Canadian Lawyer - sample

10 M A R C H 2 0 1 9 w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m R E G I O N A L W R A P S A S K A T C H E W A N NEW LAW SOCIETY PRESIDENT CRAVES CHALLENGES S he's flown over Zimbabwe's 108- metre Victoria Falls in a fragile ultralight. At age 56, she still back- packs regularly around the world in her boots, sleeping in hostels; no plushy hotels for this lawyer. By nature, Leslie Belloc-Pinder has long craved adventure, challenge, experi- ence and learning. She's explored Viet- nam, one of her favorite countries, from north to south. She's been to Africa and throughout South and Central America. Exploration and challenge are also hall- marks of Belloc-Pinder's legal career. That recently reached a new pinnacle when she was elected president of the Law Society of Saskatchewan at Convocation on Dec. 6. Gerald Tegart joins Belloc-Pinder as vice president for the 2019 term. She takes over as president from Craig Zawada. In her third decade with the Saskatoon firm Hnatyshyn-Gough, where she's a partner, Belloc-Pinder has long worked to address social justice issues through litigation since soon after graduating in 1984 at age 22 from College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan. "I was always really drawn to litigation. That is where my skills were." In the early years after Canada's Char- ter of Rights of Rights and Freedoms was entrenched in the Constitution in 1982, Belloc-Pinder used those litigation skills as Saskatchewan's board member for the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund. She began assisting LEAF on cases and legal arguments — "trying to put a little flesh on the bone," as Belloc-Pinder puts it. That compelled Canada's Supreme Court to define how the Charter would ultimately protect Canadians and chip away at social inequalities. With LEAF, recalls Belloc-Pinder, "there were all kinds of cases where we tried to explore opportunities for the courts and society to understand how the Charter, especially the equality provisions, can affect people's daily lives." She adds, "I am really interested in the connection between the rule of law or the legal pro- cess and how we can improve society and move it along a continuum." Belloc-Pinder's practice was largely focused on family law and civil litigation until her appointment as an adjudicator with the Indian Residential Schools Inde- pendent Assessment process. From 2009 to 2016, she travelled across the country, meeting with hundreds of survivors to assess their claims of sexual and physical abuse suffered as children when they were forcibly removed from their families and sent to residential schools. It was "heavy, heavy," work, recalls Belloc-Pinder. Adjudicators had to take precautions not to be vicariously trauma- tized themselves by what survivors told them. But "even as it was happening," she adds, "I felt this was so profoundly impor- tant and historic. These were people I had the greatest privilege to meet." Belloc-Pinder has been a bencher with the Law Society of Saskatchewan since 2015. Leaving his role as presi- dent, Zawada praises Belloc-Pinder's ability to get people to work together. "Law societies work with many stake- holders and must co-ordinate the pub- lic interest with members who have no shortage of ideas on every issue. One of Leslie's strengths is eliciting partici- pation from all quarters so that every- one knows their voices are heard." There is plenty for the LSS to tackle, says Belloc-Pinder, gratified to see many more women and younger law- yers elected to her society as benchers in December. "We have a shiny new strategic plan, and we need to opera- tionalize that." The challenges for all legal regulators across the country, she contends, are the issues new technolo- gies such as artificial intelligence pose for the legal profession while at the same time being useful tools that can improve ways to deliver legal services. The LSS, for instance, recently pub- lished guidelines around cloud com- puting after getting many questions from lawyers wanting to run paperless offices but worried about how to prop- erly store data. "When we went looking around for information on what other law societies were doing, we found a real void," says Belloc-Pinder. — Anthony Davis A L B E R T A LAW SOCIETY LAUNCHES ONLINE MENTOR PORTAL "B eing a lawyer," says Glen Hick- erson, "is not an easy job." For rookies just getting into the profession, it's something for which not even the best university education can quite prepare you. Knowing that, most law societies across the country established mentoring programs decades ago. Through them, long-established lawyers can typically be paired with new calls to the bar. In a professional osmosis over lunches, coffees and the like, mentors can share their legal wisdom with mentees over the course of months or years. Now, however, the Law Society of Alberta has added a new online twist to mentoring that is more like Tinder than traditional long-term mentoring relation- ships. Launched Jan. 16, Mentor Express lets lawyers wanting some quick career advice to match themselves with one or more mentors for a single one-hour meet- "We have a shiny new strategic plan, and we need to operationalize that." Leslie Belloc-Pinder, Law Society of Saskatchewan president

• Cover