WWW.CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM ISSUE 50.02
Top 25
MOST INFLUENTIAL
LAWYERS From constitutional rulings to AI rollouts, the lawyers moving Canada’s legal system forward
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COMMON-LAW PROPERTY
Navigating the varied provincial rules on property-division rights
GCs MANAGE EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE
Poonam Puri on the growing demands on general counsel
REPRODUCTIVE MALPRACTICE
Fertility clinics and obstetric delivery rooms generate more litigation
UPFRONT
EDITOR’S DESK
www.canadianlawyermag.com ISSUE 50.02 | OCTOBER 2026 EDITORIAL
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A profession called to lead at scale
T
ariffs are shifting daily. AI tools are compressing the time it takes to do legal work as clients demand that law firms demonstrate their value more clearly. Demands are piling up for institutional solutions to systemic problems. The question isn’t whether the ground is moving – it’s whether the profession is moving with it. What the current moment demands of Canada’s legal profession, above all else, is leadership – the kind that moves fast, thinks ahead, and designs systems capable of addressing problems at scale rather than one at a time. That context sits at the heart of this issue, and it’s also what will drive the discussion at the Canadian Legal Summit, on October 14 at The Carlu in Toronto. In her column, Poonam Puri captures the general counsel’s version of this moment – everything, everywhere, all at once. Boards want answers on AI, tariffs, whistleblower complaints, and CEO succession, often in the same week. The GC who thrives, she argues, isn’t the one who knows everything; it’s the one who brings order to complexity.
The question isn’t whether the ground is moving – it’s whether the profession is moving with it Matthew Peters makes a parallel argument. At McCarthy Tétrault, he says, AI is no longer coming – it’s here. What separates firms isn’t access to tools; it’s how they use them. Jonathan Leibtag takes this further: the next unit of legal excellence isn’t the individual lawyer but the firm’s capacity to capture and compound how its best people work with AI. Allison Speigel makes the case that agility – the kind that doesn’t require committee approval – is its own competitive advantage. Her value-based billing model is built on accountability and trust, things she argues are more durable than any tool a firm can purchase. Jason Ward reminds us that this logic extends to the entire profession. His column on workplace harassment identifies a structural blind spot: law societies discipline individual lawyers but never the firms that employ them, even when provincial statutes would allow it. What’s needed, he argues, isn’t more individual accountability – it’s systemic design that addresses the conditions allowing misconduct to persist. The Canadian Legal Summit, which will include these legal leaders, is designed to host these conversations. I’ll see you there. Tim Wilbur, managing editor For more information on the Canadian Legal Summit, visit canadianlawyermag.com/events.
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CONTENTS
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UPFRONT 01 Editor’s desk
Institutional leadership is needed to manage systemic problems
40 FEATURES
17 SPECIAL REPORT
TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS Meet industry trailblazers who are driving change and setting the standard for excellence
PROPERTY DIVISION
Common-law separation rules vary among provinces
CROSS EXAMINED
44 BEST OF INHOUSE INTERVIEWS
In-house innovators steering their companies to success
Harvey Brownstone’s new memoir chronicles his challenges as a gay judge and raises problems with the family court model
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Suing ChatGPT for mass shooting – why lawsuits have moved south
PEOPLE 06 Cross examined
The shift to flat-fee billing and client value at a small firm
12 Cross examined
AI adoption frees time to focus on client relationships, says McCarthy Tétrault’s Matthew Peters
FEATURES PROFILE
04 News analysis
OPINION 09 Bringing order to complexity GCs must see the big picture to make informed decisions
16 Deploying AI
A new way to measure the work that law firms produce
72 Back page
Why are individuals, not law firms, sanctioned for discrimination and harassment?
