A few recent data points about AI and the law, along with one bracing conclusion.

1. At the end of February, American lawyer Zack Shapiro published an article on Linked titled “The Claude-Native Law Firm.” It described how his two-person firm is powered by customized “skills” that capture and encode his legal frameworks and judgment into Anthropic’s Claude AI, enabling Claude to deliver legal outputs rapidly and transferably across the firm. This interview with LawDroid’s Tom Martin relates what Shapiro is doing and why it’s potentially momentous: It suggests that properly and thoroughly instructed general-purpose Gen AI might prove as effective for legal work as more expensive legal-specific Generative AI (e.g., CoCounsel , Protégé, Harvey, vLex).
2. In early March, Canadian lawyer Robert Diab published an article in the CBA National describing how he compared Claude Cowork’s legal research ability with that of the far more expensive LexisNexis Protégé. He assigned a series of advanced legal research question to both programs, setting Cowork loose on the CanLII database and asking Protégé to examine its own data. Protégé’s performance was spotty, missing some cases and misinterpreting others; Cowork was nearly flawless. “Using an agentic tool like [Cowork] with CanLII strikes me as the most accessible and powerful way to do legal research using AI,” Diab wrote. “Given the cost, it is a tool well worth using.”
3. In mid-March, American corporate counsel Laura Jeffords Greenberg published an article on LinkedIn detailing her own comparison between Claude Cowork and Thomson Reuters’s CoCounsel on an employment law question. CoCounsel provided a summary and walkthrough with little elaboration, whereas “Claude told me the current rule, what’s changed in the last 14 months, what to watch for when drafting, and why it matters. It did the interpretive work. … In-house counsel asking a legal question needs a practical answer with citations for verification; not a summary of everything that’s ever been true.”

Now, we always need to be careful when assessing claims like this. Three data points is a microscopic sample size from which to draw conclusions about wider trends across the legal sector. Feel free to discount these claims to the extent your own skepticism warrants.

But there’s a difference between skepticism and outright denial. At the very least, these examples suggest we could be underestimating just how powerful a legal tool general-purpose AI can become when it’s been deeply customized, carefully instructed, and connected to authoritative public legal sources.

That possibility is reinforced by recent gains in the advancement of Generative AI itself. Gen AI analyst Ethan Mollick reported in March that “AI systems are increasingly being used to build better AI systems, creating a feedback loop… If you make models that are good at coding and good at AI research, you can use them to build the next generation of models, speeding up the loop.”

It might turn out that general-purpose Gen AIs like Claude Cowork really can, with enough focused preparation and effort, match or even outperform far more expensive legal-specific Gen AIs in at least some settings. I’m not saying that for certain. Dramatic claims demand dramatic evidence, and three data points that crossed my desktop hardly prove that Cowork can beat Protégé or CoCounsel across the board.

But we need to pay close attention when credible users report that general-purpose models are outperforming expensive legal-specific tools on practical legal tasks. Because if that proves to be the case more broadly, the implications would be enormous. Legal data would still matter to any AI system hoping to compete in the legal market; but the absence of that data might no longer be disqualifying. And that alone is something few of us would have believed when GPT-4 arrived just three years ago.

The post What if Legal AI Doesn’t Need Legal Data? appeared first on Slaw.

A few years ago, I was asked to review a law firm’s student recruitment program. The firm had a respected brand, an engaged student committee, and a long history of bringing in summer and articling students.

The assignment seemed straightforward: review the process and suggest ways to strengthen the program.

So, I began by following the time.

There were student committee meetings. Planning sessions with marketing and talent professionals. Law school outreach events and receptions. Resume reviews. Interview preparation. Full days of interviews involving partners, associates, and administrators. Post-interview debriefs. Offer discussions. Candidate follow ups.

By the time the exercise was complete, we had mapped hundreds of hours of lawyer time.

Then I translated those hours into billable value and added the related hard costs.

The number surprised everyone.

For a firm of moderate size, the annual cost of running the recruitment process alone exceeded $500,000.

And that number did not include the investment in the students themselves. Salaries. Training. Orientation. Mentorship. Administrative support. The many hours lawyers spend teaching, reviewing, explaining, and guiding.

None of this is criticism. Student programs are one of the most important investments a firm can make. They shape the future partnership pipeline, reinforce culture, and allow firms to develop lawyers from the earliest stage of their careers.

It is also worth acknowledging something most firms already understand: students are not expected to be profit centres. Their value lies in the long view. The goal is to develop capable lawyers who will, in time, become productive and profitable contributors to the firm.

But when you step back and look at the numbers, the scale of the investment is striking.

Which raises a reasonable question.

Are firms getting the return they expect?

How often are most students hired back? How much student time ends up written off? How quickly do students begin contributing real value to the firm?

The quiet economics of student recruitment

Student recruitment is both structured and competitive. Committees devote significant time to identifying the right candidates. Lawyers attend receptions, interview days, and campus events. Firms compete with one another for highly sought-after students.

In jurisdictions such as Ontario and British Columbia, the timing and structure of hiring are coordinated through recruitment processes administered by the Law Society of Ontario and the Law Society of British Columbia.

The front end of the pipeline therefore receives enormous attention.

Yet once students arrive, firms often rely on a familiar formula for helping them succeed. Orientation. A principal. Informal mentorship. Exposure to work.

And then the expectation that they will gradually learn how the environment works.

What firms say they struggle with

Recently I asked twenty law firms a simple question.

What are your biggest challenges when it comes to student success?

Four themes surfaced:

• 54 percent said providing adequate legal training and mentorship
• 46 percent cited business development training and support
• 46 percent pointed to challenges building productive relationships with lawyers and staff
• 46 percent said they struggled to derive real value from student work

What is interesting about those answers is that none of them relate to recruitment.

They relate to assimilation.

The professional context students rarely see

Law schools prepare students well for legal reasoning. But the professional operating system of a law firm remains largely invisible to them.

Most students arrive with little understanding of:

• how work actually flows through a firm
• how to initiate finding work
• how internal relationships shape opportunities
• the economics of a law firm
• why mentorship in practice may look different from what they expected
• how lawyers originate work
• how to manage competing demands from multiple lawyers

Students often tell me they spend their first months trying to decode the environment. They are trying to understand expectations, when to take initiative, how to ask for work, and how not to overstep or jeopardize getting hired back.

Many students are left to figure this out themselves.

Yet these dynamics often determine how quickly a student becomes productive, trusted, and integrated into the firm.

What if students arrived better prepared?

When I asked the same group of firms a follow-up question, the responses were revealing.

If students arrived with stronger understanding of law firm dynamics and expectations, what difference would that make?

• 69 percent said students would be more confident and engaged
• 69 percent said they would be more proactive and productive
• 54 percent expected stronger relationships with lawyers and staff
• 54 percent predicted higher student satisfaction and stronger word-of-mouth reputation

That last point deserves attention.

Law firms tend to think of recruitment as a marketing exercise directed outward toward law schools. But there is also a powerful student economy operating quietly alongside it.

Students talk to each other constantly. They compare experiences. They share impressions of culture, mentorship, and opportunity. Reputation among students travels quickly and informally.

Every firm participating in the student market is already part of that economy, whether it realizes it or not.

The overlooked opportunity

The striking thing about student programs is how much effort goes into attracting students and how little time is devoted to helping them understand the environment they are entering.

Orientation programs understandably focus on important operational matters such as IT systems, policies, and administrative procedures.

But the unwritten rules of professional life inside a firm often receive far less attention.

How work is found.
How internal reputation develops.
How relationships are built.
How lawyers begin building practices.

Students typically learn these lessons slowly, through observation and trial and error. Some students are fortunate and their firms have talent professionals committed to some of this training.

A different lens on student programs

The firm I mentioned earlier made a small but meaningful shift after seeing the $500,000 calculation.

They stopped thinking about their student program primarily as a recruitment exercise.

Instead, they began thinking about it as a return on investment question.

How do we maximize the success rate of the students we bring in?
How do we shorten the learning curve for law students?
How do we ensure more students succeed, return, and build careers inside the firm?
How do we strengthen student satisfaction and the reputation that follows?

Student programs have always been about the future of the profession.

But when viewed through the lens of investment, they also represent one of the largest and least examined commitments most firms make to talent development.

Which suggests a useful reframing.

If firms are already investing so much to bring students through their doors, the real opportunity may lie in helping them succeed faster once they arrive.

The post The Hidden Economics of Law Firm Student Recruitment appeared first on Slaw.

Tom is the founder of a litigation law firm in Ontario who is now enjoying life beyond the start-up phase of his practice. His firm is running smoothly, powered by a collaborative team of lawyers and support staff and supported by well-integrated technology. It did not start that way. The early years required persistence and experimentation: hiring, training, and retaining the right people, and implementing technology and workflows for efficiencies. Now, he is beginning to enjoy the benefits of those investments.

What explains Tom’s success? How did he get from those early struggles to a firm that runs smoothly and a team that steps up to take ownership of files? The answer is he had strategy, a plan, and was intentional about the culture he was creating at this firm.

There is a lot of hype out there about scaling your law firm. Technology is often touted as the solution. I agree it is part of the solution, and in my view, the easiest part. What matters most though are your people.

Law firms are people businesses. Even with AI on the scene, this is still true of most firms today. The profitability of law firms is directly tied to the intellectual output of its people. For that reason, law firms must optimize themselves to support the quality of the legal work produced by their lawyers and the staff who support them.

In the past, the question of how to do this was something of a black box. Before the emergence of neuroscience-informed leadership and positive psychology, much of management thinking came from industrial models that treated people as though they were parts in a machine. We now know this model is not only outdated but particularly ill-suited to professional work like law.

One essential fact is crucial to law firm leadership – how our human brains operate. At every moment of the day – awake, sleeping, or in between – our brains are scanning the external environment, and our internal states for one purpose: To manage our energy budget efficiently so we can survive to live another day.

Our brains are highly attuned to cues in the social environment signalling potential threat or reward. The work of David Rock and others has distilled insights from the field of neuroscience into actionable models that introduce and explain the specific cues that our brains are alert to. These models provide the data we need to manage our firms intentionally to spiral up motivation and engagement, or conversely to ratchet up stress and disengagement.

Last month in Slaw I introduced the RECLAIM model as a cultural operating system for law firms. You can read that article here. The RECLAIM model draws on David Rock’s SCARF® framework, which synthesizes a large body of neuroscience research to explain the social drivers of human motivation. It also draws on elements of Dr. Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of human flourishing from the field of positive psychology. By integrating these frameworks, the RECLAIM model provides practical daily guidance for building law firm cultures that promote motivation, engagement, and performance.

The RECLAIM model consists of six inputs that shape how people experience work at a law firm: Respect, Clarity, Learning, Autonomy, Inclusion, and Meaning.

This month I begin a series of articles that look in depth at each element of the RECLAIM model and how these inputs can positively influence motivation, engagement, and performance in a law firm team. In this article I focus on the first element of the model, R, which stands for respect.

RESPECT

Respect aligns closely with what neuroscience research describes as status. In David Rock’s SCARF® model, status refers to our sense of our relative importance in relation to others. The brain constantly scans our social environment for cues about whether we are being valued or diminished. These cues arise in everyday interactions: whether someone’s ideas are listened to, whether they are interrupted, whether credit is given, how feedback is communicated. These behaviours are experienced by the brain as signals of status reward or status threat.

The RECLAIM model focuses on respect because it translates this neuroscience insight into daily professional behaviour. Status is the underlying cue the brain responds to, and respect is the practical way organizations can build this cue into day-to-day practice.

Here are four ways to build this first element of the RECLAIM model, into your law firm’s culture.

1. Develop an approach to feedback at your firm that centres learning and progress. Catching people doing things well, noticing progress, and offering insights into how to improve performance becomes the firm’s standard approach to feedback.

On the receiving side, lawyers are encouraged to compare their performance in the present against their performance in the past. Noticing improvements and professional growth is normalized as is attention to opportunities for bettering performance.

2. Develop a regular practice of publicly celebrating accomplishments. One way to think about this is as if you are “sprinkling champagne[1]” on contributions, achievements, and success.

In practice this looks like a public shoutout to the paralegal who worked over the weekend on an urgent legal matter, or to the associate who presented to an industry group, or the legal assistant who stepped in to help her colleague get a last-minute piece of work done.

This “sprinkling of champagne” is something to be encouraged across the firm and all positions or job titles. One boutique litigation firm I know, built this practice into their monthly firm meetings. A regular agenda item was for firm members to share examples they saw of their colleagues modelling one of the firm’s values. Attendance at the monthly meetings grew, with everyone packing into the boardroom to take part.

3. Provide lawyers with training on active listening. Active listening means giving your full attention to what is being said, providing small cues that you are listening, reflecting back understanding, and withholding judgment (the hardest part). This kind of listening delivers a powerful positive status cue and correspondingly signals respect and helps deepen trust.

Employ active listening when giving and receiving feedback, in meetings with clients, during meetings with mentors or mentees, or when handling a concern someone has come to you to discuss. In these moments, you can put away your phone, close your laptop or shut down your monitor, close the door and give the person the benefit of your focused attention.

4. This fourth tip for operationalizing respect at your law firm is to adopt a standard practice of assuming best intent. I first heard of this practice from lawyer coach Amy Binder and was immediately impressed with its simplicity and effectiveness.

When you adopt best intent as your lens, you approach others with a respectful appreciation that people are genuinely trying to do their best, even when they struggle or make mistakes. This appreciation of positive intent deepens trust and supports learning. The mindset—and the trust it engenders—creates a felt sense of safety in professional relationships, where errors can be discussed openly and remedied.

Adopting best intent is one of the simplest ways leaders begin to create this kind of psychological safety.

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose research brought the concept of psychological safety into mainstream organizational leadership discussions, explains in The Fearless Organization that teams perform best when people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and acknowledge mistakes without fear of embarrassment or punishment. Environments that foster this kind of psychological safety are far better able to learn, adapt, and improve.

Returning to Tom, his smoothly operating business owes a lot to the culture of respect he fostered at his firm. His team members trust his leadership. He is clear about expectations and has taken a systematic approach to the professional development of associates at the firm. They can count on him to be available to answer questions and to provide insight into how they can up their performance. Support staff are also encouraged to take ownership of their work. All team members are equally valued for the roles they play in supporting the clients through their legal challenges. The team gathers monthly at a local restaurant to enjoy each other’s company. The culture at Tom’s firm supports people to place their focus on delivering excellent legal work, without the distractions of internal politics, job insecurity, and other perceived threats.

Having explained the R of Respect in the RECLAIM model, I want to return to where I started. Respect is not simply a nice-to-have cultural value. It is a way of building positive neurological cues into day-to-day interactions at your law firm.

If you could see deep into the minds of everyone at your firm, you would see two large neural networks constantly scanning the social environment for status cues. This process is happening every minute of every day.

Take the opportunity to intentionally sprinkle positive status cues and signals of respect throughout your interactions with colleagues and clients. Small signals of respect accumulate, shaping a healthier workplace and a more engaged team.

_______________

[1] Thanks to Carina Bittel, advisor with The Lawyer Coach and Flourishing Law Centre, for introducing me to the celebratory term “sprinkling champagne” and for being such a proponent of this culture-enhancing practice.

The post RECLAIM Part II – R Is for Mutual Respect and Recognition appeared first on Slaw.

The coolest thing about being a lawyer is the ability to walk into privileged space. It’s why every immigrant parent wants their child to be a lawyer, why TV shows perennially propagate legal dramas, why politicians hate lawyers and are lawyers, why in the Godfather the biggest flex is having a lawyer-consigliere, and why there are, for lawyers, only two kinds of people: lawyers and non-lawyers.

Most tangibly, a lawyer enters a courthouse by skipping security, a place guarded by metal detectors, police, jails, and judges. Then, upon entering a courtroom, only the lawyer has the presumptive right to pass the bar and approach counsel’s table. How about the non-lawyers, those plebeians? They must sit back in the pews and worship Your Worship. They cannot be trusted; they must be searched and vetted before entering the church of law; they must be beckoned before they can approach the bar. Not so, the lawyer, we apostles of justice. To us come the spoils of decades of study and work in the form of privileged space.

And privileged space is not merely physical. It is a social space that operates within and against great power. What happens when a police officer pulls you over on the road and makes demands? Should you volunteer information that can hurt you? What consequences await you? The lawyer invokes rights, existing in the same space of power.

And what of our daily relations and the squabbles we enter? A neighbour cuts down your tree; a business associate refuses to pay; a contractor fails to complete the job; a threat is uttered, I’ll sue you! The options lay before the lawyer as clearly as the chef sees a mise en place: a friendly conversation, an unfriendly conversation, a demand letter, a claim, a mediation, a settlement, a trial. While the non-lawyer peers into each option with increasing haziness, the lawyer sees each clearly and approaches not with trepidation, but with the mindfulness of a horologist, picking up so many pieces of a well-trod puzzle.

And what of modern bureaucracy? The rebates, the insurance claims, the ski waivers, the kids’ waivers, the passport applications, the visa applications, the car accident reporting forms, the divorce forms, the licensing applications, the two-hour holds? They are the lawyer’s bread-and-butter. Allow me to take that sheaf of complexity and separate facts from fluff. For it is the lawyer’s character, trained through years of red-lined documents to review and revise, to patiently plod through the drudgery.

And what of the boardroom, that bastion of corporate power? For a typical employee it could take years, decades, if ever, to reach the invitation. Not so the lawyer, who is not only welcome, but invited, whose opinion is critical to the functioning of the business. To these boardrooms the lawyer is endemic, as comfortable as a dog sleeping in its favourite blanket.

So if the question is asked, do you want your children to become lawyers? Do you recommend becoming a lawyer? The answer depends on a simpler reply. Do you wish to enter privileged space?

The post Privileged Space appeared first on Slaw.

Disappearing acts pertaining to people, skills and talents have always happened every few years in the global legal services market as the sector continually refreshes itself. But disappearing has never been more prevalent than it has been of late and will become even more common in months and years to come. Act now.

As mentioned in my previous column, I am well aware that my opinions and perspectives especially over the last few years and more so lately are becoming more fearless and urgent as factors impacting the global legal services market surge with a magnitude of force that demands response — not admiration, study, or words — and, most importantly, requires decisive action as the clock of change ticks ever more loudly.

Right now, my concern is for talent transience at all levels within law firms. Talent of all descriptions has been sloshing back and forth and from firm to firm since the pandemic upended how we work. Lately, all levels of law firm talent have quietly retrenched in the hope that keeping mouths shut and heads down will provide safety in an environment undergoing enormous change at the speed of summer lightening.

If only ducking for cover was the answer. However, the working world is now more difficult and will become harder yet. Anyone who has a heart will recognize this struggle in people-terms. However, as a realist, I implore you to realize that law firm life will become more challenging as traditional structures show their age, operational costs and investment requirements increase, and margins become mercilessly lean.

A complete reset is required. This is not about a pivot because a turn will not save a law firm entity. This means a full restructure of how law firms operate and why, along with what tools are expected, required and used, how financing and various forms of it will support the entity, and what talents and skills of humanity are necessary for its survival.

The Law Firm Reset

My last two columns sparked huge reactions. The Law Firm Pyramid Rollover was met with republishing requests, reposts, and commentary. Its companion piece, The Law Firm Private Equity Puzzle, was met with nothing: tomb-like stillness, pin-drop quiet, could-hear-a-mouse-pass-gas silence.

I have been writing opinion columns for legal publications since 2006 and have found that the closer I get to the core of an issue, the quieter the response. Now is no different.

This same core-targeting technique has also been part-and-parcel of my consulting practice, which is to step back to study not just the problem but its context within the big picture before peeling away all that is ancillary to uncover the nut of the issue. Like a sharpshooter, the nut becomes centred in the crosshairs of my sights, I breathe to steady myself, check that others are ready to proceed, and fire. Misson accomplished.

If that sounds mercenary, it often is but it also gets the job done and desired outcome achieved.

And so, here we are with the trigger having been pulled on a legal services market reset that has taken many decades to take form. The reset will both overwhelm and underwhelm its inhabitants depending on where they are in the journey of both their personal and professional lives. But as I have said before, expect massive change to happen well before and certainly by 2030 when the global legal services sector will operate much differently than it does now.

Expect both destruction and rebirth. Many traditionally structured law firms of all sizes and practices will crash and burn because they are inherently fragile and will fail. Likely and unlikely law firm combinations will happen and be politely cloaked as mergers with fallouts of all kinds ensuing after the fact.

From their ashes and also as new builds, we will see legal service entities emerge and flourish as flatter, non-empirical structures that will operate with greater fluidity in terms of talent, technology, offerings, and cost. These entities, which will become much more prevalent, will probably not even be referred to as law firms – and won’t want to be. Nor will they be hamstrung by the lesser-than moniker of alternative legal services provider. They will be sleek, streamlined, client-catering as opposed to client-centric, and entirely different.

Recent Wreckage

Since 2026 began, we have seen three glaring examples of how these changes are playing out in real life. They include the closure of U.S. mid-size firm, McGlinchey Stafford, the crash-and-burn of the U.K.’s PM Law Group, and job cuts at global behemoth, Baker McKenzie.

While these three instances are prime examples of recent upheaval, as of this writing it’s only February. We have a long way to go for the remainder of 2026, never mind my predication that by 2030, the global legal services market will bear no resemblance to what it is today.

Still, let’s sift through some of the most recent wreckage to identify themes.

McGlinchey Stafford, a mid-sized U.S. firm of 160 lawyers based in 18 offices and headquartered in New Orleans announced its wind down after 51 years in early January 2026 and closed on the last day of that month. According to ALM, the equity partners voted to wind down after assessing “several strategic alternatives,” according to a firm press release. The firm cited its shutdown as “the result of a combination of market factors, such as lagging collections, compounded with various internal factors over several years.”

