Change is central to the practice of law, and perhaps nowhere has that change been as dramatically felt as in Canada’s youngest province. In the last few years, Newfoundland and Labrador has gone from being one of the country’s poorest provinces to one of its richest.

When Quebec provincial police launched Operation Piranha in February 2004 to investigate a drug-smuggling ring with links to traditional organized crime and the Mafia, they likely weren’t expecting to put the bite on a Montreal lawyer.

Sole practice lawyers and those from smaller offices may be feeling the pinch of the slowing economy, with many of the average fees they charge down from a year ago, according to Canadian Lawyer’s 2009 legal fees survey.

 

Insolvency lawyer Sylvain Vauclair likes to compare the negotiations that take place between creditors of big corporate debtors before they go into proceedings to implement a restructuring plan to a high-stakes poker game. “The premise of the whole solvency thing is that there’s never enough money for everybody,” says Vauclair. “People struggle to get the biggest piece of the pie.”

A lawyer with a small Victoria firm, Erik Magraken doesn’t have the luxury of a business development department to help him drum up clients. His firm still does lots of marketing, but Magraken has also taken it upon himself to do some of the work on his own, much of it from home. “What I’ve done is I try to commit one to two hours a day, usually in the evening, for business development and law firm marketing,” says Magraken, a 32-year-old partner practising personal injury law at MacIsaac & Co.

It’s a pain, but Jennifer Stoddart is quite happy to put a password on her BlackBerry. Of course, she’s the same person who keeps a shredder in her bedroom. And retailers beware: Forget asking Stoddart for her phone number at the cash register. “Giving out my home phone number in order to buy a tube of lipstick, I’ll push back because this all goes into making your marketing profile, which is often based on telephone numbers. It’s not a legal requirement to give your telephone number to purchase anything.”

The longtime, have-not province and economic weakling has developed into a powerhouse over the past few years, recently posting a $425-million annual surplus while most governments are drowning in deficit. At the same time, Saskatchewan continues to boast the lowest unemployment rate in the country at 5.2 per cent coupled with strong wage growth. Employment is forecast to grow by 8,000 jobs this year, or 1.6 per cent, the largest increase in the country. (Every other province except Manitoba is projected to lose jobs this year.) A year ago, Saskatchewan’s oil industry was flush with cash. Today, its potash sector is rolling in it.

Climate change may be a new frontier in Canadian law, but for Canadian businesses the lingering uncertainty about what governments will do about greenhouse gas regulations is starting to get old. “The problem that we have here is that we’re in a regulatory Wild West,” says Adam Chamberlain, the head of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP’s national climate change group in Toronto.

The Bombardier Q400 NextGen turboprop houses a pair of Pratt & Whitney Canada PW150A engines, specifically designed to power the Canadian-made regional aircraft. When the contracts for supplying those engines are discussed, undoubtedly Bombardier Inc.’s Daniel Desjardins and Pratt & Whitney Canada’s Alain Rondeau are involved. As senior legal officers at the two Quebec-based aerospace giants they are also faced with the realities of managing what almost everyone in the business world considers a cost centre — the legal department — during a worldwide economic downturn.

Early in the decade, Mark Hicken found a way to get clients to do the bulk of their own wills online. Using a web-based questionnaire, clients would submit information about their assets and beneficiaries, all of which would feed into software that would create the first draft of a will.