The way legal services are delivered in Canada is changing.  Increased competition and a demand for lower prices has pressured law firms to slow hiring and deliver their services more efficiently.  After finishing my first year at Queen’s…
Funding orders must be exceptional, says the Supreme Court: ‘For the first time the Supreme Court has ruled that superior courts are empowered to order governments to fund public interest litigation before statutory courts and…
Killer cop seeks funds for appeal Peter Edwards writes: A Toronto police officer who ran up a $1.2-million legal aid bill while on trial for his mistress’s murder is now seeking taxpayer funding to appeal…
This is the final instalment of a three-part series on access to legal services. In Part 1, I argued that the crisis facing access to legal services is precipitated by a fundamental mismatch between supply…
The legal aid boycott, which began in June, continues to grow. Today, Toronto-based lawyer Tony Bryant asked to be removed from a first-degree murder case being held in Kitchener, Ontario. Outside of court, Bryant cited…
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the topic of access to legal services. In Part 1, I argued that the traditional approach to ensuring access to legal services (that is, increasing the…
The boycott of legal aid by the Criminal Lawyer’s Association continues. I reported a few days ago that the CLA would not endorse the government’s plan to inject $150 million into Legal Aid on the…
In this three-part series, I make the case that the legal profession needs nurses. More to the point, we need to create new categories of legal professionals who are not lawyer, but who are qualified to provided limited legal advice and even representation within a well-defined scope. These non-lawyer professionals would be regulated by a system similar to that of colleges or associations of nurses in the health industry. In Part 1 of the series, I explore the shortcomings of the “traditional” approach to promoting access to legal services (that is, increasing the capacity of legal aid and pro bono). I argue that these approaches are cost-prohibitive from a government viewpoint and will therefore prove inadequate in addressing the underlying shortage of lawyers.
I spoke too soon when I congratulated the Criminal Lawyers Association on convincing Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley to boost funding to Legal Aid Ontario to the tune of $150-million over the next four years….
After years of neglect, the Legal Aid system in Ontario has been scheduled for an overhaul. On Tuesday, Attorney General Chris Bentley will announce $150 million in new funding for Legal Aid, as well as…
We wrote about the growing legal aid boycott before. A couple of days ago, crown prosecutors supported the protest. Hugh Locke, a retired judge and current member of Toronto’s police services board, weighed in too recently. The…
Legal aid boycott grows over paltry paycheques Here is our previous post on the boycott.