While the dust has yet to settle and, in my experience, there are always numerous factors that stress a law firm or any other business to its breaking point, the underlying cause is almost always money followed closely by people.

In McGlinchey’s case, lagging collections, which is a common problem in many law firms, was among identified issues. “There was no single triggering event or one definitive action that brought us to this point,” the firm said in the news release. “This is not because of any specific attorney’s departure, or any individual financial decision or leadership action that led us to this point.”

On February 1, 2026, PM Law Limited began machinations to close. Its 600-plus people learned the following day that the firm had shut down stranding clients, lawyers, and staff alike. The PM Law group includes more than 20 practices spread across U.K. locations in Yorkshire, Cumbria, and Berkshire with at least 55 fee-earners and dozens of support staff.

Again, the cause appears to be financial. As reported in The Law Society Gazette, “According to the last published accounts for PM Law Limited, covering the year to 31 October 2024, the company had net assets of more than £3m. The firm was owed £6.2m and was due to pay creditors £3.1m within one year. There were no cash reserves.”

Why work-in-progress has ever been considered an asset has always mystified me since WIP exists only on paper. Until a firm receives payment, WIP is as much an illusion as smoke and mirrors. Again, these are early days and the Solicitors Regulation Authority has intervened, so more may be revealed in time.

And finally – at least, as of right now – Baker McKenzie is severing ties with just over 700 people across all offices of its global business services teams, including IT, knowledge, administration, DEI, leadership and learning, marketing, and design among others.

Again, while the underlying cause is money, Baker blames layoffs on artificial intelligence. It said: “To position the firm for continued growth and remain agile in a fast-evolving business context, we recently undertook a careful review of our business professionals functions. This review was aimed at rethinking the ways in which we work, including through our use of AI, introducing efficiencies, and investing in those roles that best serve our clients’ needs.”

“Following the review, and consistent with many other organisations, we are proposing a series of changes to how we operate and deliver important business services. Subject to consultation processes in applicable jurisdictions, some roles will likely be phased out, while others will evolve. We have not taken decisions around these proposed changes lightly, but felt it was necessary to deliver on our long-term plans. We appreciate the valuable contributions our impacted colleagues have made to the Firm and will be supporting them.”

Unfortunately, Unsurprising

None of any of these situations and their results should come as either surprising or a shock. Money is always at the root of almost every upheaval. Add to that, the fact that AI is an efficiency generator, not a wealth creator.

Anyone who keeps their eyes and ears open and stays out of the weeds will have seen this coming since the combination of money and AI carries the velocity of a freight train with the potential to create widespread damage upon collision Therefore, caught between money on one hand and AI on the other, major restructuring and job losses within law firms will remain an ongoing issue for the foreseeable future.

And so there you have it: proof like we need it that the bottom is actively being cleaved off of the traditional law firm pyramid and this now archaic structure is already rolling over and upending like an iceberg.

Advice and Recommendations

Having identified this problem quite some time ago, and seeing it come to fruition, I offer a few pieces of advice that may lead to solutions along with recommendations.

Be a student: If the legal industry is where you want to spend the next five to 10 years – or the entirety of your working life – become a student of it. I don’t mean study your area of practice if indeed you practise law but consistently learn about the entire legal ecosystem and every area of it. Understanding and being completely conversant in the depth and breadth of the legal services sector will enable you to get a sense of what may happen, when, and why. This may also enable you to spot opportunities and get a jump on trends.

Ferris Bueller’s famous last line in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is apt. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” I use this quote all the time because it’s true. Let it be your guide, too.

Stay curious: Questioning the status quo pertains to challenging the accepted way of doing things. “This is the way we’ve always done it” has been a tired old go-to response that has led to inefficiencies and outdated practices that have hobbled advancements in the legal services sector since time immemorial. This is one of the reasons legal has always been slow as molasses in January to change and is part-and-parcel of the traditional pyramid structure that like many other fossils, may as well be encased in amber.

Those who question the status quo are almost always the same mavericks who shatter the norms, throw out dusty old rule books, and invent new ways of doing things. These people are the true and stalwart leaders among all of us. Be one.

Network with Intention: A simple yet effective recipe for intentional and efficient networking that beats the standard hi-how-are-ya mixer every time is: 1. Target who you need or want to speak with; it’s best if this person is the decision-maker. 2. Request a meeting about a topic that matters to both of you but mostly to them. 3. Set it up and go. 4. Expect to follow up in a helpful manner, and in moderation and at intervals. Schedule and diarize these interactions.

The simplest methods always work best. The most engaging and consistently engaged lawyer I have ever known kept a notepad on the corner of his desk with a running list of people he wanted or needed to speak with each week and about what. By following this method diligently, he became a wildly successful managing partner of a ground-breaking law firm, its key business driver, a community leader, and finally, a member of the Canadian Senate.

Where to From Here

The bottom line is to understand that changing roles and/or law firms, whether or not it is your choice, is not negative if it enables you to learn and grow. However, regardless of whether you are an employee or contractor, you will want to take agency of your own career whenever possible to avoid others dictating how your life unfolds.

For example, and rather ironically, an individual who lost their job due to working with one of the law firms mentioned earlier in this column informed me years ago, and in an authoritative manner, that law firms only want to work with fulltime employees who stay for years. I countered that wide-ranging consultative experiences with various types of law firms and legal service entities are positive and marketable traits.

Obviously, these two points of view are on opposite ends of the workstyle spectrum. One is not better than the other and both are valid. The important factor is to decide what style works best for you, customize it, and expect it to change over time. And always keep your antenna and guard up, and your network refreshed and up to date.

I have long said that keeping your eyes and ears open and staying out of the proverbial weeds will enable a better chance of you being better than okay. It has been solid advice forever, and in the fast-shifting environment in which we are living now, it may be some of the best advice you are ever apt to get – unless, of course, you prefer to go “poof” and disappear. Then again, for some people, that will be an okay option, too.

The post The Law Firm Disappearing Act appeared first on Slaw.

What many of us in law, legal education, and other fields still want to know at this point is: what is AI really good for? What does it do reliably well and better than we could do on our own? And when we use it for those purposes, what risks do we take on?

In the early days of ChatGPT, those risks were clear. AI hallucinated authorities and generated biased output grounded in its training data. But as models have improved and we’ve learned to guard against these problems, those concerns have become more manageable.

A different and more subtle issue has now come into view.

Having discovered some of the things AI is good at — supporting research, drafting, and editing — the main concern is not just whether its output is accurate, but when effective use of the tool crosses the line into harmful over-reliance.

When a lawyer or a self-represented litigant cites cases that don’t exist, they aren’t over-relying on AI. They’re misusing it. Over-reliance entails something else. It overlaps with automation bias — the tendency to defer uncritically to a system’s output — but is not reducible to it.

We over-rely on AI not just when we accept its output as true without question, but when we allow it to perform work we shouldn’t be delegating to it at all — even if it’s work that AI can do well.

But precisely what should we not be delegating to AI? Here, we’re in new terrain.

For certain forms of writing — a personal email, an essay, a court decision — most of us have a strong intuition that relying on AI to do the drafting is wrong, even if the result is fluent and technically sound. These forms of writing are tied to deeply seated ideas about identity and reflection. Automated prose, however polished, leaves us cold. It may be correct but it’s inhuman.

Yet in many cases there’s nothing wrong with relying on AI. Using it to transcribe an interview or summarize a case on CanLII to decide whether it’s worth reading closely can sometimes feel magical.

The trouble that many experienced users of AI are now encountering is that as these tools become more capable and we become more adept at using them, it becomes easier to slide into patterns of increasing delegation. And the more we do so, the more AI begins to encroach on doing the critical things we should be doing ourselves.

It becomes tempting, for example, in the course of a chat with AI to let it carry you from a brainstorm to an outline to a first draft, because it all happens so fast. The model can seem uncannily in sync with where you want to go. Prompts often end with suggestions for next steps, making it feel as though the system is always a step or two ahead of you. It can be hard to resist letting it take the lead.

Increasingly, in my conversations with colleagues about AI, the question is not what creative uses they are making of it, but what limits they are drawing around its use.

Clear lines to be drawn

Institutions are grappling with this problem by drawing formal lines. Newspapers, universities, and courts have adopted policies specifying when and how AI may or may not be used. The aim is not to ban these tools but to foster responsible and accountable use.

Should we, as individual users, do the same — commit to rules of thumb in advance?

We do this with other technology, from cell phones to social media. Taking a principled approach to using AI can help us avoid discovering, only after the fact, that we’ve over-relied on it — when we can no longer unsee an outline or draft a model has placed before us that now guides our thinking and crowds out other ideas we might have explored.

My rules won’t be the same as yours. They depend on the kind of work you do. I do mostly academic and journalistic writing. Different considerations apply in teaching and in the practice of law.

I’ll share a few of the rules I’m trying to follow, but preface them by articulating the overarching theme: make wide and varied use of AI, but use it with restraint and self-awareness.

My own rules of thumb

For research, I use tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to gather and briefly summarize sources — but no more than that. I don’t want to rely on AI to interrogate those sources, rather than delving into them directly myself.

When it comes to writing and editing, I try to be even more cautious. AI is exceedingly good at producing outlines or supporting arguments. For that very reason, I avoid it at this stage. I would rather have the structure of a piece emerge organically from my own thinking, even if that process is slower or less efficient.

I might present my own outline to a language model and ask for further ideas or angles I may have missed. But I want to do the hardest part myself: shaping the argument.

Using AI to generate a first draft of anything but the most routine writing, such as a brief factual summary or a short email pitch, doesn’t work for the kind of writing I do. This is partly because it risks passing off AI-generated prose as my own expression, which is not what readers expect. More crucially, it allows the model to pre-empt my own voice. And discovering what I want to say is a big part of why I write in the first place.

When I edit with a language model, I ask it to do so “lightly rather than aggressively.” I want suggestions for how to improve a draft, tighten the odd sentence, or catch typos. I don’t want it to transform my writing into something that no longer sounds like me.

Lawyers and litigants

Some lawyers are comfortable using language models to “generate first drafts of contracts, pleadings, memos, and correspondence.” As one lawyer explains, when drafting, she will give the model “samples of my work and then my ideas. That way, the first draft is a lot further along than if I just gave it generic instructions.”

Even the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs contemplates using AI to draft submissions, and one access-to-justice group touts AI’s value in helping to draft pleadings.

Much of this may be fine if lawyers “supervise and review all outputs generated by AI”. But I would single out using AI to draft court submissions. Even if they’re reviewed for accuracy, I don’t think relying on AI here is appropriate. Doing so, I believe, runs a real risk of breaching a duty of competence, given the professional judgment needed here to make choices about relevance, tone, and strategy — judgment that AI can’t replace.

Self-reps are another kettle of fish altogether.

But what’s the point?

So then, why bother using AI if it can so readily do more harm than good?

Because even when used cautiously, it’s still enormously helpful.

Even if I limit my use of AI in research to gathering and briefly summarizing sources on the open web, it is still a quantum leap more powerful than doing searches on Google or dedicated databases. Many of the sources surfaced in a search using ChatGPT or Perplexity will be unhelpful. But more often than not, one or two will contain a wealth of relevant material (details, footnotes) that map out the lay of the land so that I can choose where to go from there.

Language models may be over-eager writing assistants that need to be closely supervised. But for light editing or feedback on a draft, they can be indispensable. When I use AI in this way, it feels less like a replacement for my thinking and more like a demanding but helpful reader.

Easy for you to say

Will it be easy for people with weaker writing skills to use AI with restraint? Probably not.

In law school, undergrad, or high school, the temptation to rely on AI to summarize readings or complete assignments students should do themselves is obvious. It poses a real threat to their development.

Does my enthusiasm for AI rest on the fact that I have decades of reading and writing in law behind me? Is it easy for me to urge restraint because I already possess the skills that AI threatens to displace?

Perhaps.

But this, I think, is where we all now find ourselves, regardless of experience. AI has made everything from learning to research and writing both easier and harder. If you want to learn without being hindered by AI, you’ll need to learn restraint. And if you want to go on writing in your own voice, you’ll need to do the same.

I’m still using AI a lot. But I’m trying to use it cautiously and deliberately, with an eye to what I’m gaining and what I may be giving up. I’m trying to remind myself constantly: keep hold of the reins!

The post Keeping Hold of the Reins When Using AI appeared first on Slaw.

Have you ever felt so done with everything that if there was one more thing on your plate you could just explode?

I remember watching cartoons as a kid where the characters would get red in the face, the head would get bigger and bigger and then “boom” they would explode in a cloud of smoke. This is the best way to depict how many of us feel when we are at the end of our ropes. That strange sensation in the body that is telling you to walk away from your desk, go out in nature, calm down… do anything but not be in the place where you are now, is usually ignored.

The sad reality is that we are not always able to walk away, drop everything and go in nature to recharge. We have responsibilities that need to be attended to at the particular moment in time. Thus, just like the cartoon character, most likely we either implode so as not to show how we feel to others, or explode where all our angst and anger flows out to those around us.

Other than describing various coping techniques to diffuse the rise of emotions, which I have done in other articles, I want to talk to you all about something called the window of tolerance.

The window of tolerance was originally developed by Dr. Dan Siegal MD. The concept describes the optimal time or “window” in which a person can effectively manage and cope with their emotions.

This window can be affected by various variables such as being overwhelmed with too many activities/information, stress of daily life, and buildup of stressful events and trauma. This list is not exhaustive.

The window is flexible and will expand or contract depending on what is happening in your life at a particular moment in time. It is also different for each person. My level of tolerance in a certain situation may be different than any other person, since my life experiences and daily activities are not the same as others.

When you are in your window of tolerance, you will likely feel like you can deal with anything that is coming your way. You may feel stressed or tired, but it does not overwhelm you or bother you.

Experiencing trauma or stressful events may take you out of the window of tolerance and at that time our bodies may go into a fight, flight or freeze response. As a result of these experiences, any amount of stress or anxiety may generate fear which then triggers the body’s defense responses.

The reason is that these stressors, which to someone who has not experienced trauma may not be significant, will most likely make the mind believe that the trauma or other stressful events are occurring at that moment, even though you are completely safe

It is beyond the scope of this piece to go into the defense responses and why the mind reacts as it does to stressors.

However it is important to recognize when you are starting to feel like something is building inside and at any point may explode or implode.

NEXT STEPS

1. When you are feeling anxious or nervous, take a few deep breaths and connect to your body. This allows you to recognize that you are getting upset, nervous, scared, and identify the emotions.
2. I wrote about using an emotions chart to start recognizing more easily your emotions and connecting to your body.
3. When you realize and acknowledge your emotions, you can acknowledge that you are stepping out of your window of tolerance.
4. Ask yourself, what do I need now and what is my body trying to tell me? Do I need to step away from the situation for a few minutes; is whatever occurring at this moment making me very uncomfortable and if so, what can I do to help myself feel safe?
5. Remember, that feeling safe in your body does not mean that you are in actual danger. At that moment due to past trauma the body is interpreting the events as dangerous and your are feeling unsafe. You don’t need to figure out why you feel this way, just acknowledge the feelings and then find a way to feel safer.
6. This may include taking a time out, going outside for a breath of fresh air, walking in nature if possible, listening to calming music etc…
7. The main point is recognizing what your window of tolerance looks like, connecting to your body so that you know when you are stepping out of that area, and then finding ways to feel safe and calm so you can step back into that zone.

_________

Disclaimer

The information in this article is not therapy, counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care/treatment, substance abuse care/ treatment, nor is it medical, psychological, mental health advice or treatment, or any other professional advice.

The information in this article is for information purposes only, and is not to be used as a substitute for therapy, counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care, medical care, or any other professional advice by legal, medical or other qualified professionals.

The information in this article shall not be recorded, copied or distributed.

If you feel that you may need medical or other professional help, please contact your doctor or call 911 if it is an emergency.

The post The Wellness Lawyer: “Window of Tolerance” appeared first on Slaw.

For most of my career, I have worked on the inside of law firms — advising partners, managing change, fixing things that quietly but persistently get in the way of good work. Strategy. Marketing. Associate retention. Recruitment. Training. Culture. All the unglamorous but consequential pieces that impacts whether a firm thrives or stalls.

Along the way, I noticed something that never really changed.

Every year, bright, capable law students arrive at firms deeply motivated to do well — and surprisingly underprepared for what the job actually requires. Not because they lack intelligence or work ethic, but because no one ever explained the rules of the game.

Law schools teach students to think like lawyers. Firms expect them to behave like professionals in a business.

The gap between those two things is where a lot of early frustration, anxiety, and underperformance lives.

That gap is the reason I started Lawyer Launcher.

The questions students ask

Students and summer associates ask remarkably consistent questions:

• What does “good” actually look like in a law firm?
• How do partners evaluate me when no one is giving feedback?
• How do I ask questions without looking incompetent?
• How much initiative is too much?
• How do I manage my time when everything is “urgent”?
• What do I do when expectations are unclear or contradictory?

Firms, on the other hand, tend to assume that capable people will “figure it out.” Some do. Many do not — or they figure it out slowly, expensively, and with more self-doubt than necessary.

From the firm perspective, I hear:

• “The student doesn’t take initiative.”
• “They aren’t building internal relationships.”
• “They don’t seem to understand priorities.”
• “They wait to be told what to do.”
• “They’re on their phone a lot.”

Almost always, the issue is not ability. It is communication.

What’s Lawyer Launcher?

Lawyer Launcher is not about teaching black-letter law. It is not about gaming the recruitment process.

It is about helping students and junior lawyers understand how law firms actually operate — socially, commercially, and professionally — so they can show up more confidently and contribute sooner.

The content is intentionally practical. How to manage assignments. How to communicate with partners. How to recover from mistakes. How to read the room. How to build trust early. How to survive the first year without burning out or second-guessing every interaction.

In other words: the things people wish someone had told them earlier. Things I wish I knew early in my career in law as a manager.

The podcast: conversations students never get to hear

The centrepiece of Lawyer Launcher is the Lawyer Launcher – Behind the Bar podcast.

The premise is simple. I speak with people who have lived the law firm experience from different but helpful vantage points: partners, general counsel, firm leaders, consultants, recruiters, and lawyers at various stages of practice. The conversations focus less on career highlights and more on how things actually work.

We talk about:

• What partners really notice in junior lawyers
• Common early-career missteps (and how recoverable they are)
• How confidence develops — and how it doesn’t
• What firms expect but rarely articulate
• How lawyers build credibility over time

For students, these conversations demystify the profession before they step into it.

For new associates, they provide reassurance — and often a quiet sense of recognition: Oh. It’s not just me.

Why this matters beyond law school

Although Lawyer Launcher is aimed primarily at students and articling candidates, it has turned out to be just as useful for new associates. This is what managing partners have said.

The first two or three years of practice are where habits form. How lawyers manage their time. How they communicate. How they handle uncertainty. How they interpret feedback (or the absence of it). Small misunderstandings at this stage can compound quickly.

I often work with firms that are frustrated by associate performance while associates are quietly overwhelmed and unsure what success looks like. Bridging that gap earlier benefits everyone.

A student who understands firm expectations becomes an associate who requires less correction, integrates more quickly, and builds confidence sooner. We all know this.

A complement, not a critique

Lawyer Launcher is not a critique of law schools or law firms. Each does what it is designed to do. But neither is particularly focused on translation — on helping people move from academic success to professional effectiveness.

That is where Lawyer Launcher sits.

If it helps students feel less blindsided, associates feel less alone, and firms spend less time correcting avoidable issues, then it is doing its job.

And if, along the way, it makes the profession a little more humane and a little more transparent for the people entering it — all the better.

An invitation to listen to courageous conversations

For students and new lawyers, the invitation is simple: listen or watch on YouTube. Lawyer Launcher – Behind the Bar podcast is designed to surface the conversations you are rarely in the room for — the ones that shape expectations, evaluations, and professional judgment long before anyone puts those things in writing.

For firms, there is a second opportunity. The podcast can be used intentionally as part of professional development: as content for lunch-and-learn discussions, onboarding programs, or informal associate development conversations. It can also be recommended for independent listening, giving students and junior lawyers a shared vocabulary and a clearer sense of what “good” looks like in practice — without adding to internal training demands.

The goal is not to prescribe a single path, but to reduce avoidable friction at the earliest stages of a legal career. Podcast guests often share their regrets and faceplants so listeners can learn from the mistakes of others.

When expectations are clearer, confidence develops faster, feedback lands better, and everyone spends less time guessing. That is what Lawyer Launcher is trying to support — one candid conversation at a time.

The post We Can Support Law Students Better appeared first on Slaw.

“[Productivity] gains only come when companies use AI to redesign processes and ultimately rethink whole business domains. That’s where the step-change in efficiency and growth will come from. To get there, the foundations must be right — clean, well-governed data; secure and interoperable systems; and people who understand how to work alongside AI.”

This observation from Jonathan Keane, Strategy and Consulting Lead at Accenture for UK, Ireland and Africa, was a highlight of the recent Financial Times Special Report on AI. It was meant to apply to a range of businesses, but I think it lands most impactfully in the legal services space.

In many respects, law firms are ideal environments for AI to take root and flourish. Generative AI can draft lawyer-like or near-lawyer-like content in a matter of seconds — emails, agreements, factums, revisions, and legal opinions, to name just a few. When grounded in reliable legal data and reinforced with controls like retrieval-augmented generation and citation-checking, AI’s legal output becomes markedly more dependable. It almost seems custom-designed for law firms and their knowledge-work focus.

