Canadian Lawyer

" It is likely they will suggest more people should be involved than currently are in training lawyers — a recognition that it takes more than just lawyers to train lawyers. Fred Headon, Canadian Bar Association Gurevitch has to look no further than his own office to find an example of a young student-at-law who decided opportunity was knocking far from the glittering lights of the big city. Jim Bird graduated from the University of Victoria and in spite of intense efforts could not find articles. "I applied to 15 or 20 firms in Victoria and a half dozen in Vancouver," says Bird. "Most people simply said: 'we don't have room.'" But when Bird approached Gurevitch Burnham Law Office in Grande Prairie, he was snapped up and started his articles in June of last year. "They do a bit of everything except criminal law," he says. "Family, civil litigation, real estate, and corporate. I have my own office — with a window." But the need for more new lawyers is not a view shared by Toronto author and lawyer Mitchell Kowalski. He says the new law schools opening in this country "are setting up more kids to fail." Kowalski has been shaking up the legal profession with his unsettling book Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century. Everything is changing he says. The partnership model has grown tired, competition from in-house lawyers is intensifying, and the outsourcing of day-to-day legal work to places such as India is on the rise. "Yes," he speculates, "people will always need legal services; they just won't want them from legal firms." Kowalski points to the evolution of the profession in England and Wales with the adoption of new legislation. And "the U.K.'s reinvention of the legal profession is just beginning," he insists. He also has unsettling stories of computer programs that can instantly review existing court decisions and if fed a set of facts cough out an analysis of the possibility of success 26 F e b r uary 2013 www.CANADIAN before the courts. Kowalski has disturbed more than one senior partner with projections that "the kid playing Xbox in his mother's basement right now has the potential to eat everyone's lunch in the legal profession," presumably by one day formulating a program that does what lawyers get paid to do now. When it comes to articling, Kowalski is a fan of the LPP, which he says is similar to privately created and successful law training programs in England. "Ultimately I hope articling will die a natural death as lawyers come to understand that a well-thought-out LPP will produce much better practice-ready lawyers." In England and Wales, he says the move to an open legal marketplace where non-lawyers can own and operate legal services providers "will push legal education to become more diverse and exciting." Kowalski says Canadians need to "re-think what it really means to be called 'a lawyer' and re-examine the skills that a lawyer really needs in the 21st century." The Canadian Bar Association is doing just that. It is engaged in a sweeping reimagining of the way legal services are delivered in this country, focusing on three broad areas: access to justice, diversity, and the future of legal practice. Fred Headon is the CBA's first vice president and practises in-house with Air Canada in Montreal. He is heading the explorations surrounding legal practice. While a final report is still some time off, and will include research on numerous aspects of the business of law, Headon says when it comes to preparing lawyers in the future he has some thoughts already on what the recommendations may be. "It is likely they will suggest more people should be involved than currently are in training lawyers — a recognition L a w ye r m a g . c o m that it takes more than just lawyers to train lawyers." Grant Borbridge, chairman of the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association and a senior Calgary in-house lawyer, is concerned many young lawyers are not learning the financial and management skills required for success within a corporation. But he is encouraged by Ontario's LPP plan, which he believes could offer something "other than the traditional articling framework" and wonders if an LPP could be aimed directly at producing corporate counsel. He says the CCCA is "looking at ways to make it happen." In sum, the prevailing mood among the thinkers, the tinkerers, the educators, and the profession appears to be something of a reluctant willingness to consider alternatives to articling. But how many provincial law societies will be willing to undergo a wrenching battle such as the one recently concluded in Ontario remains to be seen. All this, of course, is of little comfort to the embittered law graduates and disappointed foreigntrained lawyers now locked in a dispiriting search for articles. But these wouldbe advocates who fear they will never fly may wish to consider a gloomy report prepared by the Law Society of Upper Canada. "There can be no doubt that the opportunities for a young man to make a living in the law today [are] much more limited than it was some years ago." That utterly discouraging report was written near the end of the Second World War. It proved to be completely wrong. In the postwar period, law business boomed as Canada rode an economic expansion that lasted nearly a quarter of a century. The new winds of change blowing in the legal profession may allow even more lawyers to soar.

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