Canadian Lawyer

January 2015

The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers

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30 J a n u a r y 2 0 1 5 w w w . C a n a D I a n L a w y e r m a g . c o m Canadian Lawyer 's top-rated insurance defence; tax law; and wills, trusts, and estates boutiques are all experiencing growth. By Arshy Mann W hen insurers sneeze, insurance defence firms are likely to catch a cold. There are only a handful of other practice areas that are as sensitive to the ebbs and flows of an industry controlled by a small number of corpo- rations. And while recent developments in the insurance world might appear to be trivial from the outside, they're having an outsized effect on the law firms that inhabit that domain. Take the slow-moving consolidation amongst insurance companies. "There's a lot of smaller defence firms that have sort of fallen by the wayside because insurers have become extremely large and they require firms with capacity," says Paul Tushinski, managing partner at Dutton Brock LLP. "If you don't have the ability to deal with those files either by way of numbers or resolution, they don't deal with you." Cameron Godden, the managing partner at Bell Temple, takes note of the same trend. "There are fewer insurers — they keep buying each other — and there are accordingly fewer thriving boutique insurance defence firms," he says. And as these insurers get bigger, some have been expanding their in-house legal Success at all levels Top boutiques

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