And increasingly, document generation is looking like AI’s opening act. Agentic AI, as this excellent primer by LegalTechHub explains, consists of systems that go beyond mere output generation to plan and take actions toward a goal, iterating across steps rather than waiting for a human to drive each interaction. They are “software components designed to operate with delegated authority within defined bounds.” When fully mastered (and duly guardrailed), agentic AI could potentially bring law firm productivity to even greater heights (although not, within the near future, to a point where lawyer oversight is unnecessary).

But therein lies the problem, and the key to understanding how, in other respects, AI is a terrible fit for law firms — because most law firms still define “productivity”in 19th-century terms.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, law firms measure inventory in hours and understand “productivity” in terms of volume: The more hours billed and collected, the more money generated — and the more of those hours that come from leveraged assets like associates and non-equity partners, the more profit produced. AI’s capacity to generate lawyer-like output is remarkable; but the speed with which it works is what’s really game-changing, because it renders “time worked” virtually irrelevant as a measure of value.

But the disconnect goes deeper than that. The growing capacity of AI to carry out work — not just one-off requests through a chatbot interface, but also entire chains of activity through the use of AI agents — means that AI is displacing lawyers as the primary means by which legal task are performed. We like to say that “AI augments the lawyer,” but I suspect that within a few years, especially in high-volume areas, we’ll find ourselves saying that “the lawyer augments the AI.”

In other words, we are rapidly heading towards a role reversal in legal service production. The foundational unit of productivity in law firms has always been “the lawyer,” through whom all activities of value flow and around whom staff and systems are assembled and arranged. Sooner than we think, AI will displace lawyers at the gravitational center of legal productivity: The machine will simply be more productive and ultimately more effective at coordinating and carrying out legal tasks than lawyers are.

Notice that I’m saying displacement, not replacement. Lawyers aren’t going to disappear (or they shouldn’t, unless they really play their cards badly); but they are going to switch seats. They will allow AI to be installed and operate as the productivity engine of legal work, and will dedicate themselves to those legal service activities for which people are better suited than machines: building human relationships, expressing human empathy, performing human advocacy, and exercising human judgment.

That’s the post-AI future I see for the legal profession. But I’m increasingly of the view that that future cannot be realized within the structure of traditional law firms. Law firms, as we’ve always known them, are lawyer-centric entities in every respect: Everything of value and importance, above all the delivery of legal services, flows through the lawyer.

AI simply isn’t compatible with that kind of model. In fact, I believe that AI is fundamentally antagonistic towards the traditional law firm. For AI to be truly impactful in the legal services context, a new model becomes necessary, one that incorporates and integrates AI as the default option for production, and eventually as the fundamental engine of productivity.

This is why I’m keeping a close eye on “AI-native” law firms and “AI-first” law firms — legal business entities built around AI engines rather than lawyer engines. To be clear, these entities are still in their infancy, and a lot of things need to go right, primarily with how they manage the economics of output verification, for them to really take off. But I’m coming to think these kinds of firms do hold the key to the future of legal work. The more deeply traditional firms try to use AI, the more frustrated they may become, because they’re deploying a technology that’s incompatible with the way they measure value and organize production.

Photographic film companies couldn’t survive the invention of digital photography, and the commissioned-broker model was swept away by electronic trading. Every so often, a new technology comes along that resets all the mechanisms and changes all the assumptions about how work gets done in an industry.

I think lawyer-centric law firms are poised to join them. I think we need to get ready for AI-centric law firms.

The post Towards AI-Centric Law Firms appeared first on Slaw.

[ Image by Amy Lloyd ]

I use AI to assist with social media posts, writing outlines, idea generation, initial research, image generation, etc. AI acts as my administrative assistant to create efficiencies in my inbox and remind me of important tasks I need to complete. A few weeks ago, AI reminded me that I had a blog deadline and that I should get writing. Given the promise of AI, I decided to run a limited experiment in my holiday downtime.

I wanted to understand if AI could help my practice management by creating an efficiency, but that experiment utterly failed and I wanted to conduct a root cause analysis to understand why my experiment didn’t work. My conclusion was that the failure occurred because of one (or all) of these factors: the specific AI-tool, the prompting, general AI limitations, or me.

The Productivity Promise

Stanford Professor, Jeremy Utley, is an academic who provides practical guidance on how AI can be leveraged to create productivity. In a video called, “Stanford’s Practical Guide to 10x Your AI Productivity”, his advice is to focus on the pain points of your role and try to find productivity gains in those areas.[1] For me, it is the administrative side of my practice. I find it tedious and I would love to off-load some of those tasks, but I also know that they’re necessary and important.

While I use the LSO practice management guidance, tips and precedents,[2] at the end of the year, I try to set aside some time to review my internal policies and processes just to check that they’re current and touch on trending issues or regulatory changes. When it comes to policies, procedures or other internal guidance, AI can be incredibly helpful to:

• Provide an outline of important laws, regs or relevant issues to consider
• Help with brainstorming and guidance to get started
• Draft or re-draft paragraphs (or your entire corporate policy)
• Identify outdated information and provide a checklist of areas of focus
• Initiate research into required updates by providing helpful summaries, resources, and guidance

So, when I came across Professor Utley’s videos, I thought to myself, “10x my productivity and get rid of the administrative part of my role? Sign me up!”

The Problem and the Experiment

Problem: “Can AI create practice efficiencies by helping me to update my internal corporate policies?”

Sample Size: One.

AI Tools Used: One.

Comparative AI Tools Used: None.

Methodology: Draft a SMART prompt which provided AI with context and expectations for the task; Upload the reference documents which included an outdated corporate policy and information about my practice; Refine SMART prompt and re-run

Results: AI spit out a checklist of common sense things that I should look for like, “review all references and check for updates”, “update outdated information,” “check for changes,” “confirm URLs”, “confirm if this reflects current marketing channels or strategies in use”.

Next Steps: Ended AI chat.

Conclusion: Experiment failed.

Analyzing The Results (& Why It Failed)

Once I got the results and realized that my brief AI-experiment failed, I ended my experiment and updated the policy page-by-page using my brain. Professor Utley warns us about this. He suggests, in simple terms, that many people ask AI a question and then when a valuable answer isn’t forthcoming, they give up on the tool.

In an article in the Guardian, author Sophie McBain contemplates whether AI is creating the “golden age of stupidity” and to support this position, she relies on an example provided by Michael Gerlich, head of the Centre for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School. Professor Gerlich found that students who used AI more frequently scored lower on critical thinking using a candle comparison:

“I always use the example: imagine a candle. Now, AI can help you improve the candle. It will be the brightest ever, burn the longest, be very cheap and amazing looking, but it will never develop to the lightbulb,” he says. To get from the candle to a lightbulb you need a human who is good at critical thinking, someone who might take a chaotic, unstructured, unpredictable approach to problem solving.[3]

According to Professor Gerlich, while AI can make us, “cleverer and more creative”, the way that most of us use AI produces “bland, unimaginative, factually questionable work.” When companies use AI in their internal practices without offering AI training, the result may be that innovation is stifled. He suggests that these organizations, “risk producing teams of passable candle-makers in a world that demands high-efficiency lightbulbs.” In my situation, it is possible that I was the untrained candle-maker and so my experiment was bound to fail because I didn’t know how to ask AI to conduct the administrative task.

I’ve seen countless examples of lawyers “vibe coding” and using AI to automate routine processes like completing forms, initial drafting, summarizing documents and synthesizing information from multiple sources. And, I’ve seen (and used) some impressive legal practice tools. There is no doubt that AI creates efficiency and automation in the legal practice, but not always. In using AI, it is important to use the right tool and acknowledge that it doesn’t always lead to the best results in every situation. When it comes to practice policies or any other administrative efficiency, often contextual nuances that apply only to you and your organization, can only be understood by AI when it is effectively integrated into your workflow. Training AI and becoming familiar with what it can and cannot do takes time. Maybe I did not spend enough time to work alongside the AI and teach it what it needed to know to provide the best results in my experiment?

As we’re all getting to know, very rapidly, that lawyers have to be continually weary of fabricated and miscited caselaw.[4] When it comes to the administrative part of a practice, while the risks may be lower, they do not disappear and advice given by AI may not align with LSO Regulations, By-Laws and practice guidance. The reality is that editing and revising AI-generated content can even be as time-consuming as a manual draft anyways and manual intervention is almost always needed, particularly for any edits or rewrites. Instead of being certain of the content, it is important that we continually question whether the information is accurate or whether the AI has produced a hallucination. The quality and relevance of AI recommendations are not always reliable which also makes organizational AI-reliability questionable. It is possible that I was unrealistic about the amount of engagement that would be needed after AI produced its solution – manual intervention would have been needed regardless, so perhaps the issue is that while I may have saved some time, the 10x goal was never achievable in the first place

Concluding Thoughts

My AI experiment was a resounding failure and though it ate up my time and energy (reminding me that I might need better hobbies), I still felt that the failure was worth sharing because, ultimately, the use of AI is a series of ongoing learning experiments. It is natural to have high hopes for what technology can offer, but AI may not always be up to the task. It may not achieve the efficiency you were looking for, but choosing to experiment, even when facing potential failures, setbacks and wasted time, helps us to remain part of the conversation rather than being left behind with the Luddites. My suggestion: use technology thoughtfully, rely on your judgment and continue experimenting with new approaches – you may learn much more from the process (and failures) than from the outcome.

_____________________

[1] Jeremy Utley, “Stanford’s Practical Guide to 10x Your AI Productivity,” YouTube (EO Global) (25 August 2025), online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMOmmnjy3sE.

[2] See these LSO resources: Technology Resource Centre (https://lso.ca/lawyers/technology-resource-centre) and Practice Supports & Resources (https://lso.ca/lawyers/practice-supports-and-resources).

[3] Sophie McBain, “Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity?” The Guardian (18 October 2025), online: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology.

[4] See for example, Ko v. Li (2025 ONSC 2766).

The post How AI Can (And Can’t) Enhance Practice Efficiency appeared first on Slaw.

Given the high value placed on research excellence by legal professionals and consultants, I am surprised that stories continue to be reported about the lack of rigour exercised in the creation of work product by these professional groups. In addition to the ongoing stories of professional sanctions placed on lawyers for including incorrect citations and other issues associated with the use of generative AI, there have been regular stories about the high values for government report contracts and the use of AI to create them. Here are some articles on a report prepared by Deloitte for the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador on health-care worker staffing that was prepared for the price of $1.6 million:

• Matt Barter, “GOV NL Spent Over $1.5 Million on Health Human Resource Plan,” via his blog.
• Justin Brake, “Major N.L. healthcare report contains errors likely generated by A.I.,” via The Independent.
• Justin Brake, “N.L. government pledges ‘strict review’ on AI use after more false citations found in reports,” via The Independent.
• Garrett Barry, “Deloitte breaks silence on N.L. healthcare report,” via CTV.

In the CTV article includes the following:

“AI was not used to write the report; it was selectively used to support a small number of research citations,” a spokesperson for Deloitte said in a statement. “We are revising the report to make a small number of citation corrections, which do not impact the report findings.”

I notice that the quoted text uses the Unicode character “narrow no break space” with the code <0x202f> on either side of the word “write” instead of a regular space. This character, like the em-dash, has been found to be a common artifact of generative AI systems, and, as there is no apparent reason for it to be used there, I infer this indicates that a similar system was used in the drafting of the statement (to see this for yourself, you can copy and paste the section from the site into a text editor such as NotePad or TextEdit). In typesetting, <0x202f> allows for control over how text is displayed by showing a space while forcing applications like web browsers to not allow the text to run to a new line at that spot. It is used in places like before a colon in French. I interpret this to mean that generative AI is used in a widespread way at Deloitte, which conforms to the way they discuss their work processes in their marketing material on their website.

Generative AI systems were trained on human written content, and both <0x202f> and em-dashes are regularly used in text whether human or machine written, which is why these systems insert them, and I don’t mean to imply that it is inappropriate to use them. I recognize that generative AI can be useful, but to me the particular type of situation outlined in the news stories linked above indicates lack of interest in important parts of research and writing non-fiction (using generative AI in writing fiction is another discussion). This is concerning to me, as it seems to indicate that the authors followed one of two processes, either they have written something and then used an AI system to generate citations retroactively. Or they were revising their citations using an AI system. To me this is implicitly saying that the body of the text is important but the citations matter less, which is a problematic perspective for research integrity.

At the risk of mounting one of my hobby horses, citation practice is a core component of writing substantive content like this. It is not put there to be decorative or to give a document the appearance of gravitas. In The Independent, Justin Brake reported that “Those citations reference research articles which don’t exist but were used to support claims related to virtual care, monetary recruitment and retention incentives, recruitment strategies, and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare workers. In at least two cases, the citations also named actual researchers who did not author the fabricated articles.” Though it is time consuming to verify whether citations exist, it is more so to verify if the referenced material actually says what it is asserted to say, especially in a situation where a system has been used that is designed to provide text that seems like the kind of thing it would say.

One of my foundational professional memories is teaching a class on research to first year students at the University of British Columbia Library when I was still a student and having one of the students respond on the evaluation form that the most important thing they learned in the session was “that works cited has a real purpose.” When she read it, my supervisor looked me in the eyes very intently, asking: “What exactly did you say?” My answer as I recall was that it places your writing into a wider dialogue with what others have written, gives credit to others for their ideas, and increases your credibility by showing that you have researched the topic and are not simply writing your own thoughts.

I was recently told that developers of legal information online have been exploring ways to better integrate their content into the emerging environment of AI generated snippets in online search. At the Law Via the Internet Conference in November, Craig Newton, co-director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, said that providing text in a format that is suitable for this use can mean that online reach is significantly inflated over site visits, with a potential audience of millions. However, the information at the bottom of the snippets that references websites as support for the content is misleading: it appears that these are intended to be citations, but in fact they are AI generated lists of sites that include the kind of information included in the snippet. It is impossible to know from this display where the actual text came from.

Breaking down the network of citations and treating it as an afterthought to research and writing is a concerning trend, though it didn’t start with the launch of widely available generative AI platforms. In response to this, I would encourage you to learn and teach others how to use citation management software. These are mature products that work well, and which have many attractive options (my personal favourite is Zotero). These applications will allow you to manage your research for immediate use, but also over time, and they integrate well with word processors to allow you to avoid the chore of manually inserting and updating your references. There are excellent ways to approach how to manage tracking the sources of the ideas, and I encourage you to learn how to use them before you start a big project. I’m sure you can find a library with people who will help you with this if you need it. It can avoid significant difficulties.

— I would like to thank Jen Brubacher, Katarina Daniels, and Annette Demers, who discussed this with me on the Canadian Association of Law Libraries member forum before I wrote this column.

The post Hallucinated References, Government Reports, and Managing Your Citations appeared first on Slaw.

On January 23, 2026, a disturbing incident unfolded in the Oshawa courthouse that forced the Canadian legal profession to confront a truth many Black lawyers have long known but too often endured in silence. Sudine Riley, a Black woman and criminal defence lawyer, had just completed a trial and was working in a private interview room when uniformed Durham Regional Police officers challenged her presence in the courthouse. What followed, according to her lawyer, was a violent assault: her head was slammed onto a desk, knees pressed into her back and neck, her headscarf ripped off, and she was handcuffed, dragged to courthouse cells, and left injured and bleeding. According to Neha Chugh, counsel for Ms. Riley, she “committed no offence other than being a Black woman practising law.”

A Disturbing Stereotype

This incident is not merely about excessive force. It is about belonging. It is about the deeply entrenched, anti-Black stereotype that positions Black people in courthouse spaces as suspects rather than professionals; as bodies to be controlled rather than minds to be respected. In Ms. Riley’s case, the stereotype appears to have operated with brutal efficiency: a Black woman in a courthouse was perceived not as a lawyer and an officer of the court, but as someone who needed to justify her presence, someone whose legitimacy in that space was presumptively in doubt.

Courthouses are meant to be sanctuaries of the rule of law. Lawyers should be among the safest people within that space. When a lawyer lawfully present and engaged in professional duties is subjected to violence and humiliation like Ms. Riley, the harm extends far beyond the individual. It strikes at the integrity of the justice system itself. A legal profession in which some lawyers must fear physical harm or degradation while doing their jobs is one that has failed its foundational promise of equality before the law.

The Ms. Riley incident is extreme, but it is not anomalous. It represents the violent end of a spectrum of racialized treatment that Black legal professionals routinely encounter in Canadian courthouse spaces.

Not long ago, I encountered a more subtle, but no less revealing, manifestation of the same phenomenon. I appeared as a self-represented litigant in a Court matter. During a settlement conference, the presiding judge complimented me on my “well-written and structured” statement of claim, remarking that it exceeded the quality he typically encounters among self-represented litigants in his courtroom. The remark was delivered as a compliment, but I found it deeply unsettling. The compliment was not grounded in careful engagement with the pleading. Paragraph one of the statement of claim clearly identified me as a lawyer, a fact I doubt the judge even noticed.

As it did not appear to the judge that a Black, self-represented litigant capable of drafting a “well-written and structured” statement of claim could also be a lawyer, I did not see the need to inform him that I am also a law professor who teaches civil procedure (including the drafting of statement of claim) to future lawyers. The compliment laid bare a stereotypical frame that positioned Blackness and legal competence as incongruent. It reinforced a disturbing truth: in courthouse spaces, Black people are often imagined as occupants of inferior or suspicious spaces in that environment.

This is precisely the logic that animates the treatment of Black lawyers in courthouse environments. Blackness is read as deviation from the professional norm. Presence becomes something to be interrogated. Belonging becomes conditional.

Legal Recognition of Racialized Exclusion: Peel Law Association v. Pieters

In Peel Law Association v. Pieters, the Ontario Court of Appeal confronted a strikingly similar dynamic. Two Black lawyers and a Black articling student were sitting in the Brampton courthouse lawyers’ lounge when a librarian demanded they produce identification to prove they were entitled to be in that space. No white lawyers there were asked for ID. The librarian stated that she did not ask for the ID of the other people in the lounge because she knew that they were lawyers. The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal found, and the Court of Appeal later confirmed, that the demand constituted racial discrimination. The Court acknowledged that racial bias often operates subtly and unconsciously, and that discrimination may be inferred from differential treatment in context.

The message in Pieters was clear: when Black lawyers are treated as presumptive outsiders in professional legal spaces, discrimination has occurred, even if no racial slur is uttered and no malicious intent is professed.

The parallels to the Ms. Riley incident are impossible to ignore. In Pieters, the stereotype manifested as a demand for identification. In Ms. Riley’s, it manifested as handcuffs, violence, and incarceration. In both cases, Black lawyers were effectively told: you do not naturally belong here. The difference is not one of kind, but of degree.

Racialized Surveillance and the Criminalization of Black Presence

Ms. Riley’s treatment also reflects a broader phenomenon scholars have described as racialized surveillance – the heightened monitoring and suspicion of racialized bodies in spaces of power and privilege. As Yale professor Elijah Anderson noted in his work Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life, “many Whites have not adjusted to the idea that Black people now occupy more positions of privilege, power, and prestige—or just appear in places where they were historically unwelcome. When they see Blacks in such places, many Whites, though not all, unconsciously or explicitly want to banish them to the iconic ghetto—to the stereotypical space where they think all Black people belong, a segregated space for second-class citizens. Not courageous enough to attempt this feat alone, many of these self-appointed color-line monitors seek help wherever it can be found—such as from the police.” (p. 146)

In courthouses, this surveillance is particularly insidious because it is exercised by those who wield state authority: police officers, court staff, and, at times, judges themselves. When racialized surveillance converges with coercive power, the result can be devastating. It was in Ms. Riley’s.

Anti-Black stereotypes have long associated Blackness with criminality. Within courthouse spaces, that stereotype translates into an unspoken assumption that Black people “belong” on the criminal side of the system – as accused persons, detainees, or security concerns – not as lawyers or professionals. Ms. Riley’s experience exemplifies this logic with chilling clarity. Her presence in a lawyer-only space was not read as normal; it was read as suspect. The violence that followed was the tragic consequence of that misrecognition.

Solidarity, Accountability, and the Demand for Reform

The response from the legal community has been swift and unified. The South Asian Bar Association of Toronto, the Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association, the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers, and other organizations have condemned the incident and called for an independent and transparent investigation. Their statements emphasize not only accountability, but solidarity, recognition that what happened to Ms. Riley threatens the safety and dignity of all lawyers, particularly those from historically marginalized communities.

These calls must be heeded. An internal police investigation is insufficient where allegations implicate systemic bias and serious bodily harm. Independent oversight is essential, not only to determine responsibility in this case, but to restore public confidence in courthouse safety for all legal professionals.

Yet accountability alone is not enough. Structural reform is required. Courthouse security practices must be reviewed through an anti-racist lens. Training on unconscious bias and cultural competency must be meaningful and ongoing. Clear protocols must ensure that lawyers are not arbitrarily challenged, removed, or subjected to force. And perhaps most importantly, the legal profession must continue to name and confront the stereotypes that underlie these incidents.

Conclusion: Belonging Is Not Conditional

The question at the heart of this discussion is not merely whether Ms. Riley was mistreated. The answer is self-evident. The deeper question is why such mistreatment remains imaginable, and in some cases permissible, within Canadian courthouse spaces.

As Black lawyers, we do not need to prove that we belong to these spaces. We already do. We do by virtue of our legal training, our licensing, our service, and our commitment to justice. Our presence in courtrooms, interview rooms, and judges’ chambers is not an exception; it is a right comes with our qualification to practice law.

The Sudine Riley incident should be a turning point. It should force the legal profession to confront how anti-Black stereotypes continue to shape who is seen as legitimate, safe, and worthy in our most powerful institutions. It should compel us to ensure that no lawyer – no matter their race, gender, or religious expression – ever again has to fear violence for simply doing their job.

