At the CALE/ACEJ Annual Conference last week, this year’s recipient for the CALE/ACEJ Best Paper Award was announced. The CALE Best Paper Award is an award for the best paper in the field of legal ethics and professionalism by an emerging scholar who is a member of CALE. Submissions are evaluated on their originality, the thoroughness of their research and analysis, and the extent to which they advance thinking on topics of importance in the field, nationally or internationally. For more details, see here.

This year’s award winner is Daniel Del Gobbo for his paper “Legal Ethics and the Promotion of Substantive Equality”. Congratulations again, Daniel! 

This paper was supported by his OBA Foundation Chief Justice of Ontario Fellowship in Legal Ethics and Professionalism Studies and will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Canadian Bar Review. 

At its May 2022 Convocation meeting, the Law Society of Ontario approved a new competence framework. As reported by the Law Society:

“The new Competency Framework includes the creation of a practice essentials course which will be mandatory for lawyers or paralegals within one year of setting up as a sole practitioner for the first time. This will take effect as of January 2024. The approximately 30-hour online course will set new sole practitioners up for long-term success by focusing on foundational practice and business management topics.

…

As part of the new framework the Rules of Professional Conduct and the Paralegal Professional Conduct Guidelines will be amended to adopt the Federation of Law Societies of Canada Model Code of Professional Conduct commentary (Section 3.1-2) regarding technological competence.

The Law Society requires licensees who are practising law or providing legal services to complete 12 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Hours each year. Currently, there is a six-hour limit on archived or recorded CPD programs that are eligible for credit each year. The new framework waives this limitation.

The new framework also calls for the wind-up of the Certified Specialist Program (CSP). Licensees who are currently Certified Specialists may use that designation until Dec. 31, 2022. The Indigenous Legal Issues specialization will be continued subject to any future recommendation made by the Equity and Indigenous Affairs Committee to Convocation regarding the specialization.”

In November 2021, CALE/ACEJ submitted feedback in the consultation for this new competence framework. In its submissions, CALE/ACEJ took the position that, among other things, mandatory CPD should be retained for licensees and that the Federation of Law Societies of Canadian Model Code of Professional Conduct commentary on technological competence should be adopted.

As reported in this Law Times story, the Law Society of Ontario voted to implement a mandatory minimum wage for articling students at its April convocation. 

CALE/ACEJ had written in support of such requirement in March 2022, in response to a call for feedback from the Law Society. For more details, on CALE/ACEJ’s submissions, see here.

The next annual CALE/ACEJ Conference will be held October 20-22, 2022, hosted by Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario. This conference is planned to take place in-person.

Proposals are invited for presentations on either teaching legal ethics or research and scholarship about legal ethics and professionalism. The latter includes research relating to the regulation of the profession.

We invite anyone interested in presenting on a topic to contact us. We welcome proposals from junior scholars and from those working on legal ethics outside the academy. The eventual format of the presentations will depend on, among other things, the number of proposals we accept, but we expect that each presenter would have about 15-20 minutes plus time for questions. There is no need to have a formal paper accompanying your presentation: slides or oral remarks alone are fine. You need not have a finished product: works in progress are welcome.

One of the reasons for asking for proposals at this early stage is that we understand that for some of you it can be easier to obtain institutional funding to attend the CALE/ACEJ conference once you have been accepted as a speaker. We therefore aim to communicate acceptances as soon as we can so that you can leverage that acceptance to obtain funds.

For teaching, please respond to Andrew Flavelle Martin (andrew.martin@dal.ca) and David Rosenberg (drosenbe@lakeheadu.ca) by June 30, 2022.

For research, please respond to Richard Devlin (richard.devlin@dal.ca) and Phil Lord (plord@lakeheadu.ca) by June 30, 2022.

The Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University is looking forward to hosting CALE on October 20-22, 2022. The conference will take place in person.

Details about the call for papers, travel and hotel information, and registration will be released over the summer.

The Law Society of Ontario has invited interested parties to provide views on mandatory minimum compensation for experiential training for lawyer licensing candidates. Today, CALE/ACEJ sent a letter to the Law Society with our submissions, which can also be found below.

This year’s CBA-FLSC Ethics Symposium will be fully virtual and will take place on Friday April 8.

There will be panels on (1) Lawyer Competence: Reconciliation and Working with Indigenous Peoples; (2) Ethics and the Financial Arrangements between Lawyers and Clients and (3) The Law Societies as Regulator – Developments in Self-Regulation. More details and registration information can be found at the link below.

The Law Society of Ontario is currently asking for comment on its regulation of post-licensure competence for legal professionals. This Call for Comment, found here, closes on November 30, 2021 and the relevant background report prepared by the Law Society of Ontario’s Competence Task Force can be found here.

There are many topics and issues addressed in the background report. CALE/ACEJ has submitted feedback today on the topics of (1) CPD and (2) Technological Competence. Our feedback in full can be found here: