Lawyers at Canadian firms say barrage of US tariff updates has led to surge in client inquiries
Task forces, trackers, webinars, and long hours are some of the strategies that several law firms say they’ve been deploying to cope with the onslaught of US tariff updates in recent weeks.
“It's basically all hands on deck here,” says John Boscariol, who heads McCarthy Tétrault’s international trade and investment law group.
“What we’re seeing now is the renegotiation of [the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement] in real-time,” Boscariol says. “Trump has essentially ignored its provisions… he's just moved forward in implementing these tariffs and threatening tariffs across the board, so we're in a completely new environment now.
“That’s led to a lot of outreach from companies we’ve never heard from before, who are now realizing that they need to understand how to operate in an environment of chaos.”
The past few weeks have been challenging, says Paul Lalonde, who leads the regulatory practice group at Dentons. “You have clients who are feeling a high degree of stress and who are facing a new, uncomfortable, and unfamiliar situation that they haven't planned for,” he says. “At the same time, you have very fast-moving announcements and measures being implemented.”
Since Trump returned to the White House in January, his administration has repeatedly updated plans to roll out tariffs against Canadian and Mexican goods. In early February, the administration agreed to delay tariff plans by 30 days after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum made multiple concessions, including improving border security to stem the flow of fentanyl into the US.
On Monday, however, Trump signed executive orders imposing 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports starting March 12. The orders encompass imports from Canada and will be stacked on top of a general 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods.
On Wednesday, Trudeau said the US can expect a “strong” response from Canada if Trump follows through on his threats. All 13 provincial and territorial premiers were set to meet with Trump’s senior advisors in Washington, DC, on Wednesday afternoon.
Martha Harrison, a partner at McCarthy who focuses on international trade, says hundreds of current and prospective clients have contacted the firm for trade support since the US began threatening tariffs. At Dentons, Lalonde says demand for trade support has surged in recent weeks and “really accelerated” last week, with dozens of potential new clients sending inquiries. He adds that over 1,000 people registered for a Dentons webinar on tariff issues.
Sabrina Bandali, a partner at Bennett Jones who specializes in international trade, did not say how many prospective clients have reached out about the tariffs but jokes that her calendar “looks like [a] dog’s breakfast.”
Bandali notes that the tone of the questions she’s been fielding has shifted, too. Clients that previously came to Bennett Jones’ trade team with “discrete issues” are now posing “existential” questions like, “Do I need to restructure? How do I even begin to start reviewing my supply chain? What do I need to know about my business?” she says.
At McCarthy, a common question among clients about Trump’s tariffs is, “How can he do this? Isn’t this offside trade obligations and the CUSMA, [World Trade Organization], et cetera?” Harrison says.
“For us as trade lawyers, it's an interesting juxtaposition between our usual role, which is to determine and explain the application of proper trade laws, versus operating in real-time when it's sometimes not entirely clear what will happen next,” Harrison adds. “It’s almost turning the average file on its head. And maybe that's by design.”
According to Harrison, McCarthy has a team of 10 trade specialists working almost entirely on tariff-related issues. In recent weeks, the team has worked through weekends. Three articling students have been seconded to the firm full-time to track new developments in Canada, the US, and Mexico.
The trade group is also issuing client alerts with near-live updates and risk mitigation strategies, as well as fielding a “dramatic uptick in inquiries” from clients and colleagues on the commercial and litigation teams.
“We are communicating virtually every 10 minutes with one another,” Harrison says of the trade team.
Dentons, meanwhile, maintains a Trump administration tracker that monitors developments “not only with respect to tariffs and trade but also other areas of policy intervention,” Lalonde says.
The firm regularly publishes updates and analyses as a resource for clients. This content is produced by a task force that includes lawyers with expertise in corporate, financing, litigation, and employment matters. The lawyers work to inform each other of new developments within their respective practice areas, Lalonde says.
These efforts supplement the firm’s cross-border resources, which include lawyers in the US who have “a lot of expertise on the trade side and on the public policy side,” Lalonde adds. “We’re able, simultaneously on both sides of the border, to stay on top of developments; anticipate, to the extent that that's possible with this administration, what's coming; and try to advise the clients in as coordinated a fashion as possible.”
In January, Bennett Jones published a toolkit for clients to assess their preparedness for potential tariffs. However, Bandali says the firm has not deployed additional lawyers to focus on trade issues in recent weeks despite a surge in demand.
“This is what we do all the time, and that's an investment that Bennett Jones made more than 15 years ago because the firm really recognized the strategic importance of being able to advise on trade issues,” Bandali says.
While the recent tariff updates have been fast-paced, Bandali notes that tariffs imposed by the first Trump administration and international sanctions during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were similarly challenging.
Boscariol echoed this sentiment.
“We've dealt with it even before the Trump administration in the past, in a number of instances where the US has taken discriminatory measures against Canadian imports, and Canada has retaliated over the years,” he says. He adds that clients are looking for support from firms that have “gone through this before and that [have] a good sense of how these issues play out.”
Harrison says she’s found herself reminding clients that such disputes often result in parties on both sides losing opportunities and work while harming consumers.
“One of the mantras that I've been sharing with clients and with our team is that nobody really wins a trade war,” she says.