Courthouses must be spaces where justice is practiced, not betrayed. And justice cannot exist where Black lawyers are made to feel that they do not belong.

Cause, we belong here, too.

The post We Belong Here: Black Lawyers in Canadian Court Spaces appeared first on Slaw.

Law firms are often described as professional services businesses, knowledge businesses, or relationship businesses. All of that is true. But at their core, law firms are 100% people businesses.

Every outcome partners care about be that the client experience, quality of work, risk management, profitability, reputation, succession, these all flow through people. The results you will achieve in any of these domains depend on how motivated, focused, engaged, and well those people are. There is no separating firm performance from human performance.

And yet, many partners find themselves spending far less time than they would like on activities that are truly the highest and best use of their time, such as leading and mentoring their teams, cultivating client relationships, and doing the legal work that is the most satisfying to them and creates the most value. Instead, they are pulled into avoidable people issues, compensating for disengagement, or staying far too close to work and administrative matters that should not require their ongoing attention.

This is not a character flaw, and it is not a leadership failure. It is a systems problem.

If partners want to reclaim their time, energy, and enjoyment of practice, they need a motivated and engaged legal team. Engagement is not a “nice to have.” It is a prerequisite for leverage. And that requires a cultural operating system that reflects how human beings, including lawyers, are actually wired.

That operating system is RECLAIM.

RECLAIM: a practical model for motivation and engagement in law firms

The RECLAIM model draws on research from the fields of neuroscience and psychology to describe seven factors that consistently shape human motivation at work. These factors map to core domains of social experience that the brain is constantly evaluating as either rewarding or threatening with direct consequences for focus, collaboration, learning, and wellbeing in law firm life.

The RECLAIM model sits in a clear lineage of applied research on human motivation and flourishing at work. It builds on David Rock’s SCARF® model, developed through the NeuroLeadership Institute, which identifies five core social domains that the brain continuously evaluates as either rewarding or threatening. It also draws on Dr. Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of flourishing, which describes the conditions that support sustained wellbeing and optimal functioning.

RECLAIM translates and integrates these well-established frameworks into a form that is directly usable in law firm life — reflecting both the social realities of professional workplaces and the specific drivers of motivation, performance, and meaning in legal practice.

Importantly, RECLAIM is not about perks, personality, or generational preferences. Each element reflects conditions that leaders actively create or undermine through everyday decisions, structures, and behaviours.

R — Respect: mutual respect and recognition

Feeling respected means being listened to, taken seriously, and having contributions meaningfully acknowledged. It also includes access to opportunities to grow.

In practice, respect is undermined when input is dismissed, decisions are routinely overridden without explanation, or lawyers and staff feel invisible unless something has gone wrong. Respect is reinforced when leaders listen before advising, explain their thinking, acknowledge accomplishments in addition to areas for improvement, and treat legal team members as valued professionals.

E — Equity: fair treatment

Human beings are constantly scanning for what is fair and just. Law firms are no exception.

Equity in the RECLAIM model is about perceptions of what is fair and what is unjust. It shows up in how work is allocated, how policies are applied, how people are rewarded, how decisions are made, and how transparently those decisions are communicated. Even difficult or disappointing outcomes are easier to accept when people understand the rationale behind them. Perceived unfairness, by contrast, is a powerful demotivator and a reliable source of disengagement.

C — Clarity: clarity and predictability

Clarity is not just kind — it is a business strategy.

Knowing what is expected, the direction the firm is headed in, how decisions are made, and what the path forward looks like reduces cognitive load and stress. Confusion around expectations, performance standards, processes, or advancement is not neutral; it actively drains motivation and focus. Even in uncertain times, firms can create pockets of certainty through clear communication and consistent practices.

L — Learning: growth and development

Lawyers are deeply motivated by mastery. The drive to learn, improve skills, and tackle complex challenges is intrinsic to the profession.

Learning is supported when lawyers can see how their current work contributes to longer-term development, and when growth is treated as a shared priority rather than an individual hobby pursued off the side of a full workload. When development stalls, motivation often stalls with it.

A — Autonomy: control and ownership

Autonomy is about having meaningful control over one’s work and being trusted to take ownership.

When lawyers are supported to take responsibility for files or projects, with appropriate guidance, boundaries and support, autonomy and connection are both activated. Micromanagement, on the other hand, reliably undermines motivation, signals mistrust, and keeps partners trapped in work they should not need to be doing.

I — Inclusion: connection and belonging

Inclusion is about feeling part of the team and connected to leaders and colleagues. It is about creating an environment that supports exploring ideas, collaboration, asking questions, and learning from errors.

It shows up in who is looped into conversations, whose voices are heard, and whether people feel supported rather than isolated. Exclusion does not have to be intentional to be damaging; feeling left out of decisions or disconnected from leadership quickly erodes engagement and loyalty.

M — Meaning: purpose and impact

Meaning comes from understanding the “why” behind the work and seeing how one’s efforts create positive impact.

For lawyers, this may be helping clients through difficult moments, advancing justice, protecting rights, or solving problems that matter. When meaning is visible, work feels worthwhile even when it is demanding. When it is obscured, motivation drops — even among highly capable and committed lawyers.

Why this matters for partners

Our brains are constantly evaluating the work environment. When RECLAIM cues activate the brain’s reward circuits, engagement, creativity, and learning are supported. When those same cues register as threats, stress increases, rumination rises, and motivation drains away.

For partners, the implications are direct and practical.

When RECLAIM conditions are strong:

• lawyers and staff take ownership appropriately,
• problems are surfaced earlier,
• quality improves,
• and partners can spend more time on the responsibilities and work that truly require their experience and judgment.

When RECLAIM conditions are weak:

• partners become bottlenecks,
• people problems multiply,
• and the practice becomes heavier and less satisfying to run.

What comes next

This article provides a high-level introduction to the RECLAIM operating system and there is much more depth to explore.

I first presented the RECLAIM model at the TLABC Women Lawyers Retreat 2025, where the response from participants made it clear that this framework was resonating with real, lived experience in firms. Based on that response, I have since recorded a version of the presentation and created a resource kit for law firm partners who want to explore the model more deeply. It can be accessed here: https://www.thelawyercoach.com/the-flourishing-law-centre/

Over the coming months, I will be dedicating a separate SLAW article to each element of RECLAIM, with a focus on how partners can apply these principles practically inside real firms, not as abstract ideals, but as levers for improving performance, engagement, and sustainability.

If law firms are serious about being well-run people businesses, then motivation and engagement cannot be left to chance. RECLAIM offers a practical cultural operating system for getting there.

The post RECLAIM: A Cultural Operating System for Law Firms appeared first on Slaw.

Unprecedented market conditions are forcing law firms to choose if and how they meet demands of clients and the legal market itself with private equity being a major and, in many cases, deciding factor in enabling solvency and structural reformation.

My opinion column, The Law Firm Pyramid Rollover, that examined how artificial intelligence, pricing, and transience of the legal service sector’s workforce is causing the traditional law firm pyramid structure to rollover like an upending iceberg sparked two strong and opposing reactions: One was numerous republishing requests, reposts, and commentary while the other was dead silence.

The former reaction is flattering but the latter is more telling. In response to that column and others, the silent majority has told me privately that while they identify with my opinions and agree with many points raised, remaining silent is how they feel they must react publicly due to fear of retribution and consequences.

My message to the silent majority is that I hear and see you; I know that you are there and support you.

The Private Equity Puzzle

Legal services is the last sector to rebuff elements of business modernity. As a result, it is now facing an existential crisis. Cracks in the legal services façade and signs of increasing stress appear daily, which is why a silent reaction has always signaled that I’m on target.

While provoking thought is a desired reaction, initiating decisive action is my intention.

That is why in “Pyramid,” I intentionally chose not to discuss how and why private equity is making inroads along with its potential impact on the legal services sector. Because private investment is a major topic, including it would have been overwhelming.

Still, we need to face the PE factor head on. So, buckle up, buttercup; here we go.

Pioneering Experience

With a plethora of private equity articles floating around, I, like you, have been reading about issues pertaining to PE within the legal services sector. Generally, it seems to me that many or most of these articles are the work of individuals trained as lawyers whether or not they practice.

While this is fair and, frankly, to be expected it also seems that lawyers have a built-in proclivity to lean toward legal practice. Perhaps this is because of training and experience and, therefore, is what they know best. Still, it can result in a natural tendency to focus on how private equity could or will affect legal practice with a lesser focus on how outside investment can affect aspects of legal services business, which with a deep business background is what I know best.

Ironically, we’ve been here before, or at least I have. Oddly enough, and if recent prospective client inquiries are anything to go by, my experience with outside investment in law firms is coming back in fashion like turtlenecks, bellbottoms, and gold chains, but with much higher value attached.

Here’s why: I entered the legal services sector in 1998 with a strong business management background, particular experience restructuring and turning around businesses in trouble, and an entrepreneurial temperament. These traits lent themselves to spending three years as the sole markets advisor to Donahue LLP, a 130-lawyer, three-office business law firm that operated within Ernst & Young from 1997 to 2003 as Canada’s first, and so far, only Big Four multidisciplinary (MDP) business legal practice with a U.S alliance.

We were pioneers. The combination of Donahue’s MDP uniqueness with me being its only embedded markets advisor meant I learned the legal business and how to market, manage, and survive in it with the velocity of drinking from a firehose. I loved it. Working simultaneously with EY and Donahue during that time has served me and law firms I’ve worked with very well over the years since. It has also enabled me to write and speak about alternative business structures (ABS), multidisciplinary practice (MDP), and private investment from both a unique perspective and lived experience.

A Ground Breaker

Donahue was a groundbreaking ABS born and operating at a time before “alternative business structure” was a twinkle in the legal sector’s eye, never mind a term in its lexicon. As a pioneering MDP enterprise that went to market as a “one-stop-shop” for professional business services, we battled damn near daily with law regulators who argued that the closeness of lawyers within what was often referred to as EY’s “captive law firm” – imagine how much the lawyers liked that – and the accountants was too close in too many ways.

While, after a six-year, hard-fought run, Donahue wound up Canadian operations in 2003, I find it deliciously ironic – and as a management expert, am delighted and feel vindicated – that almost 30 years after Donahue’s breakthrough, the Big Four’s KPMG won entry to the U.S. market via licensing in Arizona in February 2025.

I also find it amusing that despite barbarians-at-the-gate fearmongering, pearl-clutching commentary, and the ninny-ness of lawyer “specialism,” many law firms worldwide – due to the triple whammy of artificial intelligence, pricing, and talent transience – have been spurred to learn about outside investment and the value of professional management to handle a firm’s operational infrastructure, all of which enables lawyers to do what they say they went to school for: Lawyering.

So, let’s get one thing crystal clear: Private investment is not just coming to legal services; it’s been here for a long time. Therefore, there is no sense standing on the brakes of this business-based advancement but rather keeping an open mind to learn if and how working with outside investment may have benefits for pioneering enterprises seeking new operating structures to survive in the legal services market of today and tomorrow. 

The Last Bastion

Modernization has come to almost every classification of economic activity in the world. The legal services sector is the last professional bastion to be breached by and accepting of modern operational business procedures and conduct. Because the legal services industry is the business world’s last holdout – and to avoid the echo chamber and angst of the legal-beagle set – it is advisable to look outside the law firm purview for change management direction.

Yes, I know; lawyers are different. Being trained to argue, they will often resort to whatever defence can possibly apply at that particular moment that lends some kind of support to whatever position they have taken. Furthermore, they often collect cronies to join them in a pile-on and are apt to consider themselves having won whatever fight they think they are in due to having what they believe is the last word.

Still, my concern is that a tendency to claim rightness may be a deciding factor in winning the battle but losing the war. Not that lawyers who are often subjected to over-simplification as a homogeneous class are the enemy in any way, shape or form, but a lawyer-like risk-averse trait of clinging like a barnacle to what was can often be fatal.

There are also times when I sense a self-selected destructiveness within the resistant ranks of legal services that supports Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory of “survival of the fittest” and an observation by that old Machiavellian, Napoleon Bonaparte, who allegedly quipped: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”

Money Talks

As to private equity, it would be a mistake to say that we have not been party to enabling PE to be active within the legal services sector.

Take, for example, Chambers Global that was bought in 2018 by U.K. private equity firm, Inflexion, that realized a 4.7x return on its investment when it sold Chambers Global to U.S. mid-market investors, Abry Partners, in 2023. After selling Chambers Global, Inflexion bought U.K. law firm, DWF, that same year.

However, Chambers Global being owned by Inflexion from 2018 to 2023 means lawyers and law firms that participated with and were listed in Chambers anytime during that five-year period were enmeshed with a private equity organization. Think about it: Not only did participating lawyers and law firms provide Chambers Global with reams of information – some of it borderline confidential – but also handed over what is often privileged but client-often-reluctantly-approved contact information in the hope that interviews with these contacts could culminate in lawyers and law firms having a chance to be listed in a blessed directory.

The same year that Inflexion bought DWF, Allen & Overy spun off its risk management business to Inflexion and Endicott Capital prior to merging with Shearman & Sterling with the intention to hold a “significant minority stake” in this business that provides finance sector clients with subscription-based online legal analysis pertaining to compliance topics.

As recently as November 2025, U.S.-based McDermott Will & Schulte acknowledged “fielding inbound interest” in private equity investment. When an AM Law 50 firm considers PE funding, any argument that this type of investment is suitable for only small- to medium-size law firms or boutique practices falls away and fails fast.

Private equity is also active in Canada. Speaking personally, in 2024, a venture capital company asked me to access efficiencies of targeted Canadian law firms and consult with the VC to decide which of these firms to approach for potential investment. I declined due to a myriad of reasons ranging from potential client conflict concerns to lack of capacity and general disinterest. It didn’t help that this particular VC had a notion that applying pressure tactics and time constraints was a strategy that would achieve their objective to retain me rather than the resulting zero-sum outcome. (Watch for that.) However, anyone who knows me is fully aware that I don’t take direction well. No independent advisor worth a damn does.

Still, I find it puzzling that when private investment has been active in the legal services sector for years, handwringing about it now seems to be the newest obsession rather than tackling more prevalent factors threatening the business of law, such as AI, pricing, and transient talent that are impacting the legal services sector right this minute. Then again, for some law firms, introducing private equity into their business back office may be a possible solution to solving parts of this puzzle.

Business, Not Practice

Private equity is interested in injecting new capital into legal business, not practice. This is evident in private equity’s investment in other sectors, such as dentistry where PE has bought into the business operations side because that is their strength. They’re not capable, licenced, or interested in drilling teeth.

The same can be said for the business of law where many firms long ago spun off their internal business services into a separate unit to house finance, IT, marketing and business development, professional development, human resources, and whatever else might be applicable, leaving the practice of law side of the firm as a unit unto itself.

It’s this spun-off internal business piece that is of interest to private equity because it’s ripe for conversion to a professionally Managed Services Organization (MSO). PE is well-able to ignite better efficiency aided by professional management, guidance, and resources to streamline operations starting with removing procedures and deadwood (as suggested in “Pyramid”) that seem to be sacred cows to many law firms unable or unwilling to execute this necessary efficiency requirement themselves.

Control Issues and Structural Flaws

The nut of this issue for law firms is the lawyerly trait of needing to have control along with a potential threat – real or imagined – of losing whatever control they think they have. However, running a business is not what most lawyers identify as a strength, nor do many of them want it to be.

Because of PE’s deep understanding of business and that money makes the world go around, there is no danger of them asking such questions as, “What does ‘variance’ mean?” This was a question I overheard a senior partner who – wait for it – practiced business law for 30 years ask another lawyer who didn’t know the answer. (Over the years, I’ve asked other lawyers this question and none has known the answer, which is that variance is the difference between budget and actual that is analysed and reported monthly.) Principles of finance are basic business, which is not taught in law schools, but it is the lifeblood of commerce and corporate management.

Ironically, the reason we’re talking about private equity at this point in time is a direct result of law firm structure history.

Consider what could have happened if law firms of yesteryear had had the sense to structure themselves like almost every other enterprise of commerce by employing both a strict business approach to money along with savvy financial professionals to manage it without interference, rather than what we’ve got now: Law firms that seem to treat their businesses as private clubs or banks, and drain the coffers each year to dole out doubloons to equity partners. If you think about it, the history and absurdity of this antiquated structure is mind-boggling to the point of completely bonkers.

The Problematic Pyramid

The pyramid structure of traditional law firms has always been peculiar due to relying on hierarchy and scaling from the bottom up. Now, due to hair-on-fire business issues that include AI, pricing, talent transience, and private equity, the pyramid structure is flawed to the point of faltering and in many instances, failing.

The hierarchical pyramid structure is the opposite of flatter structures that encourage and enable contributions of ideas, systems, and improvements from all team members regardless of tenure, status, or whatever label you want to put on people. It is how entrepreneurial entities work best and grow with assurance that is based on rock-solid business plans that are also engineered for flexibility within brightline boundaries.

This is why anyone who has worked outside of the legal industry prior to coming into it, quickly and fully grasps an understanding that law firms breathe rare air. How law firms operate and why is often completely mystifying to these people since law firms in general and their operations in particular usually defy both business principles and basic logic. As a result, there are many law firms that are successful by sheer accident. I should know having experienced this many times since 1998, and I’m not alone.

For outsiders who join legal services, their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual safety valves require taking the work seriously and either cultivating or being naturally blessed with both a sense of humour and the ridiculous. Otherwise, and without these personal and professional features, they will often up sticks and go elsewhere.

Backward, Then Forward

A strong sense of self is a sanity and safety mechanism because egos are a major factor within legal services. I’m not talking about one’s sense of identity or self-worth that is important for each of us to have and nurture, but rather about the fragility of humanity and its potential for failure than can manifest as toxicity and/or oversized perceptions of self-importance that demand constant validation.

Another factor is the notion of legacy. Legacy is a fallacy because changes or advancements made at the time of their doing tend to fade sooner than you think. Again, I should know having made systemic changes to structures and operations of various law firms only to see some of these improvements backslide and for a firm to eventually revert to its former state. Oftentimes, I’m asked to return and shore up what was lost. However, recognizing the overarching futility and that I’d be doing it solely for money – which runs contrary to my ethical streak – I usually don’t bother since without consistent management and reinforcement, improvements are often like sandcastles on a beach; the tide or a storm will eventually sweep them away.

Because the practice of law is an evidence-based profession, there is a strong reliance on using data as proof especially in troubling times. Management expert, Peter Drucker, said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” I go one step further and suggest that a reliance on data means working with dated information culled from history since that’s what data is: Historical. This means that even with all the data in the world allegedly acting as proof, that old chestnut: “Past performance is not indicative of future results” is the perfect argument.

Therefore, the trouble for the legal services sector in coming to grips with the understanding that while precedence is a basis on which the practice of law sits, any data culled from history are not one whit predictive of the future pertaining to the business of law. This is why that terribly tired yet pervasive old question: “Who else has done it this way and been successful?” has been and always will be a sure-fire recipe for stagnancy and eventual decline.

Still, there are bright spots that happen when the way forward is illuminated by maverick law firms that, determined to pursue active and solvent futures, acknowledge a nodding acquaintance to the existence of data but, much more importantly, have the intestinal fortitude to break free of it to think differently, act accordingly, and shatter the mould that defines structures and cultures that confine exponential growth.

These traits are the hallmarks of law firms of the future.

Focus and Act

Distractions are aplenty in the legal services sector, which is why the topic of private equity is “flavour of the [ insert whatever timeline you want ]” and feeds into many lawyers’ professional and personal quirk of admiring the problem (for ages) before hammering out potential solutions, and discussing them ad nauseum before acting.

The problem right now is that the legal services sector is at a precipice. As noted in “Pyramid,” the traditional law firm pyramid structure is rolling over and will upend like an iceberg and by 2030, global legal services will operate much differently than they do now.

While I’m not advocating for private investment, law firms losing their lower tiers of legal talent along with operational stability due to the twin juggernauts of artificial intelligence and pricing are well-advised to consider PE for potentially better and sustainable business solvency. Yes, some degree of control will need to be forfeited to ensure better evolvement and survival, but that’s how both business and life works.

Time’s Up

Lorenzo Pietro “Yogi” Berra, an American baseball player who was probably more famous for his witticisms than his sport suggested, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Applying that wisdom to legal services where up to this point, many traditionally structured law firms have been successful by fluke rather than design, we’ve finally come to a critical fork in this sector’s road where law firms are now being forced by clients and the legal market itself to choose if and how they change.

There are essentially two paths: One leads to carrying on business as usual and hoping to survive the disintegration of an historically flawed and rapidly destabilizing traditional pyramid structure. The other requires vision, grit, and determination to change the business, its models and flexibility as well as welcoming a multidisciplinary and constantly shifting talent roster to work with and within newer, flatter legal services structures that merge with the modern world to realize solvent and successful futures.

Choose wisely. Be fearless.

The post The Law Firm Private Equity Puzzle appeared first on Slaw.

Melville’s Moby Dick, which fell flat out of the presses and was out of print in 1891 when he died, was thankfully revived 70 years later in the 1920s for it gave us access to not only one of the best books ever written, but a legal theory that will stand the test of time, that is, that possession is the whole of the law. How can this be so? By virtue of two simple principles:

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

The story goes that a boat of whalers had harpooned a whale but capsized, and watched the whale escape with their harpoons stuck in it. Another group of whalers then came along and killed and seized the whale. To whom did the whale, the capsized boat, and the harpoons belong?

The boat belonged to the whalers who were on it and capsized, for they had held fast to it and let go only to save their lives. No one else had subsequently held fast to the boat, unless it can be said that the ocean held fast to the boat.

