Speaking on Podcast - Studying Law Around the World
On this podcast I shared the journey from law school in Michigan to building a multi-office law firm in Ontario and leading private equity transactions.
CPDOnline - Selling your Legal Practice
I contribute to CPDOnline, you can subscribe and watch videos for Continuing Professional Development hours as a lawyer.
Why Some Lawyers Chase Bills
I recently saw a lawyer in my network post on LinkedIn a lamentation about how she works so hard, late nights and weekends, but always has to chase bills from her clients. Her reasoning was that lawyers are simply not respected in their work. Despite all the long hours, come billing time, clients will ask her, “why am I paying for a draft, for a few emails, or a few comments”. The post concluded that lawyers should not stay silent about this issue and the legal industry should raise awareness about this issue. This comment was liked and reposted by over 100 other lawyers which surprised me.
Navigating the Legal Job Market: Unveiling the Salary Realities and Value Propositions for Lawyers in a Changing Landscape
Much has been written about the influx of articling students and lack of requisite positions to fill, and solutions to assist such students with their placements and licensing. The bigger issue that I am seeing plaguing the legal labour market is related to the lack of education of lawyers relating to their salary expectations and how it corresponds to their value proposition. This applies to lawyers who are both fresh out of school and those who have been lawyers for some time looking for a career change.
CPDOnline: Work Life Balance for the Modern Canadian Lawyer
There are plenty of videos and articles out there about improving work-life balance and improving mental health for lawyers. But I noticed that there are very few that provide any real strategies to help accomplish this.
A False Sense of Security
When my family moved into a new house, we were considering different home security options. As is often the case today, there were many options to choose from: security cameras, automatic locks, window bars and everything in between at varying costs. It is impossible to know which, if any, of these solutions were useful in protecting the house. The main problem is that if a burglar truly wanted to break into the home, he or she will be able to break in regardless of which security system we paid for. At the time, we chose to keep our costs at a minimum because we felt that our ‘real’ security came in the form of the location we chose to purchase our new home: a well-lit street on a low crime, family-oriented neighbourhood.
Revisiting the Bar Exam
The Barrister and Solicitor examinations in Ontario are ripe for reform. With the continuous influx and new generation of law students, I have found that the current examinations are not properly testing the competency levels of incoming students. The current exam structure rewards groups of students who have a lesser understanding of the law than others who fail the exams, but are better at finding answers in materials quickly and efficiently. Moreover, it does not weed out those students who are not truly interested in practicing law after law school. I think the Law Society benchers would be well advised to initiate a pilot project to investigate the examination’s current suitability.
The Multi-Disciplinary Lawyer: Why Legal Expertise Isn't Enough
The conventional notion of what makes a successful, valuable lawyer has and continues to undergo a transformation. While it is still important to have legal expertise – this has become just the starting point for the profession as a whole and is in no way guaranteed of successful representation of clients and the community. With the rise of AI and in-house practitioners, there is a rising demand for lawyers who possess a diverse array of skills and knowledge to justify the cost. To maintain their license, lawyers must generate continuing professional development hours every year to maintain their expertise in the legal field. However, it would be more productive to require lawyers to strive to obtain knowledge in other subjects and industries to better provide genuine value to their clients.
Work-Life Balance for the Modern Lawyer
There are many self-help articles and books for every profession to assist with work-life balance, a trait which has never been more essential to service professionals like lawyers. In today’s smart-phone society emails are treated more like instant messages requiring immediate responses than the letters of old. In addition, the computer is always on your person, whether driving, at home or at work; while this allows for remote capabilities, it becomes much harder to “switch off”. There are many suggestions on how to improve mental health and achieve work-life balance: get more sleep, exercise, and practice “mindfulness”; but very little in the way of how a lawyer is expected to accomplish this.
Providing Value to the Difficult Client
Many lawyers (myself included) over the course of any practice, run into issues withdrawing from representing and terminating a difficult client. There are many competing issues at stake including: not wanting to abandon a client in a time of need; Law Society compliance; not wanting to abandon work-in-progress billings; pride; stress; and protection from a lawsuit. These are just some of the many considerations that go through one’s mind when deciding if, when, and how to “fire” a client.
The Disadvantages of Common Law Precedant: Analysis of James Bay Resources Limited v. Mak Mera Nigeria Limited, 2025 ONCA 448 (CanLII)
The Canadian common law system has its pros and cons. On the one hand, it provides for a certain level of consistency and predictability within an area of law by having judges rely on past precedent rulings to guide future awards. On the other hand, this consistency promotes a certain bias that takes a long time to review and change, which ironically creates inconsistencies across other legal framework.
