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