The harpoons held fast in the whale. When first struck, the whale was loose-fish, for it had not been caught. So at that time the proper owner of the harpoons was the whale. Then the second group of whalers caught the whale, and so the whale held fast to them. It followed, then, that the harpoons and the whale belonged to the second group of whalers, for the lot of it held fast to them.

Now more than 100 years have passed since Moby Dick and I cannot but be astonished at its applicability in our times. Let us take the a common tort in which a pedestrian is injured in a car accident. Now the pedestrian is loose-fish. Like the whale he is free and travels the oceans of sidewalks and roads. When the driver strikes the pedestrian, the pedestrian becomes fast-fish, having been harpooned by the driver. And so the driver is liable.

Suppose our case is more complicated. The driver loses control on a patch of slick ice which the municipality had failed to salt. Then the driver becomes loose-fish on the ice. The ice is fast-fish to the municipality, and so in turn the driver and pedestrian are fast-fish to the municipality. Thus the municipality is liable.

The principle is even more intuitive in contract law. A promise is made by a vendor to deliver a product. The product is defective, so it remains fast-fish to the vendor. The product is lost in shipping, so it is fast-fish to whoever arranged the shipping. The product spoils in storage, so it is fast-fish to the buyer. The product is destroyed by lightning, well, then it is loose-fish!

In family law spouses are fast-fish. Upon divorce the rope remains naturally tethered. Children, too, are fast-fish. Is it any wonder that families, which remain fast-fish to each other in nature, must in law support each other by child-support and spousal-support?

How far afield does the doctrine extend? In corporate law the business is fast-fish to the directors who manipulate it. Minority shareholders, being loose-fish, thus seek the oppression remedy from those who do the harpooning. And nothing could be clearer in securities law when insiders have the fast-fish of material non-public information, while the public are mere loose-fish. Thus the insider must act with care and the public may travel as they will; but they cannot be punished by those who claim the fast-fish.

And is not the battle of beneficiaries over their dead parent’s property nothing but a question of who is fast-fish and loose-fish? So the child who takes care of the parent in their dying years claims the child is fast-fish to the parent; and the spouse who marries into the family late claims he is fast-fish, while the child disputes, saying the spouse is mere loose-fish? And doesn’t it make sense that a will, in many jurisdictions, is deprecated upon marriage, for the creation of a new family creates new fast-fish?

We need not exhaust the cases to prove the principle. Rather be guided by the great seer:

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

-Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851

The post You Are a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish appeared first on Slaw.

Two recent events in my professional life have me thinking (and worrying as is my nature) about the push and pull we lawyers experience when communicating with clients. In an increasingly connected world, how do we balance our obligation to respond in a reasonable timeframe with the client’s expectation to receive frequent and immediate responses via text or instant messaging?

The first event is the launch of the Public Concerns Pathway (PCP) from the Law Society of Saskatchewan. I was the Knowledge Engineer on this project that provides the public with clear information about common concerns with legal professionals and steps to resolution. The PCP identifies one of the most common concerns from the public as poor communication. The PCP breaks this concern into three sub concerns:

• Slow or No Response
• Not Explaining
• Not Keeping Me Informed

The ‘Slow or No Response’ sub concern explains the lawyer’s duty to communicate effectively with their client and expected practices including:

• keeping a client reasonably informed;
• answering reasonable requests from a client for information;
• responding to a client’s telephone calls; and
• answering, within a reasonable time, any communication that requires a reply.

To assist clients to better understand whether response times are ‘reasonable’, clients are asked to take the following factors into account:

• the urgency of their matter or request, such as if there are upcoming deadlines; and
• other demands on the lawyer’s or limited licensee’s time that they may need to prioritize – for example, multiple files and holidays.

The second event is the yearly presentation to first-year law students on the importance of effective communications that I co-present with my colleague from the Law Society of Saskatchewan. In addition to outlining the communication obligations as identified in the PCP, my Law Society colleague warns about using more ‘casual’ methods for professional communications. Specifically, text messages. The Code of Professional Conduct does not explicitly ban the use of text, but my colleague stresses that text messages and other casual methods should be avoided, if possible, for the following reasons:

• Sends the wrong message about seriousness, reachability/accessibility;
• Allows for “knee-jerk” responses where more careful consideration may be required; and
• More difficult to track and control.

However, my colleague does acknowledge that in certain circumstances text may be the client’s only method of written communication. If this is the case, the lawyer should:

• Set out boundaries for the client re: use and response expectations;
• Develop a procedure to preserve and file the text communications on the client file; and
• Maintain a professional tone throughout.

Fair advice and similar to that provided by the Law Society of Alberta in Effective Communication Part II – Managing and Documenting the File:

Consider carefully whether you want use text messaging as a method of communicating with clients. Cellular service providers may only keep records for a relatively short period of time. If you use text messaging with your client, you must have a system to keep a record of your communications for the file. You must also be able to prove that a client gave you instructions by text message. Email is a better choice.

If you do use text messaging for some communications, you should not use them for conveying subtle legal information; text messages are short and not designed for this level of information. Text messages also tend to lead to less formal communications and, in some cases, lawyers fall into the trap of using unprofessional or discourteous language when engaging with clients by text message. Texting may also lead the client to expect immediate responses from you at any time of the day or night.

While all the above points are important, I particularly stress the importance of setting healthy communication boundaries for the lawyer’s mental health. We do have an obligation to respond to professional communications within a reasonable timeframe, but not at the expense of our well-being. How do we explain this to clients who are used to receiving immediate responses, even outside of working hours?

The Law Society of Alberta provides practical advice focusing the potential increased cost to clients resulting from frequent communication:

While ongoing communication with the client is important, too much or too frequent communication is costly to the client and distracts from your substantive work on the file. For instance, you might have a client who calls you all the time to micro-manage the file. Presumably, you have already advised the client at the initial meeting or in the retainer agreement that you charge for your time and frequent contacts are costly. If the behaviour persists, remind the client that you charge for your time, that these communications distract from your ability to move matters along expeditiously, and that frequent contacts will result in increased cost to the client. Be certain to document these communications.

If the client is not swayed by the increased cost argument, do we have the skillset required to set a healthy boundary? Generally, the inability to set healthy boundaries is a factor that contributes to the poor mental health of our profession. The Canadian Lawyers Insurance Association (CLIA) identifies Assertiveness/Setting Boundaries as a valuable skill to preserve health in their Wellness Toolkit, a compilation of wellness resources to assist lawyers avoid claims. Four helpful resources are identified, and I suggest you review if you are having difficulty managing your client’s communication expectations:

• Best Way to Say No – CBA Dear Advy
• 24 Hours Demand: Tactics to Help Manage Expectation and Set Healthy Boundaries – CBA Well-Being Hour
• Five Mistakes Lawyers Make When Setting Boundaries and How to Fix Them – Bena Stock
• Boundaries for Lawyers Workbook – Bena Stock

While keeping in mind our obligations, remember that allowing clients to use text messaging may encourage more frequent communications outside work hours. We need to be available to our clients but not always available. Establish communications expectations early and be careful not only in what we communicate but how. The communications method we choose can help protect our wellbeing while ensuring we are meeting our professional obligations.

The post Healthy Communication Boundaries in a Connected World appeared first on Slaw.

Have you ever felt like running away?

In the middle of doing work or going through a stressful moment, you imagine how wonderful it would be to just go somewhere far away. Perhaps the image of a desert is something that you are imagining now as you read this. No one to bother you; just you, the ocean, white soft sand, and maybe someone to serve you a delicious meal?

Escaping the moment that is causing us stress or anxiety is something that the mind does in order to cope. When we go on vacation, we are giving our minds and bodies a moment to rest and recharge. This gives us extra energy, just like a rechargeable battery, to deal with our daily tasks when we come back to our daily lives.

Most of us find that going away for a week or two, does not seem to be enough to recharge. Just when we feel that we are getting calm and are able to enjoy time away, we are forced back into reality by having to come back from vacation.

Many people say that coming back from vacation is harder than leaving, as there is so much more to do to catch up. After a day or so, it feels like you are ready to pack up and leave again.

It’s not a coincidence that many European countries have more than four weeks of vacation per year. They seem to know that for a person to relax and come into balance, there needs to be a considerable amount of time for such relaxation to take place.

As most of us are not able to take a four week vacation, what can we do to still feel recharged and balanced so that we can go about our daily tasks with ease and calm?

The answer is simple. Take mini vacations throughout the day.

Studies haves shown that just looking at an image of a beautiful beach reduces the stress response. When we see an image that makes us feel calm, the body does not care whether it’s real or virtual. As long as the mind can relate it to something that in the past we considered as calming and safe, our body will go into a more relaxed state.

Here is how you can take a mini vacation in your mind:

1. Sit in a quiet space, with dimmed lighting.
2. Make sure you are comfortable.
3. Put a ten or fifteen minute alarm on your phone, so that you can take the time without being disturbed. Make sure the alarm is set to a soft sound that will not be jarring or uncomfortable when it sounds.
4. Have soft, calming music playing in the background. There are numerous audios and playlists now on various platforms that provide music for mediation and stress relief.
5. Close your eyes, and imagine a beautiful place where you feel completely at ease. It can be a beach with soft white sand and a turquoise ocean, or a forest with a canopy of trees that creates a cocoon around you.
6. If you are not able to imagine a place where you feel calm, then find images on the internet and look at the image on your phone before closing your eyes and imagining yourself in that place.
7. Take a few slow, deep breaths. Breathe in to a count of 5, hold to a count of 6 and release to a count of seven.
8. See yourself in that beautiful space, where there is no schedule, time limitations or tasks. You are alone and for the 10-15 minutes that you have allocated to stay in this mediation, you don’t have any responsibilities or worries.
9. If worries or thoughts creep into your calm space, kindly say to them that you will pick them up and deal with them later, but now is your time to be on vacation. There is a no disturb sign on the door to your mind and you kindly ask these thoughts and worries to wait outside.
10. You can also listen to a short calming meditation from YouTube or other sources while having the peaceful image in front of you or in your mind.

This may not be easy to do at the start, since you mind and body are not used to just sit and relax. The mind will start creating all sorts of excuses as to why you need to get up and DO things. However as you continue to do this practice every day, preferably at the same time of the day, the rewards will be tremendous.

The interesting thing is that you will be able to increase your productivity and be calmer in your daily activities, after you take these mini vacations throughout the day.

As you continue to practice, you will eventually find yourself looking forward to the “me time” vacation, which will reap more benefits than you can possibly imagine.

_________________

Disclaimer

The information in this article is not therapy, counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care/treatment, substance abuse care/ treatment, nor is it medical, psychological, mental health advice or treatment, or any other professional advice.

The information in this article is for information purposes only, and is not to be used as a substitute for therapy, counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care, medical care, or any other professional advice by legal, medical or other qualified professionals.

This article is for information purposes only and is not to be construed as legal opinion, legal advice, or any other professional advice in any respect.

The information in this article shall not be recorded, copied or distributed.

If you feel that you may need medical or other professional help, please contact your doctor or call 911 if it is an emergency.

The post The Wellness Lawyer: “Running Away” appeared first on Slaw.

When I sat down with lawyer and author Katherine Reilly to talk about her new book Legally Zen, I surprised her by starting at the end. It felt right: the final chapter is where she introduces the idea that has stayed with me most—the concept she calls “Gen Zen.”

Reilly is not the stereotype of a mystical explorer. She is a senior civil litigator with almost twenty years in practice: formerly a partner at a national law firm in Vancouver, later counsel with the Ministry of the Attorney General in Victoria, and now back in private practice. She has built a career grounded in evidence, logic, and the demands of high-pressure litigation.

That is precisely what makes her articulation of Gen Zen so compelling.

As she explains, Gen Zen is not a demographic but a mindset—a “group of people out there… for whom woo and spirituality are not necessarily bad words.” They include mainstream professionals from all walks of life—some whose paths look a lot like hers, and others whose lives look nothing like hers at all. What ties them together is “an open-minded, open-hearted approach to the world and a curiosity around inner work, around living an authentic life, and around spiritual practices.”

For years, Reilly thought she was alone in that curiosity. A “serious lawyer” —driven, professional, rational—she lived something of a double life. Her inner-world exploration, prompted by a series of major life events including significant health challenges, becoming a mother in the first week of COVID lockdowns and the breakdown of her marriage, unfolded privately. In spiritual circles, she avoided telling people she was a lawyer; among lawyers, she didn’t speak about her spiritual practices.

Her book is, in many ways, a coming-out story. Publishing it under her real name was “downright scary.” She considered a pseudonym but ultimately realized she couldn’t: “The purpose in putting this book out there was to own my story and integrate these pieces of myself in a public way such that I’m no longer living these dual lives.” Reilly wants to live with authenticity and hopes that by ‘walking the talk’, she will inspire others to do the same.

She expected judgment. Instead, she encountered curiosity, appreciation, and connection. “With this experience, as with so many others where I lean into vulnerability… I have been resoundingly rewarded.”

Why Gen Zen Matters for Lawyers

Reilly believes many lawyers may quietly recognize themselves in Gen Zen. Law is “demanding and highly rewarding,” but “does not leave a lot of room for your humanness.” For her, the practices she began exploring—spiritual, somatic, contemplative—became a kind of “secret weapon.”

“My inner landscape is much calmer,” she says. “I have this much broader perspective and a deeper appreciation for how people are acting and reacting in these high-pressure environments.” For lawyers who want to stay in the work they love despite its intensity, she sees these practices as a path forward: “This is a way to build your own capacity so that you can enjoy law more… and to find that really fulfilling, joyful experience in it.”

Our discussion also underscored how much overlap now exists between applied neuroscience and practices traditionally dismissed as woo: meditation, breathwork, somatics, grounding exercises. These are increasingly understood as practical tools for calming the nervous system and regulating emotional responses—approaches that support clarity, resilience, and even professional performance.

Reilly’s own experience mirrors this shift. “There is a lot of science behind a lot of these things,” she notes. But more importantly, her test is simple: they help. Whether it’s meditation, a breath practice before heading into court, or even something like a grounding crystal tucked in her pocket, “I feel better when I rely on these supports… and eventually I realized – maybe that’s all the evidence I need.”

A Memoir, a Guidebook, and a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

One of the strengths of Legally Zen is that it functions as both a memoir and a guidebook. That combination did not come easily. Early drafts leaned too much toward pure instruction. The harder work was allowing more of her personal story onto the page. Yet that story is what animates the guide: it shows not only what she tried, but why and when.

She describes the spiritual realm as “a choose-your-own-adventure.” There are no prescribed beliefs; each person can build a toolkit that fits within their own “woo boundaries.” And those boundaries can shift meaningfully over time. Hers did—nudged not by mystics, but by “two highly credentialed medical professionals” treating her concussions, who encouraged mindfulness, mantras, and gratitude practices long before they were mainstream.

Writing the Book While Lawyering and Solo Parenting

I was inspired by what Reilly accomplished: completing this book while carrying a full civil litigation practice and raising her daughter largely on her own. She told me that many lawyers ‘have a book in them,’ and Reilly is someone who actually wrote hers.

When I asked her what advice she would give to other lawyers who want to write, she was pragmatic.

First: be realistic. “Do you have the time, the internal motivation, and the know-how?” Some people do. She recognised that she did not. So she hired help. “Just as I do better at the gym with a personal trainer… I knew I’d have a far better chance of getting this work out into the world if I hired people to help me.” Her book coach was a four-time New York Times bestselling ghostwriter; her editor was deeply experienced. They guided her through the rough patches, kept her accountable, and helped her shape the narrative.

The process took about 16 months: six or seven months for the first draft, then a substantial developmental edit, then the final stages leading to launch. Much of her writing happened in the early mornings from 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. or during the odd getaway retreat when she could immerse herself in writing. What mattered most was not just the time management, but creating a structure that supported her with writing during her most creative hours.

The Response—and the Tools

When hundreds, and then over a thousand people, added her book to their book shelves, Reilly was “astounded in the best possible way… heartwarmed and humbled.” Mostly, she says, she felt grateful that the book resonated and that people were curious enough to “walk along with me and see how I did it, why I did it,” and that they felt encouraged to explore their own paths.

For readers who want to try the tools she uses daily, Reilly has created a free Zen Extras kit: a downloadable bundle of meditations, mantras, breathwork exercises, and grounding practices. It is available at legallyzen.ca. “Even if you never read my story,” she says, “go get this free resource… it’s full of game-changing practices.”

Sitting at the Same Table

For Reilly, this isn’t about persuading anyone to hold specific beliefs. It’s about allowing logic, science, wonder, and spirit to sit at the same table. “These concepts can—and do—coexist.” Her life, she says, has grown “richer and fuller” since she allowed herself to sit at that table too. And if readers find some joy or begin their own small explorations, she will have achieved what she hoped for.

The post At the Table With Logic and Spirit: a Conversation With Katherine Reilly, Author of Legally Zen appeared first on Slaw.

[Image by Amy Lloyd]

Unlike some open-access academic journals, the LD Journal does not charge its authors publication fees or its readers a viewing/downloading fee – it is known as “diamond open-access”.

The LD Journal is the first of its kind. An academic journal that connects academics and practitioners of legal design by combining three separate elements: articles, a studio showcase, and legal design news. Articles include scholarly works submitted to the journal, which undergo a double-blind peer review and can include submissions in multiple languages to reflect the global nature of the practice.

Why Create this Journal?

Interestingly, in my last blog published with SLAW, “The Legal Design Summit 2025 & BrainFactory – a ‘Re-Up’”,[2] I received a reader’s comment that suggested, in essence, that I should take the time to explain the concept of legal design to the reader – fair point.[3] However, this comment directly highlights the importance and need for the LD Journal.

For years, academics and practitioners of legal design would publish their works in a variety of legal, design, and economic journals throughout the globe. Professor Michael Doherty, the LD Journal’s Editor-in-Chief and Professor of Law at Lancaster University, explains how this affects authors:

“When legal design work is published in more generalist journals it affects the structure, tone and depth of that work. Authors must spend significant time and space explaining that legal design is ‘a thing’, what (in very basic terms) it is, and how it has something valid to add to the understanding or practice of law. This reduces the space for in-depth review of the ideas or projects that the author is presenting.”[4]

Aside from writing about the legal design basics, I particularly appreciate Professor Doherty’s point that legal design authors have to argue, “that legal design is ‘a thing.’” Much of the legal design writing I have reviewed in other journals seeks to convince its audience that there is inherent value in the methodology, which is something that the legal design community already understands.

The Journal is a Home

In order for legal design to mature and grow as a concept, it needed a home for writing and publication. The LD Journal is that home.

Like many specialized academic journals, the LD Journal allows professionals to focus their writing on evolving legal design concepts, methodologies, and illustrating innovative viewpoints or studies that advance these ideas. It is a place where the basics are already understood and readers are looking for more.

However, the LD Journal is not meant to be an “exclusive club” for those who practice in legal design. Quite the opposite. The foundational element of this home is inclusivity – it is dedicated to being a free and open-source publication with the goal of access and giving the megaphone to a range of global voices. To be truly inclusive, the organizers of the LD Journal were intentional that cost would never be a barrier to sharing ideas.

The First of its Kind

Neil Armstrong, Tenzing Norgay/Edmund Hillary, Charles Lindbergh are all credited with being the “first” at something. While Professor Michael Doherty, the LD Journal’s adventurer and Editor-in-Chief, will likely disagree with the comparison, he is the driving force behind the world’s first academic legal journal focused on legal design topics and should be credited with that accomplishment.

Every innovative exploration led by an adventurer with a “crazy” idea has a strong team behind them who believe in the mission and are willing to be the pioneers. Professor Doherty was able to use his collaborative and inclusive nature to rally together what he refers to as “an amazing team of 28 legal designers from around the world” (the “Fabulous 28”) to develop and operate the first LD Journal.[5] And, they did it using the legal design methodology (of course).

In legal design, the methodology requires that we determine the ‘user’ of whatever process or project we have undertaken and gather user-data. Professor Doherty and the Fabulous 28 did just that. They identified the readers and ‘users’ of the journal and relied on a process that we refer to as ‘empathy’. This is when the ‘creator’ puts themselves into the shoes of the user by considering what the user wants.

Instead of following the traditional routes to develop an academic journal, it was important to Professor Doherty and the Fabulous 28 that they use the legal design methodology to create something that people actually wanted. To that end, a survey was provided with over 144 responses from 33 countries. The ‘users’ told Professor Doherty and the Fabulous 28 exactly what they wanted from the LD Journal and they listened.

The Second Attempt – Coming Soon!

As with all “firsts”, there are lessons learned for the next time. While Professor Doherty admits that, “creating the first issue of the Journal has been a learning curve for us all.”[6] The publication and its submissions are only getting better.

Very soon, everyone will be able to get their hands on the second edition of the LD Journal. It has already undergone article selection and peer-review and is currently in the editing and publication stages. Get ready for the second voyage coming soon.

_____________

[1] Legal Design Journal, website: https://legaldesign-journal.com/.

[2] Kerri A. Salata, “The Legal Design Summit 2025 & BrainFactory – a ‘Re-Up’”. SLAW Online: https://www.slaw.ca/2025/11/03/the-legal-design-summit-2025-brainfactory-a-re-up/

[3] An established definition of “legal design” can be found here:

Professor Margaret Hagan. Law By Design. Online: https://lawbydesign.co/legal-design/ at Chapter 1

Or, Kerri A. Salata. “Hello World! Let’s start with the Basics…What is Legal Design?” Online: https://kerriasalata.com/what-is-legal-design/.

[4] Michael Doherty. “Introducing the Legal Design Journal: A Home Where New Ideas Can Grow” (The Legal Design Journal (2024), Volume 1, Issue 1, ISSN 3049-5644), Online: https://ojs.library.lancs.ac.uk/ldj/article/view/132/122, at p. 3.