Lawsuits are Investments
Whether enforcing a contract, recovering damages, or seeking injunctive relief, most civil lawsuits are ultimately efforts to obtain money or something of equivalent value; thus, there should be a return-on-investment analysis for every claim. Often, litigants and their counsel get so caught up in the content of what their lawsuits are about that they overlook or completely disregard this crucial point.
The Importance of Docketing
Why do lawyers docket? What is its purpose? Has the act of docketing run its course for modern law firms? For the purposes of this article, for a lawyer to “docket” it means to input a record of their activities completed for the client along with the time it takes to complete the activity (later multiplied by an hourly rate for billing purposes). Whether doing it by hand, manually inputting into a spreadsheet, or using a legal management software like Cosmolex or Clio, docketing is crucial in the billing process and ultimately the conversion of legal activity into the earning of money both for the firm and the individual lawyer.
A Lawyer’s Reputation
Right out of law school there is a general theme that is expressly stated that a lawyer must maintain a “good reputation” – one that reflects well on the individual and also the legal community as a whole. This is furthered in rule 2.1-2 of the Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers which states in part: “A lawyer has a duty to uphold the standards and reputation of the legal profession”. As a result of the above, I find that many lawyers, young and old, guide their actions and practices based on their personal interpretation of this rule and their own idea of “reputation” rather than its objective nature.
When is the right time to Start your own Practice?
Starting a practice is an extremely sensitive topic for many lawyers and is certainly not for everyone. There are many factors to consider: practicing law vs operating a business, managing a payroll vs receiving a payroll, taking on personal liability over and above what professional insurance will cover etc. Taking the jump to starting your own practice comes with many of these different types of responsibilities and much has been written on it apart from this article. This includes how to network, acquire your first clients, how to hire and manage employees, how to raise start-up capital etc. But this is not the purpose of my writing this article. Instead, the purpose of this article is to tackle the question when is the right time to start a practice?
Choosing the Right Employer for your Legal Career
I am often asked about how to choose the right employer for a legal career. Financial compensation and incentives may be a significant starting point; however, there are often little differences in compensation for the position you are eligible for, so it is difficult to determine the right path. This is not only the case when searching for a position at the start of a legal career but also midway through. The adage on the employer side is “hire slow, fire fast”; but as far as I’m aware, there does not seem to be a similar adage for employees. I have met too many lawyers who apply to (or switch to) firms with the promise of higher compensation but find out quite quickly it was not as they hoped. I am hoping this article can provide some other considerations to think about besides (or in support of) compensation offered.
Addressing Employee Turn-over in Law Firms
Many law firm owners I speak to are having difficulty growing their practice, and a major reason for this they reason is lack of retention and the overall issue of employee turn-over within the firm. There are many articles that address this issue in the legal industry and in other industries as well – usually blaming this on the millennials and generation Z. The argument goes that this current generation of lawyers focus on social media and the next best job offer, find themselves jumping to new firms after several years, and there are few that maintain loyalty with the same firm over a longer period of time.
Bedside Manner – what they don’t teach you in law school
Many lawyers have a difficult time not only in acquiring clients, but also in keeping clients or achieving client referrals. Many times, this is the case despite the quality of the work, the speed produced, or even the price charged. One large reason for this comes as a result of a lack of “bed-side manner” – a term typically used for doctors and patients but extremely applicable in the legal industry. Bed-side manner refers to the manner in which a doctor explains advice and consequences to a patient at his or her bedside.
Opinion: Why Law Society Rules Should Serve as Guidelines, Not Strict Mandates
I am currently about to write the MPRE (multi-state professional responsibility exam) for licensing in the United States and this allows me time to review the ABA standard rules of professional responsibility for lawyers in the United States, which are substantially similar to the Law Society of Ontario’s Rules of Professional Responsibility. As a lawyer who has been practicing for close to 10 years, I find it interesting to go back and review these Rules in extreme detail and relate them to the realities of practice.
The Great Discontent of Law Firm Power Dynamics
I often hear from colleagues about a general discontent in working for a standard law practice and its culture. There is often resentment and politics between the different classes of employees – Partners, associates, articling students, law clerks and operation staff. The reason for this discontent is typically due to a perceptive hierarchy that does not reflect practical reality. In order to foster a more positive culture in a law practice, it is the responsibility of the leaders of the firm (ownership group or managing partner) to fracture the perceptive hierarchy and be as transparent has possible as to the firm and its goals.