FEATURES 10 Mental health
53
SPECIAL REPORT
TOP LITIGATION LAW BOUTIQUES
Small but mighty: select group of litigation boutiques rank highest year after year
Heed psychological components of personal injury files, advises Gluckstein Lawyers’ Jonathan Burton
67 Reproductive malpractice
Canada’s legal framework regarding fertility and obstetrics still being developed
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UPFRONT
NEWS ANALYSIS
‘Violent ideation’ with ChatGPT After an 18-year-old killed students, a teacher, and members of her family in a violent mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, BC, OpenAI is facing dozens of negligence lawsuits, with more likely to come
IN EARLY September, OpenAI was hit with 30 lawsuits. The complaints, all filed in a US federal court in California, begin by describing the plaintiffs’ experiences at a small secondary school in British Columbia on Feb. 10, 2026.
School, had used ChatGPT to plan the attack. The complaints allege that OpenAI’s system had flagged the shooter’s activity and routed it to an internal team of professionals with backgrounds in threat assessment and counterterrorism. The lawsuits further allege
“Although any legal action pursued by the province would be separate from the litigation initiated by families and community members in Tumbler Ridge, we will work closely with them” Niki Sharma, BC attorney general Among these descriptions are accounts of how a 13-year-old student witnessed a school shooter enter the school’s library, shoot a teacher at close range, and proceed to shoot his classmates one after another; how a 16-year-old hid in a small storage closet with his classmate, watching his teacher try to administer first aid to a bleeding student before covering the student’s body with his jacket when her breathing slowed to a stop; and how a grade-seven teacher, hiding her students under her desk, texted her husband a final goodbye because she was sure she would not survive. According to the lawsuits, the shooter, a former student at Tumbler Ridge Secondary
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that the team urged OpenAI’s leadership to notify the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but the company declined. The lawsuits claim that this decision cost five students, an education assistant, and the shooter’s brother and mother their lives. They allege OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his leadership team didn’t want to notify the RCMP because they did not want to set a precedent whereby the company notifies law enforcement each time it identifies a ChatGPT user planning a violent attack. The lawsuits also allege that OpenAI sought to avoid the possibility of handing over chat logs that would prove ChatGPT was unsafe
and to avoid derailing a planned initial public offering. Represented by US firm Edelson PC, the plaintiffs include Tumbler Ridge Secondary School students, educators, and the school’s principal. Alleging negligence and product liability claims, the plaintiffs are seeking compensatory and punitive damages, along with an injunction requiring OpenAI to intervene when ChatGPT users plan acts of violence, submit to independent audits, and warn users that ChatGPT’s features can reinforce and escalate violent ideation. In response to the lawsuits, OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon posted on X, “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened at Tumbler Ridge, or the victims of this devastating tragedy and their families.” However, Kwon argued that Edelson PC had made “false claims” about the OpenAI teams that create standards and processes for when the company reports user activity to law enforcement. The company’s legal department and intelligence and investigations team “use automated systems that leave the toughest calls to human judgment, but within
LITIGATION TIMELINE March 2026: Maya Gebala, her mother, and her sister sue OpenAI in BC April 2026: The lawsuit, along with complaints by six other families, is filed in the Northern District of California July 2026: BC Attorney General Niki Sharma announces the province has retained legal counsel to pursue legal action against OpenAI September 2026: 30 more lawsuits by Tumbler Ridge victims are filed in the Northern District of California
“The damages that we can recover for folks in Canada, in British Columbia … are massively dwarfed by the opportunity for damages available in California. Period” John Rice, Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott LLP standards to minimize discretion and produce principled decisions that strive to balance security and privacy for the people who use our service and the public,” Kwon said. While Kwon acknowledged that this judgment is not infallible, he argued, “It is always rooted in looking out for this balance for people.” He also argued that it was “completely untrue to say that the people at the centre of these challenging decisions do not prioritize safety, or that there are ‘political’ or ‘public relations’ factors at play.” This is not the first time Tumbler Ridge victims have sued OpenAI. In March, a 12-year-old student named Maya Gebala, her mother, and her sister sued the tech giant in BC Supreme Court, accusing it of prioritizing
user engagement over safety. The plaintiffs soon withdrew their lawsuit and refiled it in a US federal court. At the same time, their lawyers from Vancouver firm Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott LLP, who had teamed up with Edelson PC, filed six other lawsuits against OpenAI on behalf of the families of other victims. September’s complaints are unlikely to be the last Tumbler Ridge-related lawsuits that OpenAI faces. In July, BC Attorney General Niki Sharma announced that the province had retained both BC- and California-based lawyers to pursue legal action against OpenAI. After the September complaints were filed, Sharma said in a press release that
the province was exploring legal options to hold OpenAI accountable. “Although any legal action pursued by the province would be separate from the litigation initiated by families and community members in Tumbler Ridge, we will work closely with them,” Sharma said. Speaking to Canadian Lawyer in July, John Rice, one of the partners at Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott LLP representing the victims and their families, explained why the plaintiffs chose to file the lawsuits in California rather than BC. He argued that California’s broader range of remedies and lack of caps on damages would give the plaintiffs a better chance of obtaining compensation commensurate with the losses they’ve endured. The vast differences between California and British Columbia law raise the question of whether Canada’s legal system is equipped to respond to such tragedies. Rice stated the issue bluntly: “The damages that we can recover for folks in Canada, in British Columbia … are massively dwarfed by the opportunity for damages available in California. Period.”