[5] Ibid at p. 4.

[6] Ibid at p. 5.

The post The Second Voyage: Explore the World’s First Legal Design Journal appeared first on Slaw.

In a bizarre procedural twist, the Ontario Divisional Court issued two contradictory decisions on consecutive days in the same case. Two written motions for leave to intervene in Dosu v. Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario was sent to two different judges – Justice Sharon Shore and Justice Shaun Nakatsuru – who rendered opposite rulings. Justice Shore dismissed the would-be intervenors; the next day, in a separate ruling, Justice Nakatsuru granted them intervention, setting the stage for what appears to be an embarrassing judicial outcome for the court.

The anomaly in the motions outcome – essentially a legal coin flip yielding heads in one court and tails in another – has captivated legal observers and raises pointed questions about how judicial perspectives on race can decisively shape legal outcomes.

The underlying case is rooted in allegations of racial discrimination. Ms. Dosu, a York University employee, filed a human rights complaint at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) alleging racial discrimination by her employer. An HRTO adjudicator dismissed most of her claims as time-barred under the Code’s one-year limitation period. She applied for judicial review challenging the reasonableness of that decision. In that review, Dosu’s union, the York University Staff Association (YUSA), and the Black Legal Action Centre (BLAC), an anti-Black racism legal clinic, moved to intervene. What followed was an extraordinary divergence: two endorsements, issued by two different judges one day apart, reaching diametrically opposite conclusions on whether those intervenors should be heard.

Divergent Approaches to Race and Systemic Context

The contrast between Justice Shore’s and Justice Nakatsuru’s decisions can be viewed through a racial lens – specifically, how each judge framed the relevance of race and BLAC’s proposed systemic submissions. Justice Shore adopted an extremely narrow view. In her endorsement, she insisted that “the nature of this case is such that it is limited to the issue of the limitation period” under the Human Rights Code. Justice Shore deemed BLAC’s broader anti-Black racism perspective irrelevant to that technical timing question and warned that BLAC’s involvement would introduce “irrelevant peripheral issues” likely to cause confusion. She saw no distinct contribution BLAC could offer on the limitation issue and doubted its participation would assist the court at all. Accordingly, Justice Shore refused BLAC’s motion. She likewise concluded that YUSA lacked a sufficient interest and denied it intervenor status.

Justice Nakatsuru, by contrast, embraced a systemic anti-discrimination lens. He acknowledged that York University portrayed the matter as a narrow limitation issue, but he refused to isolate Dosu’s case from its broader context. Justice Nakatsuru found a “sufficient foundation” for BLAC’s involvement, pointing to BLAC’s concern that the HRTO’s decisions could be interpreted to require an applicant to first raise their complaint with their employer before approaching the Tribunal. BLAC warned that such an interpretation would directly harm Black individuals beyond Ms. Dosu by effectively imposing an internal-exhaustion requirement [para. 19]. Justice Nakatsuru viewed this concern as far from peripheral – he saw it as a live issue tied to “the intersectional nature of discrimination” in Dosu’s situation. He noted that “BLAC is well placed to offer assistance in how the intersectional nature of discrimination faced by Black persons should be addressed on the judicial review application”. In sum, where Justice Shore dismissed BLAC’s contextual lens as irrelevant, Justice Nakatsuru regarded it as indispensable.

BLAC’s motion starkly highlights the judges’ divergent lenses. Justice Shore’s approach was essentially colour-blind: she treated the dispute as a neutral technical issue, dismissing race and systemic discrimination as irrelevant distractions that would only cause confusion. Justice Nakatsuru’s approach was explicitly colour-conscious: he recognized that even a narrow legal question is inseparable from its racial and systemic context. This difference in framing proved decisive – BLAC’s voice was silenced in Shore’s courtroom but welcomed in Nakatsuru’s.

Judicial Identity and the Context of Race

How could two brilliant judges in this case, faced with the same record and legal test, reach such diametrically opposite conclusions? The answer may lie in the judges’ own identities and judicial philosophies regarding race. Justice Nakatsuru is a Japanese Canadian jurist well known for acknowledging how race, history, and personal experience inform the pursuit of justice. His own father was among the thousands of Japanese-Canadians interned by the Canadian government during the Second World War, an experience that might have shaped his understanding of historical injustice and the need for cultural awareness in adjudication.

In his landmark sentencing decision R. v. Jackson, he confronted anti-Black racism in the criminal justice system head-on. He wrote that “for African Canadians, the time has come where I as a sentencing judge must take judicial notice of” the history of colonialism, slavery, segregation, and systemic racism, and how that legacy contributes to inequality and over-incarceration. He emphasized that judges should not require formal proof of such social facts in every case, because these forms of systemic harm constitute part of the legal context. Jackson underscored that judicial notice of systemic racism is an “important first step” toward rendering justice. This philosophy explains why Justice Nakatsuru did not view Dosu’s case as a sterile technical exercise, but rather as part of a broader narrative of anti-Black discrimination.

By contrast, Justice Shore’s endorsement shows no comparable awareness of racial context. She approached the motion from a formalist perspective, focusing narrowly on the limitation issue and the immediate parties. Nothing in her reasons suggests that she considered the broader context of Dosu’s discrimination allegations or the value of an anti-racism voice in the courtroom. Her characterization of BLAC’s input as “irrelevant” and potentially confusing reflects a view that the law should be applied in a vacuum, sealed off from the realities of social context. That form of purported neutrality creates the very blind spots through which systemic bias is allowed to persist.

Justice Shore’s approach mirrors a deeply problematic pattern among some non-racialized judicial decision-makers when faced with race and racism in adjudication. Too often, the reflex is to dismiss race as “irrelevant” and retreat into the ‘safe’ confines of a narrow legalism that pretends social context does not exist. This is not neutrality – it is erasure. I have previously criticized this pattern in my analysis of the all-White panel in LSA v. Madu.

The Case for Lived Experience and Cultural Competence

The Dosu case underscores why judges hearing race-based discrimination matters need either lived experience or genuine cultural competence regarding systemic racism. At minimum, any judge handling such a case must understand how racism operates within legal processes – whether through personal experience or through rigorous, purposeful education. The stark difference in outcomes here illustrates what is at stake: a judge without an appreciation for the role of race may unwittingly downplay or exclude crucial context, whereas a judge attuned to systemic factors will welcome contextual expertise like BLAC’s, enriching the court’s understanding and improving the quality of justice delivered.

There is growing recognition that judicial diversity and cultural competence are not matters of optics but of substantive justice. A judge from a racialized community – or one who has worked closely with marginalized groups – may more readily grasp why a Black-led organization like BLAC offers a perspective distinct from that of the main parties. Such a judge is also more likely to appreciate how historical and contemporary power imbalances can render ostensibly technical issues, such as filing deadlines, especially fraught for racialized claimants.

This is not to suggest a simplistic “race-matching” of judges to cases – racial identity alone does not guarantee judicial insight on race. Many non-racialized judges have written deeply race-conscious decisions, while some racialized judges have, conversely, authored racially troubling ones – Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in SFFA v. Harvard being a prominent example. The point is that every judge deciding race-related cases must possess the cultural literacy necessary to engage with their full context. Whenever possible, such cases should be assigned to judges who already have that literacy; at the very least, judges without lived experience must approach these matters with humility and openness – including by welcoming intervenors who bring expertise on systemic discrimination.

Conclusion

Dosu v. HRTO is a cautionary tale for justice in a multicultural society. Two judges – one a traditional formalist, the other a social-context jurist – produced irreconcilable rulings in a case centred on race. The takeaway is stark: who sits in judgment can profoundly shape the legal outcome. In cases alleging racism, courts cannot simply apply rules in a vacuum; they must be prepared to confront the lived realities that animate the legal issues. This necessity demands greater cultural competence on the bench and may require rethinking how judges are assigned in such matters. Dosu reminds us that justice is best served when those who dispense it reflect and respect the diverse experiences of the society they judge. Only then can we avoid the intolerable prospect of racial justice turning on chance, and ensure that every litigant finds a court open to all relevant voices – including those highlighting systemic inequality.

The post A Court Divided: What an Ontario Court Motion Reveals About Race in the Courtroom appeared first on Slaw.

Transformative change is underway in the Canadian lawyer licensing system. Two of the country’s largest law societies have signalled the impending end of high-stakes, multiple-choice legal-knowledge exams as the primary test of lawyer licensure.

In Ontario, a September report from the Law Society of Ontario (LSO)’s Professional Development and Competence Committee proposed that the current multiple-choice barrister and solicitor exams be replaced with a “mandatory skills-based course with assessments for all licensing candidates.”

The committee identified a lengthy list of problems and challenges associated with the written exam system, including:

• Written exams fail to assess core practice skills like interviewing, writing, oral advocacy, and negotiation, to such an extent that candidates regard the exam as misaligned with real lawyer work.
• Time-pressured, open-book multiple-choice questions drive candidates to assemble and consult complex indices of knowledge, rather than demonstrate understanding or applied analysis of legal issues.
• Candidates, especially those who are internationally trained and Indigenous and those who need accommodations, report significant mental-health strain from the exam format.
• Social-media sharing and mobile device risks prompted a security audit to assess the risk of cheating, but meaningful fixes would require curtailing the open-book model and undertaking a major reconstruction of the process.
• The exams constitute a growing cost and operational burden for the law society, given the resource-intensive nature of exam development and delivery as well as increasing and complex accommodation requests.

These findings are not new. The committee’s critiques reflect those of studies in other jurisdictions, primarily in the US, that have found written legal knowledge exams are insufficiently valid and defensible as a new-lawyer competence assessment method.

“Licensing assessment should focus on the most important competencies relevant to entry-level practice today,” the committee wrote. “The current licensing examination model has been in place for almost 20 years. During that time, the practice of law has evolved, and reforms have been made to the experiential training requirement.”

Accordingly, the committee proposed the establishment and adoption of a mandatory skills-based course with assessments for all licensing candidates. “The course would be delivered through the use of self-directed modules, workshops and virtual law firms. Accompanied by robust feedback, licensing candidates would be able to learn and demonstrate their understanding of the material. The course would be offered online to ensure accessibility to applicants across the province, but in a manner designed to facilitate interaction.”

Importantly, the committee stated that “a final assessment … would evaluate the candidates, to ensure that they meet the entry-level competence standard required to practise law in Ontario. These assessments may include scenarios to determine whether each candidate has the knowledge and skills required to practise. Trained lawyer assessors would determine individual outcomes based on accepted testing standards.”

The report cited two Canadian examples of a “skills-based course with assessments”:

1. The Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP), the skills-based bar admission program employed in Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan for the last several years; and
2. The Law Practice Program (LPP), a pathway to licensure in Ontario that offers a skills-building and assessment program as well as a four-month legal work placement that replaces the articling requirement.

While passage of the LPP did away with an Ontario candidate’s need to article, an LPP candidate still has to write Ontario’s barrister and solicitor exams. However, PREP does not teach legal knowledge and does not include any written legal knowledge exams as part of its assessment.

The LSO report did not recommend that Ontario adopt either of these programs as the vehicle for a new skills-based program for all Ontario candidates. At this stage, the committee is informing the profession of its assessment and proposal and inviting input on whether and how the law society should incorporate training and assessment into its bar admissions process.

Should the law society accept the committee’s proposal and go on to adopt a skills-based licensing program, the significance would be difficult to overstate. The LSO has been administering written bar examinations since 1959; Ontario alone admits nearly half of all new lawyers in Canada every year. This proposed shift would constitute a sea change in new lawyer licensing in Canada.

But if Ontario did go down this path, it would not go alone. The Law Society of British Columbia announced in October that it would retire its longstanding bar admissions program, the Professional Legal Training Course, in 2026 and adopt PREP as its new lawyer licensing program thereafter. Whereas the PLTC required passage of two written exams and four skill assessments, PREP requires a two-week Capstone Evaluation at the end of the program without any written legal knowledge exams.

Full disclosure: I am not a neutral observer when it comes to new lawyer licensing in British Columbia. In 2022, I submitted a lengthy report to the LSBC that recommended the adoption of a competence-based system for lawyer licensing. That report, accepted by the law society in December 2022, was one antecedent of the eventual establishment by the four western law societies of the Western Canada Competence Profile (WCCP) in 2024.

As part of my report (pp. 58-63), I endorsed the discontinuation of the PLTC, which in its time had been a pioneering bar admission program but had since been surpassed by skills- and competence-focused approaches. I suggested that the law society either develop and implement its own skills-based bar admissions program, or join one of the pre-existing programs, PREP or the LPP.

When British Columbia joins PREP next year, half of all Canadian provinces will be using this system; should Ontario also adopt a skills-based program, then only in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland & Labrador would written legal knowledge exams constitute the bulk of new lawyer licensure activity. (In Québec, aspiring legal professionals are required by both the Barreau du Québec and the Chambre des Notaires to complete both knowledge-based assessments and practical skills-based programs.)

I strongly support the proposal of the LSO’s Professional Development and Competence Committee to adopt a mandatory online skills-based program with assessment for all licensing candidates. This would align Ontario with the growing trend in Canada away from re-testing the legal knowledge of licensure candidates and towards an actual assessment of the fitness of a candidate to receive a law license.

Not only that, but shifting to a skills-building and competence-assessment licensing system would further position Canada as a world leader in this area. An innovative new licensure pathway in Oregon (and potentially one in the state of Washington) specifically references Canada’s pioneering role in this area.

Finally, this approach would strengthen public confidence that Canada’s legal regulators are truly evaluating the capacity of aspiring lawyers to serve their clients and run their practices competently, ethically, and professionally. There’s never been more pressure on lawyers to demonstrate their value, reliability, and proficiency in an increasingly automated and commoditized legal sector. Competence-building and assessment in licensure is the best way forward for the legal profession.

The post Major Changes Coming to Canadian Lawyer Licensing appeared first on Slaw.

Artificial intelligence, pricing, and transience of the legal service sector’s workforce will cause the traditional law firm pyramid structure to rollover like an upending iceberg. The result? By 2030, global legal services will operate much differently than they do now.

Twin juggernauts – AI and Pricing – compounded by continuing transience of the legal service sector’s workforce will take a major toll on law firms unprepared for their impact. This reckoning will upend the traditional pyramid structure with the result being that by 2030, the global legal services sector will operate much differently than it does now.

The countdown clock is ticking more loudly by the minute, and yet those in the legal services sector that has a historic penchant for entering races to finish second is, as usual, waiting for someone else to make the first move.

What are you waiting for?

I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the hurry-up-and-wait babble, lip-flap, and word salad of throw-away terms such as “disruption”, “innovation”, and “best practices” that tend to be tossed around like confetti at a wedding by those who prefer to hear themselves pontificate in an endless future-focused echo chamber rather than take a resolute stand and act right now with the ruthlessness of clear-sighted goal orientation that empowers the achievement of crystal-clear objectives.

Actions always speak louder than words, and decisive swift action pertaining to restructuring how law firms conduct legal service business – not practice law – is the key to survival of the fittest now and over the next five years.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Business Survival

The Internet changed the world. AI is flattening it.

Task-based AI-enabled work is well-suited to be volume-produced and commodity-priced at a law firm’s lowest operating levels. This includes both legal and administrative work. Clients, who have also adopted AI and continue to do so, know how this tool works and are pressuring external counsel to reflect faster speed and lower cost in transactional pieces of their outsourced legal work. And rightly so.

The upshot of AI replacing junior legal talent most often tasked with rote work – for which clients often refuse to pay – will result in the lowest tiers being lopped off the bottom of traditionally-structured law firms. Juniors that remain are likely to experience higher than ever stress levels, which are apt to result in increased health care claims and departures.

We’re not blameless and, in fact, have been party to this demise.

For example, a number of years ago a General Counsel friend searching for an eighth Canadian firm to handle a portion of his company’s legal portfolio was approached by a major national law firm offering to conduct the company’s rote work at the firm’s paralegal level and at a deep discount provided that the GC consider the firm when litigation files were up for grabs. Apparently, the firm was either daring or willing to have its sophisticated litigation expertise judged and possibly awarded on the quality of commoditized rote work.

Regardless of the firm making a peculiar bet on the quality of its work product, the GC accepted the offer of a bargain price on rote work. As for what happened to litigation files, who knows but it’s a sure thing as with any unpredictable situation that all bets were off.

Even though this event occurred years ago, the acceleration of commoditized rote work has increased steadily to the point where it can now be handled by AI at a much lower-than-human cost and turned around in a heartbeat.

The Pricing Component

The flip side of the AI coin is pricing. Because these two factors go hand-in-hand, both must be considered simultaneously and executed in tandem. The added wrinkle is that this double conundrum is a core business component, which means that specialized and accredited talents of experts, such as CFOs, COOs, pricing specialists, and data analysts – not lawyers – are critical to the ability to shift to various pricing models that are crucial to a firm’s survival.

This is when lawyers must step aside and let money-oriented businesspeople do their jobs. It’s not that lawyers don’t add value to the pricing process; it’s that lawyers by the nature of their work and orientation to legal practice often confuse practice with business when, in actuality, the two concepts are as different as a zebra and an umbrella.

As an illustration, for a client who is the buyer of legal services and products, cost is a major component in evaluating both the process and outcome as a way to measure value for money. For this cost-conscious client, providing pricing certainty for budgetary purposes enables an avoidance of unpleasant and unwelcome surprises.

This means that the hourly rate will no longer continue to be the standard pricing method. Instead, it will remain on trial for its life and will survive to be used only in select situations and as warranted.

The demarcation between legal service providers who employ AI and modern pricing components and those who don’t is already stark and in the months of come, the gulf between the two will widen.

As for the billable hour, it will continue in a languishing state with and for those who can’t imagine anything else. However, the billable hour will die very shortly or has already died with and for those who can imagine everything else.

Where the Back Stops

Value-based pricing, flat fees, fixed fees, and subscription models are go-to methods for law firms determined to be viable and solvent.

Instituting these models is not a wholesale, all-or nothing transition from hourly rates to modern pricing schemes. Instead, the transition is best accomplished by the deft scoping of every mandate.

This means more work on the front end of a file due to the requirement of having in-depth, clarifying conversations with a client to understand the full end-to-end scope of the matter and its value to the client personally as well as professionally.

The next step is to scope the matter into its composite parts. Once all the matter’s parts are scoped, an assignment of both a pricing model – there can and probably should be different models for different pieces of work – and cost based on experience, expertise, and talent required to produce that particular component, can be assessed and client approved with none of these component parts and costs having any bearing on time.

Flat fees, fixed fees, and subscription models are fairly simple to understand and apply. However, in my experience, very few lawyers fully understand and grasp what Value-Based Pricing (VBP) is and confuse it with discount schemes pertaining to hourly rates.

VBP is not a discount scheme in any way, shape, or form. In a nutshell, value is a measurement of worth. Worth is determined by how much more value a client receives from you than you receive from a client in payment. Therefore, value-based pricing is determined by how what you provide to a client benefits them now and over the years to come.

Clearly understanding your client’s business and industry along with how what you provide impacts them professionally and personally is the starting point. This deep level of discovery needs to happen every time for every client on every matter because they, their business and lives change continually, which you won’t know about unless you ask many questions and probe for nuance … Every. Single. Time.

The challenge for law firms is that VBP, in particular, requires a complete alteration of mindset, culture, business structure, and lawyer compensation. This is why AI is the ultimate pricing and restructuring lever.

The Domino Effect

The domino or knock-on effect of the traditionally-structured law firm rollover is that without young associates and students handling rote work – which is often referred to as “training” for some unfathomable reason – mid-level lawyers won’t have the supports they’re used to but will still be expected to self-sustain and bring in new business.

At the top levels, senior lawyers who can retire will do so, leaving those who don’t, won’t or can’t retire holding both the firm’s responsibilities and purse strings in fewer hands.

The end result for many of these firms will be structural cave-ins due to one of two scenarios: 1. Overweighted equity at the top, a compromised centre, and weak support at the bottom – think reverse pyramid, or 2. Lesser equity at the top, a bloated middle, and again, weak support at the bottom – think diamond shape, which is why rollovers will upend traditional law firms like icebergs when their weight distribution changes.

Cave-ins will be considered a “collapse” while, as a rescue mechanism, law firm acquisitions and mergers will happen aplenty.

Redundancy and Rightsizing

What about everybody else who works in law firms? As you’d expect, it’s fair to assume headcount to decrease at all levels and roles throughout traditional law firms due to the bottom being lopped off the pyramid structure.

As most often happens during times of rightsizing, many of those who are released will be professional staff who are not lawyers. This is because lawyers are considered revenue generators while professional staff are perceived as overhead.

However, nothing is further from the truth. Professional staff provide the business structure of a firm, particularly in terms of financial and technology management, as well as data analytics, pricing, marketing, and business development talent who enable targeting of prospective clients as well as expansive cross-servicing to current clients with efforts applied to both classes of clients that convert to sales. This level of infrastructure enables lawyers to do what they say they went to law school for – lawyering.

The problem is that even though this level of infrastructure provides the rebar that supports the business of a law firm, lawyers prefer not to pay for it but instead will often elect to bring in more unsupported legal billing talent.

And around and around we go.

The Dreaded Deadwood

Worse yet, many firms continue to carry deadwood – non-productive people of all stripes who are freighted like a ship’s ballast. While in shipping terms, ballast enables stability, deadwood impedes forward motion similar to a ship dragging an anchor.

This peculiar phenomenon has been going on in the legal services sector forever and ranges throughout many firms from partners to staff who are carried for a cornucopia of reasons, including: habit, fear, non-transferred or hoarded intellectual capital and production skills along with knowledge of and politics pertaining to where bodies are buried – hopefully, figuratively – along who put them there…you name it.

