Canadian Lawyer 4Students

Academics in isolation need to be applied to bring them to life. We're going to be integrating skills within all our core courses. Lakehead law dean Lee Stuesser Trudy McCormick, executive director of the Northwest Community Legal Clinic, says it's a constant struggle to bring lawyers to the far-off parts of the Canadian Shield, which presents a problem, particularly given what's come to be called the "greying of the profession." She says: "We have not had many lawyers start to practise here in many years, so there isn't a pool of talent that is there to replace folks as they retire," she says. Alexander Zaitzeff, a veteran trial lawyer with Wat- Looking for t in intellectual property? Ridout & Maybee LLP is a long-established intellectual property boutique. Our legal expertise and real-world technical knowledge are consistently top ranked in independent national and international surveys. We are a firm of approximately 35 intellectual property professionals – large enough to handle the most interesting and challenging matters while remaining small enough to provide a tight-knit and collegial work environment that fosters professional growth. www.ridoutmaybee.com TORONTO MISSISSAUGA OTTAWA 30 fall 2013 dout_4st_Mar_11.indd 1 CANADIAN kins Law Professional Corp. in Thunder Bay, agrees. "It's been difficult for years, indeed decades, to get graduates to come to Northern Ontario, for reasons that I don't think are valid," he says. While young lawyers may flock to the "cement canyons" of Toronto in search of a prominent career, Zaitzeff says in Thunder Bay the legal work is interesting and, perhaps even more importantly, there's plenty of it. "A lawyer up here could work 20 or 24 hours a day if he was so inclined," he says. "And there's full employment." So how do you draw lawyers to underserviced communities? Dean Lee Stuesser's answer is by starting a law school "in the North, for the North." By focusing the curriculum on "northern" issues like aboriginal law and natural resources law, Stuesser wagers he can help fill a gap in the legal market. "Most Canadian law schools offer courses in these areas . . . but I think the difference is the integration," says Jason MacLean, a former associate at Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, who will leave behind his commercial litigation practice to become one of Lakehead's five full-time law professors, including the dean. Rather than sticking aboriginal law at the bottom of the syllabus with the caveat "if time allows," Lakehead is proposing to weave it into the core curriculum, including two half-year courses in first year, and an upper-year course in Canadian Law as Applied to Aboriginal Peoples. Not everyone was satisfied with the law school's initial program for aboriginal studies. The non-credit, half-year Aboriginal Perspectives class was added in response to a protest staged by some Lakehead students after the administration reduced the original aboriginal law class from a full- to a half-year course. Even with the compromise, Lakehead promises to be a leader in education on aboriginal law. Lakehead's program will also emphasize practical legal skills. "The problem with so many Canadian law schools in the last few decades is that there's a pendulum in education, and the pendulum has swung towards the academic side," says Stuesser. "We're fusing academics with practice, integrating the two." L a w y e r 4 students 2/23/11 11:03:09 AM

• Cover