All Posts Tagged With: "lawyer"
Goodbye Bay Street. Hello Humboldt.
From the 2011 Maclean’s Professional Schools Issue
Photograph by Nayan Sthankiya
Click here for our 2011 Law School Rankings
When she was in law school, Amber Biemans always figured she’d practise in the city. After she and her husband had kids, though, she felt the pull of small-town life. At age 26, Biemans joined a firm in Humboldt, Sask. (population 5,900); two years later, she’d bought out a senior partner at the firm who was ready to retire. Making partner at age 28 was an “amazing opportunity,” says Biemans, now 32, but beyond that, “the benefits here are immense,” from the commute to work—which takes all of five minutes—to the close relationships she’s built with clients.
UToronto to offer bridging for foreign-trained lawyers
Program will offer academic training, language referrals, career services and employment counselling to lawyers who want to practice in Ontario
The University of Toronto is starting Ontario’s first bridging program for internationally trained lawyers, thanks in part to a $4 million investment in the program from the provincial government.
Every year, the Internationally Trained Lawyer Program will aim to help 100 lawyers who need accreditation to practice law in the province. Michael Chan, Ontario’s minister of citizenship and immigration, launched the program a ceremony last Tuesday.
“We have tremendous international talent, a pool of talent here in Ontario for which we already have bridging programs, such as pharmacists, engineers and nurses, who are all internationally trained but are not currently in the job that they want,” said Chan. “Our economic prosperity depends on attracting skilled newcomers from around the world and retaining those people.”
The program will provide a range of services, including provincial work experience, academic training, language support, career services and employment counselling. It’s set to operate out of U of T’s law faculty, and will be supported by groups including the Law Society of Upper Canada and the National Committee on Accreditation, in addition to local law firms.
For more information, click here.
UNB students petition for wrongfully convicted man
Dying Ontario man was convicted of murder in New Brunswick 34 years ago
A group of law students has collected more than 1,000 signatures through an online petition in the effort to get compensation for a dying Ontario man who was wrongfully convicted of murder in New Brunswick 34 years ago.
Erin Walsh was convicted in 1975 of killing Melvin (Chi Chi) Peters in Saint John, N.B., and served 10 years in prison before getting parole, but was acquitted last year after new information was uncovered.
Walsh, who has colon cancer, has launched a civil suit that names the province, the Crown prosecutor in the original trial, the City of Saint John and Saint John Police as defendants.
University of New Brunswick student Shane Martinez says other provinces have compensated people who were wrongfully convicted, and New Brunswick needs to do the same.
Government officials have declined specific comment on Walsh while the civil suit is before the courts.
Premier Shawn Graham has asked Business New Brunswick Minister Greg Byrne, who was attorney general and minister of justice from 1997 to 1999, to temporarily oversee the file for the province.
- The Canadian Press
Want to be a lawyer? Go down under
If you don’t make the cut in Canada, Bond University wants you
It was 3 a.m. as Warren Beil tried to toss a garbage bag into a dumpster and it burst over his head. At that moment, the Vancouver kitchen manager decided that it was time to explore other career opportunities. “I don’t want to be a chef,” he said to himself. “I think I’m going to go to law school.” It was December 2003, and he had already missed application deadlines at every Canadian university. Yet just a week later Beil, then 23, was on his way to Bond University, a law school in Australia that actively targets and recruits Canadian students.
Five years later, Beil — now completing his articling at a Vancouver law firm — is one of a growing number of future lawyers who are going abroad for their legal education. In 2007, 562 foreign-trained graduates applied to the National Committee on Accreditation, requesting the right to practice in Canada, up from 225 in 1999. If current trends continue, that number could grow by 200 applicants in as few as three years, according to Vern Krishna, a University of Ottawa law professor and former Treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada.
Bond is, by far, Canada’s most popular overseas law program. Since its founding in 1987, Australia’s first private university has geared its law program to attract Canadians. More than 140 are currently enrolled—making Bond’s population of Canadian law students almost as large as that of the University of Calgary’s faculty of law. Students meet fellow Canadians through the Canadian Law Students Association and study with visiting profs from the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Manitoba, and the University of Western Ontario. They can even study Canadian constitutional law (Canadian corporate law courses are in the works, too) and get credit from the University of Manitoba. To top it off, it all takes place on a campus in the suburbs of Gold Coast, Queensland, a lush paradise that is a hybrid between Miami Beach and Waikiki.
Victoria Heron, a manager with student recruitment agency AustraLearn, says there are three primary reasons students choose Bond: to get through law school faster (a law degree at Bond takes only two years, not three), to gain international experience—and because they weren’t accepted at a Canadian law school. Eric Colvin, a Bond professor and former dean who used to teach at the University of Saskatchewan, says that two-thirds of graduates return to Canada to practice law and most have no problem finding jobs and articling positions. “The students say that they are able to get employment,” he says. “The fact that they have got their law degree from somewhere like Australia makes them somewhat exotic and interesting creatures and law firms are very willing to see what they’ve got to offer.”
Beil thinks his global outlook gave him an edge when applying for articling positions. “A lot of the Canadian law grads have never worked. They have never done anything,” he says. “In this market, employers just want to see something different. I got out there and saw the world and it makes me way more interesting.” But among his peers at the University of Toronto where he later completed a second law degree, Beil had to fight Bond’s stigma as Last Chance U. “The appearance of Bond to a lot of people in Canada is that the school will let anybody under the sun in,” he says. “People say, ‘You went to Bond because you couldn’t get in anywhere else. You’re not as smart as the rest of us.’ It’s simply not true.”
On the cultivation of lawyers
Good or bad? Right or wrong? Just different?
I was into the department yesterday morning when I stumbled across a particularly rare sight for 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning: undergrads. Why are there undergrads making noise outside my office?
Turns out the LSAT was being administered today. Poking around, I found that four classrooms had been booked for this event, and they all seemed pretty full. I would estimate a minimum of 100 students – approximately 10 per cent of the graduating class.
That’s a lot of wannabe lawyers. Out of everyone I knew throughout high school and university, I can only think of three people who wrote the LSAT, two of whom are now lawyers in training. Googling around, it’s fairly easy to find that there’s about 1.15m lawyers in the United States, but I had to construct an estimate for Canada – about 70,000. Applying the 10-to-one rule, that implies that the US has 60 per cent more lawyers than we do in per-capita terms.
Tossing out some economic reasons for the disparity, I can think of lawyers becoming a larger section of the population with more income, more income inequality (though Canada and the States aren’t significantly different on that score) and some bias from the different mixture of businesses that comprise our respective economies.
Still, it seems that like would hardly account for it all. I don’t put much stock in those reasons. In general, the law degree in the States seems a prerequisite for political ambition, moreso than in Canada. Elite law schools down here seem like the ultimate network for the would-be movers and shakers, one that doesn’t have a Canadian analogue, just like our universities are much more egalitarian than south of the border.
Good or bad? Right or wrong? Just different? I’m inclined to pick the latter, with some mild worry that a select handful of professors are giving the same education to an awful lot of the future governing body.