Deadwood is one of the most pervasive, pernicious, willfully ignored, and systematically unaddressed symptoms of a law firm fated to be a ghost ship or hit the rocks. We know it, talk about it and yet this problem persists.

This is why law firms determined to survive come AI and Pricing, and hell or high water must make hard and unwavering decisions, have tough and uncomfortable conversations, and restructure themselves ruthlessly to be flatter, non-hierarchical enterprises that are streamlined, sleek, and seriously ultra lean.

A Restructuring Warrior

Having helped law firms restructure practices groups, industry teams, client service departments and firm-wide client-facing systems, I understand the peculiarities and sensitivities of doing so within the legal services sector.

However, having also successfully led two major business turnarounds prior to my life in legal – one company that was privately held and the other that was public, federally-regulated and unionized – by fixating on core business and eliminating all that was ancillary while maximizing profit margins, executing on an exact schedule with short-term goals, mid-term milestones and long-term objectives, and keeping intact a team that embraced the vision, I have first-hand experience and the scars to prove it that heavy restructuring is an unpopular role that, metaphorically, will result in needing to remove knives from your back during the day before resting at night, an act that will continue mercilessly until the job is done.

Restructuring is warrior’s work that demands proven business acumen, deep management experience, and uncompromising rigour along with a calm demeanour as well as flexibility, determination, and grit along with senses of both humour and the ridiculous.

There’s a dearth of that type of mercenary talent within most traditionally structured law firms – and a fear of contracting it in – which is why heavy restructuring within the legal services sector has yet to happen proactively, and won’t if and until it has to by necessity and only at the last minute.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

The phrase “gradually, then suddenly” originates from the 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway when, in response to being asked how he went bankrupt, the character Mike says, “Two ways: gradually and then suddenly.”

It illustrates that even though change seems sudden, it’s often the compounded result of a process that been in production for a long time.

For many years we’ve been conditioned to hearing, reading and talking about change awaiting us in the future. That’s because this type of messaging is often used to create a frisson of attraction, excitement and urgency. However, this messaging is false because change happens by increments and in nonlinear fashion every single second of each and every day.

Such is the case of the traditionally structured hierarchical law firm pyramid, which is why and how this structure is in the evolutionary and unstoppable process of gradual destabilization that will cause it to roll over like an iceberg and upend suddenly.

To that end, act now – and fast – or prepare to go under.  

The post The Law Firm Pyramid Rollover appeared first on Slaw.

After ten hours of flying, an eight-hour layover, a seven-hour timezone change, and one missed flight, I finally made it to my second Legal Design Summit in Helsinki. In 2023, I reluctantly left Helsinki after buzzing with excitement about the like-minded community I had just met and the interesting work being done across the globe to improve access to justice using legal design techniques. The momentum of the event had been fueling my professional interests and writing over the last two years, but it was time for a “re-up”.

After its 2024 hiatus, the Legal Design Summit was back this year with a specific focus on exemplifying the tangible benefits of legal design along with the integration of AI-techniques into the practice. This year, a global community of lawyers, designers, risk management professionals, legal designers and consultants from private, public and not-for-profit practices descended on Helsinki. It was unmistakable that the Legal Design Summit is growing and gaining force.

What is the Legal Design Summit?

The Legal Design Summit is broken up into two distinct segments: the BrainFactory and the Conference. The BrainFactory is a series of practical workshops, in which professionals apply their legal design knowledge to work through various problems. The Conference segment is where experts lecture in the legal design field. There is a more informal, third segment as well: the social element that includes Finnish music, hours of dancing, life-long connections and a welcoming professional community.

The Legal Design Summit has traditionally been held in the mecca of Design Thinking, Helsinki, Finland. “Efficient” is how visitors to Finland would likely describe the country. From its architecture and transit system to its judicial system, Finland embraces design thinking and integrates it across all industries. In Helsinki, courts adopt legal design principles, lawmakers integrate it into their drafting processes, legal academics develop the knowledge, data and subject-matter expertise and practitioners (lawyers and law firms) apply it in their practices. It makes sense that the Legal Design Summit is held in Helsinki.

The BrainFactory

In the past, the BrainFactory consisted of a three-day intensive course, working through the legal design framework to solve one legal challenge. However, the extensive programming meant only around 40 people could attend. This year the organizers reimagined the BrainFactory into a one-day event consisting of both morning and afternoon workshops, that could accommodate 125 participants. The demand for access to the BrainFactory workshops quadrupled this year.

When asked what it was like to manage multiple workshops involving over one-hundred participants, BrainFactory Lead, Laura Hartnett,* said:

“We were so pleased to quadruple participation and still have a waiting list. It really shows there’s a demand for legal professionals around the world to get their hands into the legal design methodology and apply it to a multitude of scenarios.”

Many of the BrainFactory workshops were co-created with practitioners, academics and some of the mega firms like DLA Piper and EY Law, in different parts of the world with various areas of expertise. Topics included legal design writing, contract design, advancing people-centred justice, organizational design for legal teams and leveraging AI to master legal design concepts. “We specifically set out for even the presenters to collaborate and learn from one another in addition to the participants,” reflected Hartnett.

Reflections on BrainFactory Workshop on Legal Writing

Personally, I was struck by the quality of the BrainFactory workshops I attended. Of particular note was the “Legal Design Writing: Telling the World and Getting Heard” workshop led by some of the most well-respected academics in legal design across the globe:

• Michael Doherty, Professor of Legal Design, Lancaster University (who is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Legal Design Journal);
• Helena Haapio, Contract Strategist, Lexpert Ltd (affectionately known as the “mother” of Legal Design);
• Lisa Toohey, Professor, UNSW Law & Justice (Editor of the Legal Design Journal);
• Michael Blasie, Dean and Professor of Law, KIMEP University (known as the nation’s (USA) foremost expert on plain language laws focussing on legal document design; also teaches the judiciary how to improve their judgment writing).

Throughout her lecture, Helena Haapio reminded us that our writing can push traditional views of, “this is how it’s always been done,” and highlighted the importance of challenging legal documents that do not consider the reader. Our BrainFactory workshop lecturers invited us to discuss and address our ‘monsters’ (i.e. fears in writing), which was uncomfortable but important to acknowledge. We then made commitments and were asked to start writing, which we did, right there and then. It is rare that one can attend a writing workshop with the “best of the best” in legal design academia across the globe but for those of us lucky participants, it gave us the encouragement to continue to spread the word about the benefits of legal design.** The immediate call to action to participants to confront our fears and start writing was a powerful way to put theory into practice. This BrainFactory workshop was only one of many that the 124 other participants attended.

It Was Electrifying

Hartnett called the results of the BrainFactory “electrifying,” as each room was buzzing with anywhere from 20 to 50 participants, breaking off into groups, working through legal design challenges in AI, writing, organizational design, and contracts among others. Participants were swapping contact information and pledging to keep in touch to support one another long after BrainFactory concluded. Following the BrainFactory were two packed days of learning and legal design exploration (also co-hosted by Hartnett).

See You There

If you haven’t attended the Legal Design Summit, mark it in your calendars, follow them on social media, and I look forward to meeting you there where it promises to be even bigger and better next time.

The best part is that I left Helsinki exhausted but full of memories, life-long friends, and a wealth of legal design topics that will fuel my writing for years to come. This experience was a crucial “re-up” to continue to spread the word about the benefits of legal design and its potential to improve access to justice. This is an essential event for anyone who is serious about designing the future of law.

__________________

*In addition to being the BrainFactory Lead and co-Presenter for the LDS 2025, Laura Hartnett is a former management consultant, litigator at national and international firms, and in-house corporate attorney. She is currently a legal design consultant in the United States working with legal teams to improve the practice of law. Her passion is making the legal experience better for both clients and attorneys by improving the processes and systems that deliver legal services. You can find Laura on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurahartnett/.

**As a special note to these academics, while this is not my legal writing project, thank-you for allowing me to expose my “monsters”, and I am taking my commitment to myself seriously.

The post The Legal Design Summit 2025 & BrainFactory – a “Re-Up” appeared first on Slaw.

There is a story about a business owner, we will call him Joe, who hired two people to help him unload large barrels of wine.

The wine was very expensive and he specifically instructed the workers to be very careful.

Unfortunately, as happens in life, one of the workers slipped as he was unloading the barrel and it cracked, spilling all the contents on the ground.

Joe was very angry. He told the workers that he will sue them for damages if they don’t pay him for the now unusable wine.

The workers were very poor and they begged Joe not to punish them as they have nothing to pay him with. They were relying on this job to buy food for their families.

Joe would not hear of it. He quickly prepared the papers and sued then in court for the losses he incurred.

When the case came before the judge of the town where they all lived, all the residents gathered to see how this case would evolve.

The trial did not take long. The facts were clear and the workers did not have a defence.The decision was quickly rendered. It was not a surprise to anyone, that the workers had to pay for the losses.

However, there is a twist to this seemingly simple story.

After the judgment was read, the judge then turned to Joe and said: “You are a learned man, a pillar of our society. Yes, these workers caused you to suffer financial losses and by the strict application of the law, they must pay. However, justice is not always served by following the strict application of the law. One must look at the situation and ensure that in the interest of justice, fairness and justice is preserved when decisions are made.

Thus, when you saw that these workers, who inadvertently caused damage to your wine, were so poor that they only had the clothes on their backs, you should have determined before coming to court, that in the interest of justice, it would not be proper to sue them and force them to pay you money that they do not have. “

So the judge delivered the second part of his judgment and ordered Joe to pay the workers the amount they would have received had the job been completed.

We learn from this parable, that even though the law may seem black and white on the surface as it applies to very clear circumstances, it is very important to remember, that justice is the ultimate goal that we need to achieve when administering the law.

There are rules of procedure that allow courts to make determinations in the interest of justice. Lawyers need to remember that when advising clients regarding potential litigation, that common sense, logic and the interest of justice need to be the foundation of the counsel. Even in the simplest of cases, there are always extenuating circumstances, and what may seem as a slam dunk case, may turn out to be a Pandora’s box.

In conclusion, whether you are a lawyer, paralegal or a judge, it is my humble submission, that first and foremost justice must be served. Thus, whatever advice or decision is rendered, the law should be administered in such a way as to be in the interest of justice, thereby not causing any more harm, than has already been done.

________________

Disclaimer

The information in this article is not therapy, counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care/treatment, substance abuse care/ treatment, nor is it medical, psychological, mental health advice or treatment, or any other professional advice.

The information in this article is for information purposes only, and is not to be used as a substitute for therapy, counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care, medical care, or any other professional advice by legal, medical or other qualified professionals.

The information in this article shall not be recorded, copied or distributed.

If you feel that you may need medical or other professional help, please contact your doctor or call 911 if it is an emergency.

The post The Wellness Lawyer: “In the Interest of Justice” appeared first on Slaw.

It transpired, on the cusp of partnership, that one of the lawyer’s junior associates arranged a meeting with a CEO of a tech startup and presented an irresistible synergy.* The startup was a match for a client, a deep-pocketed conglomerate on the lookout for an investment. A buy-out of the startup would rocket the client’s value on the market and establish the lawyer as the go-to man for equity financing, credit facilities, a corporate governance overhaul, an IPO, and produce corresponding billings. Such a catch would net him first partnership, then power dwarfing the law firm itself and finally propel him into an international spotlight to dine with kings and, undoubtedly, to become a king.

So it goes, he fired the junior, despite earlier promising to give full credit and compensation, citing a subpar quality of work. Upon protest, the lawyer invoked his list of contacts, promising a carrot of a job offer within weeks with one of his friends, whilst threatening with his stick a blacklist should a whiff of a complaint arise. Placated and cowed, the associate disappeared into the ether and was immediately forgotten. Indeed, when the lawyer received a follow-up email from the junior weeks later, he did not recognize the target of his abuse.

Meanwhile the CEO, on the hunt for investment, was fed a steady diet of salesmanship worthy of a Ferrari dealership. Such technology and IP, the lawyer said, must be protected with invulnerable patents and copyrights, without which the startup should sit in as much fear as optimism. Seduced by squash at the racquet club followed by a meeting in the large white room on the penthouse floor of the King Street office followed by lunch at Richmond Station, the CEO threw the lawyer some legal work to investigate what else could be protected. The lawyer put his associates to work combing through every nook and cranny of the technology, directing them to find any potential infringements of existing copyrights. One such was found with a former client.

It was easy work to run into the former client at Barberian’s on a Wednesday night, sitting at a favoured table, and, with a bottle of Château Smith Haut Lafitte in hand, the lawyer walked over and mentioned with surprise that no one had copied their technology, despite startups that looked ever-so-similar. It was a mere matter of days when the former client sued the CEO, citing copyright infringement, and the CEO came running to the lawyer.

There was, the lawyer said, only one way to escape, and that was to sell the company quickly and at a discount. As luck would have it he knew of a conglomerate that would swoop in to the rescue. Calling in a favour, and dodging a conflict of interest, the lawyer arranged the CEO to retain a friend of his, a former law-school buddy who needed work and had no expertise in the matter. The deal was done quickly and the CEO relieved, having escaped, or at least was so persuaded of, a millions-dollar liability. It was not until a few years later, when the technology was used in a popular app owned by the conglomerate, that the CEO realized who was played, and sued the lawyer’s friend for providing poor counsel.

When the lawyer was offered the managing partnership he turned it down. Instead he conspired with his friends (re-defined as those who could either work on his files or bring in clients) and left the firm to create his own. The firm, however, had become over-reliant on his rainmaking and was forced to close. At the final partners meeting when they asked him why, he stood up in the boardroom, paused, without a word went to the bathroom, neglected to wash his hands, returned to shake the hands of all the partners, and laughed. He would always, he said, keep them in mind should they need a place to land.

*This is fiction. Any resemblance to reality is accidental.

The post Clean Hands appeared first on Slaw.

Earlier this year, I was invited by the Canadian Bar Review to write a review of a book by Professor Adam Dodek of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law titled: Heenan Blaikie: The Making and Unmaking of a Great Canadian Law Firm. I found the book an excellent read and I highly recommend it. My review is included in the current issue of the CBR, now available online. I’m grateful to the Canadian Bar Review for both the opportunity to write this article and for their permission to reproduce the excerpt below.

This is a gripping account of a Canadian law firm’s rise and fall from the 1970s to the 2010s, and of the contemporaneous transformation of our country’s politics, economy, and legal sector during that period. Perhaps most usefully, this book is an insightful exploration of the myriad elements required to build and sustain a successful modern law firm — vividly illustrated by Heenan Blaikie’s failure to assemble or adhere to almost any of them.

Prof. Dodek persuasively argues that the seeds of Heenan Blaikie’s shocking failure were embedded in its founding and began to flourish during its meteoric rise. The handshake agreement in 1973 among Don Johnston, Roy Heenan, and Peter Blaikie that birthed the firm came to assume mythic proportions within its culture. “The Handshake” represented a refreshing and liberating informality in legal practice, a more carefree and less punishing approach to work. This was to be a legal workplace built on collegial trust, a “different kind of law firm” where you could be yourself, work only the hours you wanted, and still make a good living.

That’s a lovely vision for a law firm, especially in the 1970s, when law practice in Canada was as cloistered and protected as it’s ever been. It might even have been a sustainable vision, had history proceeded differently. Had Heenan Blaikie remained a full-service Montréal-only firm with a dominant labour law practice, whose lawyers traded greater income and higher status for shorter workdays and healthier lives, we would be telling a different story today.

However, seismic political events — especially the two Québec referenda and the failure of the Meech Lake Accord — would shift the balance of economic power in Canada from Montréal to Toronto during the last 20 years of the 20th century, making a presence in Ontario’s capital essential for any firm with nationwide ambitions. And perhaps the waves of merger and expansion that swept through the Canadian legal sector in the 1990s would have defeated the original vision in any event.

But Heenan Blaikie was an ambitious firm. Its lawyers liked to call themselves “entrepreneurial” and said they were committed to “growth.” So when innovative tax partner Norm Bacal strong-armed the firm into opening a Toronto location in 1990, one that swiftly grew to rival and then overtake the founding office in Montréal, it was a natural and sensible decision. So too were later expansions to Vancouver and Calgary, and even an affiliate office in Beverley Hills.

Smaller regional offices in places like Kamloops and Trois-Rivières were more difficult to justify, never mind an eventually disastrous expansion to Paris, but nobody was asking difficult questions about these decisions or looking too closely at pesky issues like profitability or strategic goals. Heenan Blaikie was a “different kind of firm” where the good times kept on rolling. Until they didn’t.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with growth and ambition for a law firm. But growth for its own sake and ambition without goals and guardrails are dangerous. And in my experience, law firm lawyers who describe themselves as “entrepreneurial” often mean, “I get to do what I feel like doing.” But real entrepreneurialism combines the rush and excitement of independent business with the equally bracing possibility of humiliating failure and financial ruin.

Law firms can accommodate entrepreneurial lawyers, of course; such lawyers are often the engines of new business development. But they need to be managed carefully, and they ought not to form a substantial minority of even majority of the partnership. An entire law firm of “entrepreneurial lawyers” inevitably would breed a reckless corporate culture, which is exactly what manifested at Heenan Blaikie.

Growing and expanding beyond Montréal was not Heenan Blaikie’s fatal mistake. The mistake, one that would inevitably lead to failure and collapse, was to retain the original firm’s ragtag governance structure and business culture throughout this expansionary period. Heenan Blaikie was a multi-million-dollar international legal conglomerate that often seemed to be run like a side-hustle family business.

The most incredible oversight was the firm’s refusal to employ a written partnership agreement — a foundational management protocol in place at every comparably situated law firm — until 2002, a mind-boggling dereliction of governance standards. But governance and management failures appear in almost every chapter.

• Significant business decisions, especially those concerning new office locations, were made by a few influential partners with little supporting data or strategic planning.
• Revered co-founder Roy Heenan exercised de facto veto power over significant proposals, ruling the firm like a patriarch.
• Major lateral hires were made without anything like proper due diligence, leading to the recruitment of several high-flying yet notorious partners whose impact on the firm proved to be disruptive or even destructive.
• Standards for partnership admission were low and unproductive, and equity partners were rarely forced to leave, creating both profitability problems and bottlenecks at the partner level.
• Practice groups within offices, and offices in different locations, were poorly integrated; tensions that arose within and among them were consistently ignored or swept under the rug.
• There was little to no financial transparency for the partners, and most of the partners appeared perfectly content to be in the dark on these critical matters.
• The firm simply did not plan for the future: As Prof. Dodek puts it, there was “no strategic planning, no succession planning, no planning for the end of big cases, no planning for an economic slump.”

Halfway through the book, you’re no longer wondering how Heenan Blaikie collapsed. You’re asking yourself how in the world it remained standing for so long.

__

Book Review: Heenan Blaikie: The Making and Unmaking of a Great Canadian Law Firm appears in Volume 103(2) of the Canadian Bar Review, released at the end of September. This excerpt is published with permission of the CBR.

The post Book Review: Heenan Blaikie: The Making and Unmaking of a Great Canadian Law Firm appeared first on Slaw.

Tasked with proposing reforms to the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure, the Civil Rules Working Group (“Working Group”) misfired rather badly. For example, the Working Group proposed adding a prelitigation protocol that would in effect require plaintiffs to serve their Affidavit of Documents before commencing litigation and accordingly disclose sensitive information (think medical records, bank and credit card statements, tax returns and proprietary business information) directly to opposing parties, often before such parties had retained counsel. Ignoring privacy issues and resultant risks of such information being posted online, because why not, this would add significant up front cost to all cases, including those that would otherwise settle after claim was filed but before documents were exchanged, and would seem to run counter to the Working Groups stated goals of reducing “cost and expense.”

Next, regarding expert witnesses, the Working Group both proposed to eliminate the right of parties to select their own experts in certain cases while in others adding requirements for experts, after having produced reports, to “meet and confer”, adding yet further cost.

Further, despite the acknowledged scarcity of judges (not enough Judges for the current workload) the Working Group proposed increased judicial oversight of each case (increasing the workload of existing Judges). Apparently, further judicial time will become available once the Court adopts the Working Group’s most profound, if stupid proposal, namely the elimination of oral discoveries, under the naïve assumption that henceforth, litigants would “cooperate and tell the truth.” Of course, this would require the Court to resile from its common law traditions and eliminate the ability of parties to test evidence in all but the half percent of cases that reach trial, but hey, what’s that old saying about “breaking a few eggs?”

For obvious reasons, the Working Groups’ proposals were almost universally panned (with numerous critiques posted here). One of the more muted criticisms came from the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association, who noted the Working Group admitted, apparently without appreciating the irony, that its proposals were not data driven (despite the Working Group being provided with significant data on court performance which the court had previously gone to great lengths and employed dubious legal reasoning to hide from public view). The Federation of Ontario Law Associations was less generous, calling the proposals misguided and bad for the public. The Canadian Defence Lawyers described the proposals as radical while at least one Toronto based senior partner described the proposals as “insane.” The question remains what reforms the Superior Court most needs that the Working Group should have proposed instead?

To consider that, it is worthwhile to look at the data provided to the Working Group, namely various tables on Superior Court performance, that until released to the Working Group, Canadians had no legal entitlement to access. These tables included information on the:

Number of Cases Commenced by Year:

Number of Motions Heard by Year:

Number of Pre-Trials Completed by Year:

Number of Trials Per Year:

and Average Trial Length by Case Type (Motor Vehicle selected for this example):

The above tables illustrate a clear trend of declining judicial performance (though this has not stopped the Judiciary from requesting a $60,000 a year raise). Specifically, while new civil claims declined by just under 10% over the ten-year period, the number of motions heard dropped by nearly half. Pre-Trials held likewise dropped by nearly 30% while the number of trials dropped by nearly 45%. Interestingly, the percentage of cases reaching trial (half of one percent) is well below the rate in New York State, which having a similar population (but higher rate of civil cases per capita), manages to hold nearly 4x more civil trials yearly. It is also important to note that the majority of matters reaching trial (close to 90%) require less than 5 days of court time.