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FEATURE
CROSS EXAMINED
FLAT-FEE BILLING: COMPETING WITH BIG LAW Allison Speigel of Speigel Nichols Fox LLP on value funds, phase-by-phase pricing, and the communication gap that costs firms clients
FOR ALLISON SPEIGEL, the advantage a small firm holds over a national competitor is less about resources than responsiveness. A partner at Speigel Nichols Fox LLP, a commercial litigation boutique in Mississauga, Ontario, Speigel has built a practice designed to move faster, lean on flat-fee billing, and stay closer to clients than the big-firm world she left behind. That positioning is the subject of a panel she will join at the Canadian Legal Summit in Toronto in October 2026, titled “The Size Advantage: How Agile Firms Are Winning in a ClientDriven Market.” Speigel Nichols Fox was among the first firms in Canada to offer value-based flat fees across all its litigation matters, a shift Speigel dates to the mid-2010s. The firm sets aside a portion of each bill – on a $10,000 account, she explains, roughly $2,000 – into a notional “value fund.” At the end of a matter, the firm can recover anywhere from nothing to double that pool, depending on the result and the client’s agreement. The logic, she says, is accountability. “You want to know that your lawyer always
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has some skin in the game so that they’re making the decisions not just because they say it’s in your best interest, but because it’s also in their financial best interest,” she says. Disputes are rare, and the client’s view governs. Her line if one balks: “If you don’t agree with the value component that I’ve set, that’s fine – we go with yours, but I’ll never work with you again,” she says. The model has limits, and Speigel is candid about them. Litigation, unlike a fixed
Her clients’ appetite has also surprised her. Despite years of industry talk about moving away from the billable hour – a trend evident in the shifting Canadian legal fee landscape – Speigel found that large corporations often stick with hourly billing out of habit, while individuals are more willing to try flat fees. What clients of all kinds embrace, she says, is the value fund. “They love the idea that … you have money riding on the result. And I think it really
“If you don’t agree with the value component that I’ve set, that’s fine – we go with yours, but I’ll never work with you again” construction bid, hinges on an opponent’s choices. “So much of what happens is a reaction to what somebody else is doing, and you really don’t have control over the other side,” she says. That is why the firm prices matters phase by phase rather than quoting a single fee for the whole case.
helps to create a level of trust that is missing in some of the lawyer-client relationships,” she says. The shift is broader than her own practice: in the US, 59 percent of firms billed flat fees either exclusively or alongside an hourly rate in 2024, according to Clio’s 2025 Legal Trends Report.
