The most dangerous times in any flight are takeoff and landing. The same could be said about the trajectory of a young lawyer’s career. Getting into law school, the takeoff, is risky and hard and many excellent candidates fail to take wing. Landing an articling position and subsequent job after law school may be even harder and some fine would-be lawyers crash and burn.

Few recent legal scandals have generated as much Sturm und Drang as the one caused by Winnipeg lawyer Jack King. Years ago, he tried to coerce a client into having sex with his wife, Lori Douglas, today an associate chief justice in Manitoba. This past summer, the salacious details of King’s actions were exposed during a Canadian Judicial Council hearing set up to determine whether Douglas should remain on the bench.

Illustration: Peter Mitchell

Julie Macfarlane says the centuries-old legal cliché about people who represent themselves in court having fools for clients makes perfect sense. But the reality is record numbers of Canadians with legal cases — the vast majority when family law is involved — no longer turn to lawyers to represent them in civil matters. “I am blown away by the numbers of self-represented litigants in our courts today,” says Macfarlane, a University of Windsor law professor who is currently conducting a national research project on the subject. “I think it’s more fitting now to say that it’s the inmates who are running the asylum.”

Photo: John Hryniuk

Prominently displayed on the web site of a legal marketing initiative called the Personal Injury Alliance are links to three one-minute long commercials featuring people who have suffered catastrophic injuries as a result of accidents. Accompanied by soft music playing in the background and showing the individuals now leading active lives despite their injuries, the video clips also include praise for their unnamed lawyers. They end simply with the person stating his or her name. Glossy, with good production values, and attempting to be inspirational, the videos are stylistically more like the athlete profiles that run continuously during Olympic Games than what they actually are: Commercials for a group of the best-known personal injury law firms in Ontario.

The common refrain you will hear from in-house counsel these days is whenever possible they are bringing work in-house as opposed to sending it out. If they are sending work out, it’s for complex files or specialized one-off projects involving litigation, tax, or intellectual property matters. Even then, they may well be breaking down a litigation file and managing some aspects of it themselves to cut costs, sending only the most complicated aspects to external law firms.

Illustration: Matt Daley

Since British Columbia MP Russell Hiebert tabled the union dues disclosure bill, every politician and commentator with an opinion on Canada’s unique labour structure has taken it as an excuse to air their views. Every topic from mandatory dues to privacy rights has been aired — raising controversy in an area that has been relatively stable and peaceful for the last 40 years. Now lawyers are weighing in on whether this political dispute has any credence in law.

Illustration: Mick Coulas

Every culture has its taboos, and for expert witnesses the biggest of them all is the issue of bias. “It’s something people don’t seem to like speaking about out loud,” says Paul Okrutny, an associate at forensic service firm Giffen Koerth Inc. “If you do hear people talking about it, it’s to say of course they’re not biased. But it’s a big issue in the legal field, and I think maybe we don’t talk about it enough.”

Imagine, if you will, Leo Leduc passing time in an airport bookstore in 1990 when he sees Dr. Seuss’ last book Oh, The Places You Will Go, just after it is published. The Canadian diplomat spies it on the shelf with the other new releases and smiles to himself as he thinks of his children, Kevin and Sandra. The Leducs, you see, lived the book in the 1970s and 80s. Long before it came to be in print, Leo made it a real-life movie and the kids got to star as themselves.

Illustration:Peter Mitchell

The fifth and final will prepared by Patricia Luz Holvenstot divided nearly all of her assets among her three adult daughters. To her son, she left one cent. It was a decision with a detailed explanation. In the will, drafted in British Columbia three years before her death in 2000, she referred to another document in which she outlined a long list of complaints about the behaviour of her only son, dating back to when he was a teenager more than three decades earlier.

Economic changes over the last few years have had a dramatic impact on the practice of law in Canada and abroad. Old ways of doing business do not work anymore and the industry is being forced to make substantial structural changes. Canada still lags behind many countries in reassessing the way the legal profession is regulated, continuing, some may argue, to be a self-regulated monopoly that enriches practitioners while acting as a barrier to access to justice. That is perhaps a bit harsh but there’s no doubt that Canada — specifically the provincial regulators — is well behind the United Kingdom and even Australia in adapting to new realities. Alternative business structures are barely on the radar in this country, despite rules that allow multidisciplinary practices in many jurisdictions, but the world is changing and Canada will have to catch up.