Canadian Lawyer

w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 8 31 embracing change. That's a fine balance that needs to be managed by any dean and any legal community. I'm cautioned about how quickly we have moved . . . Within any legal community, you always have entrenched interests." One of the first moves Paton made when he arrived at the school from Cali- fornia almost four years ago was to cre- ate an external advisory board comprised of eight to 12 members spread across Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto. Says Paton, "We set it up to get advice, input and information; to garner a better insight in terms of what we ought to be doing." More recently, Paton created a second advisory body — this time on experiential learning — to look at "how can we bolt on or enhance the experiential learning we provide and add it to our academic foun- dation carefully, thoughtfully and well." In late January, meanwhile, the school hosted a conference on legal innovation. And Paton, who surveys students on the faculty's performance, has also launched a law and social media course. That takes on a different topic each year, most recently the Truth and Reconciliation Commis- sion. Prior years have focused on women's suffrage and the Magna Carta — with that year's version of the course winning national and international recognition. Innovation runs through the school's pedagogy, says Paton. For example, pro- fessor Peter Sankoff — winner of an inno- vation-related international Bright Space award — introduced to Canada's academy "flipped classrooms," a concept that aims to place students rather than lecturers at the centre of the learning experience. Paton is also launching experiential partnerships with organizations such as the Alberta Utilities Commission and Alberta Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Armed Forces and innovation hub TEC Edmonton. And the school also offers "various opportunities" for students to have supervised externship practice experiences. Mitch Kowalski, a Toronto-based law- yer and the Gowling WLG Visiting Pro- fessor in Legal Innovation at the Univer- sity of Calgary Law School, says law school faculties are "ocean liners filled with ten- ured professors who need to be coaxed in new directions" — professors who have "little incentive" to respond. Kowalski, who labels the council of deans' letter in response to Ryerson's pro- posal as "petty," says there's only a "veneer of innovation" at Canadian law schools. "The current level of innovation is nothing to crow about. Ryerson's proposed curriculum would put it leaps and bounds ahead of every Canadian law school. "New players in every industry have a huge advantage because they don't have any legacy baggage to deal with as part of change management. A new school starts from a blank page, hiring only the profes- sors who buy in to the new vision and only those who are able to take a fresh look at how every course is taught." Erika Chamberlain, dean of Western University's Faculty of Law in London, Ont., says that, in her experience, there's always a "sense of inertia" among faculty as well as students. She'd like to increase her school's skills training and introduce a greater variety of "more authentic" class- room assessments and exercises, including "problem solving via collaboration" and soft-skill training such as communication. "That's something we've been work- ing toward, and we're making a lot of progress." As for the present, Chamberlain says the school has made significant strides when it comes to exposing law students to other disciplines. Her school runs, for where are we with the lpp? C onceived as an eight-month-long, coursework-based alternative to articling, the Law Society of Upper Cana- da's controversial Law Practice Program began in 2014 as a response to the increasing number of new graduates unable to find articling positions. LPP students spend four months in a "virtual" law office where they take on a variety of cases and then participate in a four-month work placement. Ryerson University offers the English version of the pilot, while the francophone equivalent — Programme de pratique du droit — is administered by the University of Ottawa. In its first year, Ryerson's LPP drew approximately 260 can- didates, of whom 221 graduated. The French course drew 19 candidates, of whom 17 graduated. Chris Bentley, managing director of Ryerson's LPP and a former criminal lawyer and Ontario attorney general, told Canadian Lawyer that early indicators suggest LPP graduates, once called to their provincial bars, are meeting with "excel- lent" employment results. Specifically, Bentley says that 84 per cent of the program's "Year Two" class — and 75 per cent of the "Year One" graduat- ing class — were working in law or law-related positions as of the schools most recent twice-a-year reporting cycle. Says Bentley, "The figures reflect the status one year after call. If we could not reach them, they were counted as no job. "There are no equivalent figures for articling." Over at the University of Ottawa's LPP, director Anne Levesque reports that, of her program's 51 graduates to date, the average employment rate for all years combined is 80 per cent.

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