PROFILE Name: Allison Speigel Current position: Partner at Speigel Nichols Fox LLP Key Dates: » 2008: Graduated from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law » 2008: Joined Shearman & Sterling LLP » 2010: Joined McKool Smith » 2013: Began at Speigel Nichols Fox LLP
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FEATURE
CROSS EXAMINED
Agility, she says, is structural. “As a smaller firm, we don’t have lots of layers of decision-making.” The firm can tailor a fee arrangement to a single client, decline a file on principle, or change course without clearing it through committees. “You can make decisions, and you can make decisions quickly,” she says – an advantage she argues matters more in a market shifting almost daily. She has seen the opposite extreme up close. Since 2024, Speigel has co-chaired Ontario’s Civil Rules Review with Justice
has been that “learning how to use AI is its own skill,” she says – one that can be built only through practice. Even strong results leave her wanting more: she finds that, “even when the summary is totally correct” and free of hallucinations, “I still ended up wanting to go to the documents,” because in litigation, a few words can change a case. The trade-offs echo accounts of how AI is reshaping day-to-day litigation work across the profession. The same Clio research found that 79 percent of US legal professionals now use AI in their work, and
“Investing in technology is important. Then you have to get uptake, and the uptake has to … translate to efficiency” Cary Boswell of the Superior Court of Justice, on a sweeping overhaul of the province’s Rules of Civil Procedure. The group’s final report, made public in December 2025, moderated several of its most contested proposals after consultation feedback. “From my recent experience with the civil rules, it’s very hard to get lots of people to agree on any type of big decision,” she says. “And the same holds true at a firm.” On technology, Speigel is enthusiastic but unromantic. Spending on tools is easy; adoption is not. “Investing in technology is important. Then you have to get uptake, and the uptake has to … translate to efficiency,” she says, noting that many lawyers never use the tools their firms buy. Her firm went fully paperless years before the pandemic and is now testing AI tools. She uses Westlaw’s research AI and a paid version of ChatGPT to tighten her writing, not to draft. The harder lesson
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Canadian Lawyer’s coverage of the report found that many clients are already putting their own legal questions to AI. The one place Speigel believes firms of any size leave value on the table is communication. She regularly inherits files where clients cannot say what stage they are at or what the strategy is. Telling clients where a matter stands, and why, builds trust that fee models alone cannot. “If you don’t understand what somebody wants out of something or where they’re trying to go … then you have no ability to be agile and address those needs,” she says. This article is based on an episode of CL Talk, Canadian Lawyer’s podcast. All episodes can be found at canadianlawyermag. com/cl-talk. The Canadian Legal Summit will take place on October 14 at the Carlu in Toronto. Visit canadianlawyermag.com/ events for more information.
AGILITY AS AN ADVANTAGE Allison Speigel will appear at the Canadian Legal Summit on a panel titled “The Size Advantage: How Agile Firms Are Winning in a ClientDriven Market,” examining the following topics: How cultivating a culture of agility allows your firm to adapt to market disruptions faster than legacy competitors Ways to rethink your core value proposition to meet modern client expectations for transparency and strategic partnership Aligning your operations and technology investments to drive rapid responsiveness without sacrificing the bottom line Visit canadianlawyermag.com/ events for more information on the summit.
UPFRONT
OPINION
Everything, everywhere, all at once When the board wants answers on tariffs, AI, activism, and whistleblower complaints all at once, how does the general counsel manage? YOU’RE THE general counsel of a widely held TSX-listed consumer goods company in Canada, and you just stepped out of two days of intensive board meetings. Your to-do list is incredibly long. The audit committee chair is asking about the legal and business implications of the recently announced tariffs, the company’s mitigation strategy, and how best to communicate the risk of further tariffs to shareholders. The governance committee chair wants bulletproof responses to mounting investor concerns about CEO succession and a shareholder proposal on a sensitive topic. The human resources committee chair is pressing for an update on an internal investigation triggered by a whistleblower complaint alleging forced labour in the global supply chain. And the board chair wants a comprehensive legal analysis on the CEO’s ambitious plan to drive efficiencies through an AI rollout across the business. Of course, these demands threaten to crowd out the day-to-day issues keeping your legal department busy. You have rolling labour negotiations, a long-simmering class action, a bitter intellectual property dispute, and so much more. Welcome, GC, to a phenomenon I call “everything, everywhere, all at once,” evoking all the chaos of the popular 2022 film. It’s trite to say that boards, CEOs, and the counsel who guide them operate in a tumultuous external environment. Since dealing with a once-in-a-century global pandemic,