Some of the above data can be visually represented by the ‘litigation pyramid’ shown below. Based on the best available data, at least it Toronto, it takes cases around 5 years from filing to reach trial. That is several times longer than civil cases in New York State.

Given the close integration between Ontario and the US economy, along with the fact that the current Ontario rules are essentially a less well developed version of the American Federal Rules, it makes sense to explore both those limited areas where the Ontario Superior Court outperforms its American peers along with the substantial areas where it does not. In terms of outperformance and having once practiced in the US, I have identified two specific areas. First, many US States maintain strict pleadings requirements that apply to both claims and defences. Such requirements are enforced by procedural Motions to Strike/Demurers that utilize court resources (determining whether all elements for breach of contract were plead) without advancing cases substantively. Thankfully, such unnecessary motion practice is generally absent in Ontario. Second, where default has been noted, the Ontario Superior Court permits Judgment to be entered on written motion while at least some States (Florida) require formal trials with oral evidence, again using court resources unnecessarily.

The situation reverses when it comes to discovery. Initially, the current Rules lack a sensible procedure to obtain production of relevant documents (i.e. whether the cigarette company has any documents showing it to have knowledge of the harmful effects of smoking), especially from recalcitrant defendants. Specifically, while such documents are required to be produced (R. 30.02), where such production does not voluntarily occur, the opposing party can either request production via correspondence, bring a speculative motion in advance of discoveries, to the effect that such documents must exist and hence should be produced or as is generally the case, tease out the existence of such documents at discovery, request undertakings for production, and then reattend at discovery as necessary. Depending upon the parties and counsel, one or more motions may be necessary along the way. Conversely, production is dealt with much more efficiently under the current US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, with Rule 34 providing a mechanism to request disclosure and Rule 37 setting forth sanctions for failing to comply, up to and inclusive of the striking of pleadings. The Working Groups suggestion to deal with this via Redfern requests and interrogatories is not superior to US FRCP 34, which our courts should simply plagiarize and adopt.

Ontario’s rules in regards to oral discovery are likewise backwards and unworkable (and so byzantine that they are perhaps best ‘summarized’ over a 50 or so page summary guide). Specifically, Rule 31.06 limits examination to “any proper question.” Thus, out of court examinations take on the character of in court examinations, replete with debates, objection and refusals. Where obstruction is sufficiently egregious, this results in undertakings and refusals motions, placing further strain on limited court resources. Our courts meanwhile have developed such extensive, if worthless jurisprudence on relevance and ‘proper questions’ that opinions on routine discovery motions can run to nearly 300 paragraphs. By wordcount, that is around one third longer than the Shawshank Redemption, though the issue ultimately boils down to “should the question have been answered at discovery” or “should the document have been produced?” Unworkable rules and long-winded opinions could explain in part the declining judicial performance noted above.

The Americans have likewise adopted much more workable rules in regard to oral discovery. Stated plainly, they basically direct parties to “answer the question and we can deal with issues of propriety or admissibility at trial,” (which also tends to be the way such matters are handled for ‘friends of the court’ who are entitled to the concierge level of service provided by the commercial list in Toronto) which most of the time does not occur (as most matters settle such that determination is unnecessary). This is set forth by US FRCP 30, which both limits objections and directs that testimony is taken subject to any such objections. Were Ontario to adopt such a rule with appropriate sanction for non-compliance, it would likely vastly reduce the time and complexity of discovery motions, without the need to eliminate discoveries altogether. Further, under the longstanding American Rules, all discoveries can be visually recorded, which further reduces the incentive for parties to misbehave. Rather than scrap oral discovery entirely as the Working Group suggests, it would make more sense to simply adopt the American Rules verbatim.

While considering reforms, the Working Group should give thought as to whether Ontario really needs 3 courts of first instance (Small Claims, Superior and Divisional)? Considering Divisional Court, it sometimes acts as a trial court, sometimes as a court of appeal, and sometimes, has only partial (yet exclusive) jurisdiction (over for instance a Writ of Mandamus but not over Declaratory Relief on the same set of facts), along with the Superior Court, with both courts having the same Judges (but with the Divisional Court generally requiring matters heard by 3 judges sitting together). In the event Divisional Court is to continue, it would at least make sense to allow Superior Court judges to exercise jurisdiction in all three courts and/or to transfer matters easily between them, to cut down on the expensive development of an academic jurisprudence on transfer between 3 branches of the same court.

In Rule 48.04, Ontario has implemented an unnecessary road block to the timely resolution of cases. Specifically, to obtain a trial date, parties must file a ‘trial record’ and pay a filing fee. However, pursuant to R. 48.04, once they do so, they can no longer continue any form of discovery or bring refusals motions or motions for production of further documents (i.e. further and better affidavit of documents) absent leave (though they are permitted to bring undertakings motions arising from the same discovery). Thus, cautious counsel are incentivized to not file trial records (getting in queue for trial) until after discovery issues have been dealt with, and obtaining a motion date in Toronto often occurs a year or so into the future. If successful, time will be provided for further production and then further examinations must be scheduled, adding significant, if unnecessary delay. In the US in contrast, discovery generally occurs while matters are proceeding to trial.

Though adding nothing substantively to litigation besides cost and delay, the Working Group apparently gave little thought to reforming the Rules in a way to reduce general courthouse dysfunction, which is endemic in Ontario with each courthouse operating as its own little fief. This is perhaps best exemplified by the continued inability of various courts to accept routine documents for filing. A few recent personal examples that come to mind include rejecting a default judgment for being off by a penny (on a $550,000 judgment, due to not carrying enough decimals to satisfy the Clerk) and rejecting an Order setting aside an incorrectly entered Default on Consent as lacking a supporting motion (to the effect that the Court made a mistake given a Defence was timely filed).

However, courthouse dysfunction also manifests via differing and conflicting local practices, such as a general requirement to file documents online, yet local dictates that Judges additionally be provided with full paper copies of all documents in advance of hearing. In one of my recent cases, an in-person attendance was required half-way across the Province on a short unopposed motion, despite the prior Provincial Practice Direction that the presumptive mode of attendance in such cases was virtual. Had such hearing gone forward (Consent was obtained shortly prior to hearing such that the matter proceeded in writing), my client would have faced several thousand dollars in pointless counsel commuting costs. This dysfunction also manifests in the more mundane, such as the phones not being answered at court or emails timely responded to.

While the Working Group came up with a number of good ideas as I have previously noted, they likewise misfired in a number of areas, which is to be expected when trying to dictate top down solutions without significant input from stakeholders. Hopefully, the Working Group will consider the extensive feedback they have received and further consult, or at the very least, copy what the American have done, given the American’s much greater knowledge as to how to run a functioning court system.

The post What Reforms Does the Ontario Superior Court Most Need? appeared first on Slaw.

When a senior associate left the firm, the busy practice group leader moved swiftly. Files had to be reassigned, and quickly. The next morning, John, an associate in the group, opened his inbox to find seven new matters had been dropped onto his desk without warning.

At first, he froze. Then came a wave of anxiety: the tightening in his stomach, and the mental calculation of how to stretch his already packed schedule.

What unsettled him most wasn’t the extra work; it was how it was handled. The partner didn’t reach out to give him a heads-up or to ask about his capacity. There was no conversation about it at all. Instead, there were just the transferred files, and the expectation that he would get on with it.

By lunch, John found himself venting to a colleague: “I’m overwhelmed, and I don’t feel like there is anyone who cares.” The spark he had felt for his work was dimming. His sense of motivation was slipping away.

Circumstance vs. Leadership

Here’s the point too many leaders miss: the circumstances themselves are rarely the defining factor. Associates will leave. Workloads will shift. Demands will rise and fall. What makes the difference is how partners lead their people through challenge.

Imagine if the partner had paused before hitting “send” on that email. Instead of quietly reassigning files, they could have gathered the group together to acknowledge the associate’s departure and discuss the path forward.

The team could have looked at the list of files together. Associates could have been invited to voice their current workloads, their interests, and what they felt capable of taking on. The partner could have guided the conversation to balance fairness, provide clarity on expectations, and acknowledge the additional effort being asked of everyone.

Would the workload have been lighter? No. The facts would be the same: more files, fewer hands. But the meaning of those facts would be transformed. Instead of feeling dumped on, John might have walked out of that room thinking, “This is tough, but we’re in it together. I’m trusted. I’m respected. I’m part of this team.”

A transition like this can be experienced as unfair, isolating, and demotivating or as a chance for recognition, clarity, and team connection. The choice is real, and it rests squarely in the hands of the leader.

I encourage leaders to keep a simple compass in mind when handling difficult moments: five factors that spiral motivation up or down. Respect and recognition. Control and ownership. Certainty and clarity. Fairness. Connection and belonging.

A Compass for Leaders

Think of these not as a checklist to be ticked off, but as a set of bearings — guideposts that help you orient yourself in challenging conversations and decisions.

Respect and Recognition. At the core, people want to know they are seen and valued. Even when the news is hard, a workload increase, a change in role, acknowledgment can make the difference between deflation and motivation. John needed the partner to respect him enough to take the time to talk through the situation. Hearing his contributions mattered and that the firm trusted him to take on new challenges would have been encouraging.

Control and Ownership. Motivation thrives when people have a say in their work. It doesn’t mean leaders abdicate decision-making, but offering choice, consultation, or even small degrees of autonomy helps people feel invested in the process. Without it, people feel powerless. In John’s case, having a chance to weigh in on which matters he could take on, or how best to balance them, might have turned the experience from depleting to empowering.

Certainty and Clarity. Ambiguity is exhausting. When expectations, timelines, or reasons for decisions are unclear, stress rises. Leaders can alleviate this stress by providing transparency and clear direction. Even a short conversation that outlines why the files need to be reassigned, what the priorities are, and where support is available can replace uncertainty with steadiness.

Fairness. When the process for allocating work feels arbitrary or hidden, people quickly assume the worst. By being open about the “why” behind decisions and ensuring the workload is distributed thoughtfully, leaders can preserve a sense of justice and equity. Without it, resentment builds fast. With the absence of communication from the leader, John was left wondering if his pile was heavier than others’.

Connection and Belonging. Positive relationships in the workplace with both colleagues and leaders are a powerful motivator. Being part of a team that has each other’s backs boosts resilience. Leaders who bring people together, acknowledge shared challenges, and encourage collaboration foster a sense of belonging among their team members. When they don’t, individuals feel isolated and disconnected. A big part of John’s discouragement was from a sense of being left on his own without support.

Every Leadership Moment Counts

What I want leaders to see is this: motivation is not about generational quirks or personality types. It is a facet of our humanity. When people are respected, included, treated fairly, given clarity, supported and trusted, they thrive; when they are dismissed, left out, or sidelined, their energy wanes.

That is the power of this compass. When leaders take shortcuts and skip investing time and energy in these factors, they risk demotivating their team. When they take the time to lead with them, they boost engagement, trust, and resilience.

It is tempting, in busy practices, to see moments like file transfers as administrative details. But they are not. They are leadership moments, with consequences that ripple far beyond a single assignment. Each one either reinforces engagement or erodes it.

Here’s something to try: The next time you face a challenge, whether it’s reassigning files or delivering feedback, ask yourself: Am I navigating by the compass? If the answer is yes, you will not only handle the situation, but you will also strengthen the motivation, engagement, and resilience of your team.

The post A Compass for Leaders appeared first on Slaw.

Artificial intelligence is impacting how lawyers market themselves and grow their practice. However, it’s wise to first consider if and how AI tactics can fulfill business development strategies that convert to achieving a measurable growth objective.

The hype around artificial intelligence is stimulating a fear factor bordering almost on hysteria for many lawyers and their law firms who are fixating on it more than any other concern in the modern global legal services market. While fear can be understandable, mostly because for many the benefits of AI remain somewhat murky, we need to grasp the reality that AI is a tool that, right now, is within our control.

Many law firms and lawyers have been employing AI to execute rote, task-based legal work that traditionally has fallen within a practitioner’s working domain. While off-loading rote work and tasks to artificial intelligence tools opens capacity to higher level work that is more meaningful and valuable to both the client and legal practitioner, AI does not replace valuable human traits – the three E’s: expertise, experience, and empathy – that help earn a professional, legal or otherwise, a reputation as a trusted advisor.

This is why before using AI as a tactical tool, we’re smart to consider the strategy-to-objective components that enable measurable business growth.

The AI Fear Factor

Anyone who has worked extensively with lawyers knows that to get their attention, all you have to do is scare them with risk. This is because risk is more than a four-letter word; it’s a perceived threat and a major component of the fear frenzy around AI.

But here’s the thing: AI is a tool best employed as and when needed to execute a tactic.

A tactic is an action that when executed within a specific time frame supports a strategy. A strategy is one of a series of interlocking decisions that support a measurable objective. Think Objective-Strategies-Tactics tiered as a pyramid.*

Most lawyers I know tend to be tactic or task oriented, ticking off to-do items with a goal of getting things done. While this is all well and good, being task-oriented – and often control-oriented – can lead to treating AI as though it’s an assistant or tackling it like an opponent. It’s neither. It’s a tool. It doesn’t care what you think or how you feel. It can help get things done and best of all, if or until AI takes on a life of its own as Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, a Professor Emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto warned in his acceptance speech for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, you can tell it what to do.

Tooling Around

Once upon a time, tools of legal and many other businesses, included telephones, dictaphones, and typewriters. Then along came photocopiers, which manifested in a cottage industry of eye-wateringly priced, so called business-related disbursements that in my opinion qualified as extortion. The advent of the fax machine that enabled speed, trimmed some but not all of the fat from those juicy disbursements.

Fast-forward to our digital world where we can work wirelessly from anywhere using a computer that often fits in our pocket. While this can be beneficial to both a practitioner and client, oftentimes digital assets designed to enable convenience and delegation can result in hit-and-miss consequences.

The Hit and Miss of AI

Take, for example, AI-enabled chatbots used for client intake. Chatbots can triage prospective clients, collect preliminary information, and route inquiries to appropriate legal talent. Chatbots are allegedly designed to do two things: 1. Improve a client’s experience; and 2. Accelerate a law firm’s response time while weeding out timewasters and tire-kickers.

But let’s call a spade a shovel: A chatbot is a lawyer-oriented tactic because it’s geared to support the strategy of handling only those matters that sit dead-centre within one’s professional wheelhouse with work supplied by targeted clients qualified to pay for it, and cull everything and everyone else. Doing so supports a growth objective of increasing revenue and annual profit by fill-in-the-blank per cent.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this as a tactic supporting a strategy that converts to an objective for a lawyer or law firm. In fact, I endorse it.

However, using a chatbot as a business development tactic can backfire and even cause reputational damage because it provides precious little benefit to a prospective client since, due to its artificiality, a chatbot is cold, imperfect, not nuanced, often frustrating, and makes a potential client do all the work from the outset.

Silence of the Chatbot

This was the finding of a few testers who I asked to try out chatbots on websites of a handful of law firms some time ago. They filled in forms, hit send, received confirmation that their query was accepted, and then were met with silence. The upshot was that these testers who were prospective clients with work relevant to these firms were disappointed, made disparaging remarks about them solely on the basis on the non-response, and took their business elsewhere.

While this may have been the best solution for these prospective clients, it may not have been the best outcome for the firms. But we’ll never know because they didn’t respond or take the time to learn more about the nuances of these clients’ needs.

This is an instance where silence isn’t always golden and AI-delegation can cause extrapolated and even compounded loss, including: 1. Loss of potential business that may or may not be within your wheelhouse, and 2. Losing an opportunity to be a valuable connector who introduces a client in the time-proven pay-it-forward tactic of a referral that supports a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats strategy that tends to convert to the objective of business growth, which due to reciprocity usually includes one’s own.

Legal Service Remains a People Business

I expect this issue is symptomatic of my observation that “growth mindset” is evoking a narrow scope pertaining to growth of an individual or firm rather than growth for the greater legal community and good.

This behaviour may be due to fearfulness referred to earlier, which can morph into a notion that AI will replace lawyers – it will replace some, for sure – and cause an acceleration of production speed that will undermine the billable hour – fingers crossed. Still, I don’t think efficiency pertaining to AI and its adoption should be an all-encompassing fret factor as long as legal service remains a people business.

Yes, AI can help lawyers to be perceived as knowledge experts by generating marketing content for blog posts, newsletters, and social media platforms. However, AI has its own voice, and its voice is not yours.

This is why it’s best to use AI to research and support your ideas and write in your own words to retain and project your own voice, thoughts, tone, and personality.

The Personal Touch

Marketing is about continuing to build profile within your chosen market. Business development is about nurturing relationships with people in your chosen market whether or not they have work for you, support your endeavours, or applaud your contributions.

Both marketing and business development enable market positioning that provides a foundation for growth within your chosen field by honouring relationships that are crucial elements of your community, both professional and personal.

And all of it hinges on human values of thoughtful listening, insightful questioning, understanding, and empathy.

While AI may have computational “thinking type” functions, it comes by its name honestly. It has an ever-increasing degree of intelligence as a result of learning by human input, but it remains artificial and has yet to have a heart.

Until it does, the curses and blessings of our humanity and enormous range of distinctive and individualized personality traits that span from curiosity and compassion to humour and perspective, and intuition and imagination remain our superpowers.

* My Objective-Strategies-Tactics Pyramid is a no-fail business, markets, and management tool that I have used in many circumstances and industries over the last 30 years because it works every time. I will be writing about it shortly. Watch this space.

The post The Legal Market Intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Business Development, and Measurable Growth appeared first on Slaw.

In July, I was counsel in a voir dire in BC Supreme Court, where four police officers testified over three days. While the officers gave evidence, I took over 30-pages of handwritten notes. I could capture verbatim maybe 30 percent of what was said. The rest of the time — when answers went on for too long or counsel and the witness talked over one another — I got only the gist of it. Yet, precision was key.

At one point, we stood down for over an hour for the court clerk to go through the recording to find a certain exchange that no one could clearly recall.

At another point, counsel disagreed about what a witness had said in chief. Did he refer to a critical meeting that took place on the morning in question or intimate that there was another meeting before that?

It was maddening not to have a transcript at hand. Yet, in hindsight, there was a solution sitting right there in front of us.

Several iPhone and Android apps can now generate a complete transcription of an audio recording — with speaker attribution — using AI. Doctors in Quebec are beginning to use these apps to record consultations with patients, and I’ve explored the possibility of lawyers using them to record meetings with clients.

I hadn’t thought about using AI in the courtroom until was too late. But if I did think to ask the court for permission to make and transcribe a recording, I would have run into a hurdle.

In British Columbia, as in many provinces, audio recording by anyone other than the court clerk is restricted.

Rules vary and in some cases AI transcriptions appear to be prohibited altogether. But why should counsel not be allowed to use such a powerful and convenient set of tools?

Delving into this further has uncovered one good reason why — but there may be a better solution.

What court directives say about recording

Ontario is quite strict about this. The Courts of Justice Act prohibits anyone from making an audio recording except in certain cases. One of them is where a lawyer records a hearing “in the manner that has been approved by the judge, for the sole purpose of supplementing or replacing handwritten notes”.

But an Ontario Superior Court directive states that while counsel can make an audio recording, it “must not be transcribed”.

British Columbia’s Policy on the use of electronic devices in courtrooms permits “accredited media” to “audio record a proceeding for the sole purpose of verifying their notes” — so long as they destroy the recording “once verification… is complete.”

The policy is silent, however, on whether counsel can make an audio recording, and it says nothing about transcription.

Alberta courts have issued a general requirement to obtain the court’s permission “before anyone can use … electronic recording devices of any kind, including cell phones, in courthouses.”

Concerns go beyond privacy

If counsel asked to record and transcribe witness testimony using a phone, it would be hard to predict what a judge would say.

Courts would likely be concerned about what might happen to any recording made or data used to create an AI transcription. And counsel might try to reassure the court on this point. (“My phone can do this offline…”)

But judges may be concerned about more than just privacy or security.

We saw this when the CBC challenged a court directive in Quebec prohibiting media from broadcasting portions of the court’s audio recordings of its proceedings. The Supreme Court of Canada held that this infringed the freedom of expression, but it was a reasonable limit on that right.

We need to restrict access to audio recordings, Justice Deschamps held, to protect the “serenity” of court hearings. The ban is really about trying to “reduce, as much as possible, the nervousness and anxiety that people naturally feel when called to testify in court.”

Why assurances may not be enough

The police in my case may not have cared whether counsel recorded their evidence. They may have accepted my assurance that I would delete any recordings at the end of the hearing.

But in a sensitive matter — a complainant testifying in a sexual assault case, a police informant in a murder case — a judge may not be inclined to add to the stress involved just to make counsel’s job easier.

It’s not that a judge would distrust what use counsel might make of a recording. It’s that when relying on a commercial provider of data storage or AI, no one can be certain about what might happen to a file or to the data used to make an AI transcription.

Courts might be concerned less about the data and more about the anxiety witnesses might feel in relation to it, and how this would affect their evidence.

For this reason, any assurance counsel might seek to provide — “But, no your Honour, Apple uses Private Cloud Compute!” — would miss the point.

One obvious solution to all of this would be for courts to produce a real-time AI transcription of the court’s own digital recording.

Courts could provide this through an app like Teams, using an AI model kept off-line and overseen internally.

It seems so obvious a solution as to be inevitable. At some point.

The post Should Courts Allow Counsel to Record and Transcribe in-Court Testimony on Their Phones? appeared first on Slaw.