Jordan Weisz is the kind of lawyer who has kept Canada’s legal aid system afloat for the past two decades. About 80 per cent of the clients who come to his doors each year have a legal aid certificate in hand. Yet they represent less than half of his revenue. As a senior practitioner, he qualifies for Legal Aid Ontario’s top tariff rate of $106.90 per hour. But LAO is forced to make do with a fixed amount of funding each year regardless of demand for services. To cover the shortfall, it restricts the number of hours for which lawyers are compensated, regardless of what may be required for a proper defence.

 

The morning of June 23, 1985 was a typical Sunday for John Major. At the time a highly touted litigator at Bennett Jones LLP, he enjoyed a pleasant Sunday morning round at the historic Calgary Golf & Country Club, one of the few hobbies the self-confessed workaholic partakes in away from the law. But as he left the course, a startling news report chimed in on the car radio. An Air India plane was reported missing over the North Sea. Major was well aware of India’s internal strife at the time: the country’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, had been assassinated in October 1984 by two of her bodyguards as radical Sikhs rallied to create their own country in the Punjab. In an effort to quell the campaign, Gandhi had earlier ordered a raid of the revered Sikh Golden Temple. These factors led Major, as he wound his way through the golf course grounds, to assume the plane’s fate was attached to “internal” Indian turmoil.

Canada’s improving economic climate might be starting to translate into more jobs for small Canadian law firms, according to the latest compensation survey conducted by Canadian Lawyer. Of the 256 firms that answered the question, 34 per cent said they would hire more lawyers in the coming year and 63.7 per cent say they are planning to keep the same number of lawyers on staff. Only 2.3 per cent said they were planning to downsize.

The Université de Montréal law faculty’s Centre de recherche en droit public drew the ire of lawyers across the globe in 1996 when it launched the CyberTribunal project. The groundbreaking venture was the first to offer consumers an exclusively online mediation and arbitration platform to settle disputes with online vendors. Many lawyers were appalled by the brazen experiment in managing disputes between parties that would never come face to face and, perhaps more to the point, not pay counsel to help generate a settlement.

 

Love to hate them but lists of the tops in any profession are still compulsive reading. Canadian Lawyer is stepping into the fray with the Top 25 Most Influential in the justice system and legal profession. As this is the first year, our list will undoubtedly be controversial but we are ready to brave the slings and arrows of the profession.

Rod Snow, a partner at Davis LLP in Whitehorse, practises aboriginal, mining, and environmental law. He was born and raised in Nova Scotia, but found himself in Vancouver after completing his LLM at the University of Washington. In 1993, he moved to the Yukon to help Davis open its first office in the North and stayed ever since. As the first president of the Canadian Bar Association from the North, he plans to focus on several issues affecting Northern Canada.

 

When newly appointed Attorney General Chris Bentley set off on his travels around Ontario, hoping to speak to members of the legal community about criminal and civil matters, he found that everyone really wanted to talk about family law. “For many years we hadn’t done much to family law — just little tweaks in the legislation and the process — but everywhere I went the lawyers and judges and people in the community all agreed that something needed to be done.” According to Bentley, the call for reform has been hard sell; loud and persistent. “I heard that the existing approach was ‘very frustrating.’ That’s the nicest way of putting it. Everyone wanted decisions to be made faster with less anger and confrontation and for the system to be one heck of a lot cheaper and less complex.”

 

When the parties involved in a recent personal injury case in London, Ont., came out of the courthouse with a settlement in their hands, there was a sense of relief for everyone involved mixed with a feeling of appreciation that an intensive pretrial process had shown results. 

 

Brian Saunders had two inspirations when he signed up with the federal Justice Department in 1977. Public service was in his blood and — among the goals that would lead him one day to head the new Public Prosecution Service of Canada — he wanted to go to court. “All of my father’s family and my mother’s family were public service,” the youthful-looking Justice Department veteran says. “My father’s family, all his brothers and him, were in the military. My mother’s family were all school teachers and nurses, so I was brought up in families that had a sense of working for the public.”

 

Offshore financial centres, or offshore tax havens as they are more commonly referred to, have been the subject of heightened international scrutiny and pressure in recent years from governments in the developed world.