they have had to respond to war in Europe and the Middle East, persistent inflation, supply chain disruptions, energy shocks, on-and-off trade wars, devastating wildfires, and other climate disasters. How can the GC succeed? If the last six years have taught us anything, it’s that volatility is no longer an isolated event but a standard feature of the business landscape. Guide your advice and decision-making by three key principles: Be agile. Threats and opportunities arise more frequently and with little notice. Take AI, which went from an internet curiosity to an economic driver in months: Move too slowly, and you risk falling behind; move too fast without appropriate guardrails, and you expose the company to major legal, operational, and reputational risks. Boards and management no longer look to the GC for narrow legal answers, seeking instead a holistic approach that balances risk management with the need to advance business objectives on a compressed timeline. Consider tariffs, which are now announced, imposed, and altered almost daily, and often in the face of existing trade agreements. The GC must quickly understand where tariffs impact the business, both as an importer of raw materials and an exporter of finished goods, while identifying potential mitigants and communicating with stakeholders. Who pays under supplier agreements? Can crossborder supplier agreements be terminated
to source locally? How do you draft meaningful risk factor disclosure when the ground keeps shifting? Think ahead. Given the rapid pace of change, the GC should anticipate future legal, regulatory, and stakeholder risks and keep the board and management apprised. With no comprehensive binding AI framework in Canada yet, the GC should map the contours of one now, a task further complicated for global operators navigating inconsistent international rules. The GC should also anticipate how stakeholders will react as AI further integrates into workflows. Have a unionized workforce? General counsel should consider how collective agreements may apply to AI-related workforce changes. Shareholders questioning the company’s pace of AI adoption? The GC must balance short-term shareholder pressure against the longerterm risks of enterprise-wide adoption. The GC should be able to articulate the company’s AI strategy credibly, without inviting regulatory scrutiny for “AI-washing.” Be a business partner. The days of the GC as a siloed legal advisor are long gone. GCs are now integrated members of the business team, working hand in glove with the board, CEO, and other executives to deliver value for the business. Chief among the GC’s functions is managing risk. In today’s volatile environment, that means operating in the grey zone, offering advice that is as much legal analysis as it is risk, communications, and stakeholder engagement strategy. The GC who adds the most value sees the whole picture, bringing sound judgment to competing legal, commercial, operational, geopolitical, and governance considerations. The answer to “everything, everywhere, all at once” is not to know everything but to bring order to complexity and help the C-suite execute with confidence. While the demands on the GC have never been greater, neither has the opportunity to lead. Poonam Puri, O.Ont, L.S.M., F.ICD, is a distinguished research professor in corporate governance at Osgoode Hall Law School, an experienced public company director, and a trusted advisor to boards and special committees.
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SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL FEATURE
PSYCHOLOGICAL INJURY
Weighing mental health damages Gluckstein Lawyers’ Jonathan Burton explains why every personal injury file carries a psychological component – and what that means for how lawyers build their cases
INITIAL CONVERSATIONS with clients tend to centre on one thing: the physical. Did you break your leg? Have the concussion symptoms eased? Did you have surgery? For Jonathan Burton of Gluckstein Lawyers, that line of questioning captures only part of what an accident does to a person, and often not the most consequential part. Over 21 years in personal injury law, Burton has watched mental health awareness grow and, in turn, influence how cases involving psychological injury are built and argued. The firm is increasingly seeing a psychological component in injury files, with clients and their family members grappling with injury management and the aftershocks of the accident. He advocates for a shift in how lawyers approach the intake conversation from the very first meeting. “Tragedy, trauma, health – these are things everyone experiences, and there’s a mental component to all of them, with resilience and strength at one end, demoralization and deterioration at the other,” Burton says, adding that plaintiff-side lawyers must determine a client’s full functional picture and whether there’s a psychological component to the damages. “We’re hoping that not every person who comes in has a mental injury, but if they do, we need to find out because it’s part of the recovery.”
