability to deliver justice fairly, meaningfully, and accessibly.

It is time for the machinery of justice to confront the inherent longstanding disconnect between the principles it espouses and the realities experienced by those seeking its protection. Public trust, democratic legitimacy, and the rule of law ultimately depend upon that alignment.

Many nonprofits operate on budgets under $20,000, with no staff, informal governance, and no capacity for audits. The founder often performs every operational role—administration, bookkeeping, fundraising, program delivery, even using their home as the office—sometimes contributing personal funds as well. When new directors later take over, they may allege mismanagement, despite the absence of resources for proper audits or professional support.

The organization clearly receives a benefit; the volunteer‑director experiences a corresponding deprivation; and often there is no clear juristic reason for the nonprofit to retain the benefit without compensation.

Yet this scenario is rarely discussed in the literature. It would be valuable to see future scholarship address whether nonprofits can be enriched unjustly by the very people who built and sustained them. /end/

Does this episode also point to the speed that can be achieved if both parties are willing to accelerate to get a decision?

The Lundy Model provides a practical framework for improving participation in justice processes, especially where decisions can deeply affect a child’s life and well-being. The idea of giving feedback to children about how their views influenced the outcome is also powerful, because it helps make the process feel more respectful, transparent, and child-centred.

Thank you for highlighting this important approach to meaningful participation in the justice system