Via SLAW – for the website, click HERE

Posted by Adam Dodek, January 4

In the spirit of the New Year, Resolutions and Top 10 lists, I present to you my predictions for the top issues that the legal profession in Canada will face in 2013. This was inspired by a discussion on the listserv of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics (CALE) and in particular by contributions fromAlice Woolley who started things off with a “Best of 2012” post that you can find here. Malcolm Mercer, Tom Harrison, and Richard Devlin, as always, expanded and enriched the discussion. Some of my “Top Issues for 2013” repeat Alice’s Top Issues in 2012 but I think that is the nature of our slow-to-change profession.

So here is my “homage to David Letterman” and the Top 10 Issues for the Canadian Legal Profession in 2013:

10. The continuing battle over conflicts of interest

The SCC’s conflicts trilogy will become a quadrilogy (?) (or a tetralogy?) with McKercher being heard by the SCC on January 24, 2013. Elsewhere, I have written about the battle over conflicts of interest between the CBA and theFederation of Law Societies of Canada (FLSC) Continue reading →

Via ABLawg – for the website, click HERE.

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Alice Woolley

At the blog Legal Ethics Forum John Steele recently published a list of the top ten legal ethics stories in America in 2012 (here). With contributions from Adam Dodek (University of Ottawa), Malcolm Mercer (McCarthy Tetrault), Richard Devlin (Dalhousie), and other members of the Canadian Legal Ethics Listserv, here is my articulation of a Canadian edition:

The Top Ten

1. The Law Society of Upper Canada’s modification of the articling requirement to allow, at least on a test basis, some people to become members of the bar through alternative forms of training.

The link to the LSUC website on the Articling Task Force is here. Former Law Society of Upper Canada Treasurer Gavin Mackenzie’s critique of the change is discussed here. An article on the final vote of the Law Society is here. The irony of this is that one of the items in John Steele’s list (at point 5, in the discussion of changes in general education) is about initiatives by the bars of New York and California to increase practical training requirements – in the form of a pro bono requirement in New York and in the form of striking a commission on practical training in California. Will the public in Ontario be well served by this change? Will the profession be improved in the long run? There was clearly a gap between the number of qualified people seeking articling positions and the number of positions available in Ontario, a gap that also exists elsewhere in Canada. Articling had become a barrier to entry to the profession that was hard to justify as a matter of principle or of sound public policy. But whether this solution to that gap represents regulation of the profession in the public interest remains to be seen. Continue reading →