The social media Catch-22 Because these cases can take years to reach trial, lawyers have an opportunity to develop
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that full picture. The strongest evidentiary record combines testimony from lay witnesses and medical experts. Colleagues and friends who knew the plaintiff before the accident can describe what has changed, while treatment records from psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists can document other indicators, including functional evidence such as withdrawing from a career, becoming socially isolated, or experiencing significant weight loss or gain. The strongest plaintiff is a credible one, and the same era that has normalized conversations about depression and anxiety has given insurers and defence counsel an unprecedented tool for challenging that credibility.
an inability to function in public spaces but appears in a video at Canada’s Wonderland does not necessarily have a fraudulent claim. However, that footage exists and may be used
“Tragedy, trauma, health – these are things everyone experiences, and there’s a mental component to all of them, with resilience and strength at one end, demoralization and deterioration at the other” Jonathan Burton, Gluckstein Lawyers “You can be sure that the first thing an insurance company or defence lawyer is going to do is plug your name into Google and look you up,” Burton says. “It’s free surveillance.” The result is a genuine Catch-22. A client who reports anxiety, a fear of crowds, and
to undermine the client’s credibility. Even a professional who must maintain an active online presence to keep a business viable faces the same problem: the image of competence projected online can be used to contradict the injury documented in the litigation.
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diagnosis is not required to establish that a mental injury has occurred. “Don’t overlook the fact that there’s no immediate psychiatric diagnosis of a client and think that maybe there isn’t a psychological injury,” he says, noting that lawyers should use every tool available. For example, a client injured in a motor vehicle accident who has access to accident benefits should also use those funds for psychological therapy, social work, and family counselling. Burton has found that the benefits extend further than anyone expects: clients who had never sought counselling before discover resources and insights that reach well beyond their immediate recovery. “It’s about rebuilding their lives – taking the individual as we find them and helping them as best we can,” Burton says. “Get to know them, Burton addresses this risk at the outset. He tells clients that a personal injury claim is a significant invasion of privacy, from the disclosure of medical records dating back three years before the accident to the opposing parties combing through Facebook posts. “They must assume and expect that everything they put out there will be available to the other side. Be ready to talk about it,” he says. Burton advises clients to be more selective about what they share on social media and to keep sensitive personal information off public platforms. He’s seen far too many details posted on GoFundMe pages, for example, as well as people describing on family members’ public Facebook walls how their injuries are – or are not – improving. He also stresses the importance of keeping contemporaneous, private notes about how they are genuinely feeling on any given day. “It’s tricky because there’s so much interplay between social media, life, and litigation in these cases,” Burton says. “From
“Don’t overlook the fact that there’s no immediate psychiatric diagnosis of a client and think that maybe there isn’t a psychological injury” Jonathan Burton, Gluckstein Lawyers the outset, we provide our clients with a letter that gives them a real heads-up about social media safety and encourages them to be mindful.”
get to know the whole picture, and include it as part and parcel of their recovery and their case in every situation. Everybody has a mental health component.”
A holistic view
Jonathan Burton joined Gluckstein Lawyers in 2005. He received his bachelor of laws from the University of Western Ontario in June 2006 and returned to the firm to complete his articles. Following his call to the Ontario bar in June 2007, he assumed his current position as a senior litigation lawyer. Burton restricts his practice to insurance litigation, including personal injury, disability matters, occupiers’ liability, medical malpractice, and product liability.
What an accident does to a person is never merely physical. The law, practised well, should account for all of it. The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Saadati confirms a principle Burton believes every personal injury lawyer should bring to each file: a formal psychiatric or psychological
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FEATURE
CROSS EXAMINED
FROM SIX-HOUR REVIEWS TO ONE Matthew Peters gives a ground-level account of AI adoption at McCarthy Tétrault – from deal work to hiring to vendor strategy
THE HYPE around artificial intelligence in law is over. What has replaced it is messier, more consequential, and playing out right now inside Canadian law firms – in the drafting work that junior lawyers are no longer doing, in the strategic decisions firms are making about which legal technology vendors to trust, and in the new skills that managing partners are looking for when they hire. In a wide-ranging conversation with Canadian Lawyer, Matthew Peters, partner and national leader of transformation at McCarthy Tétrault LLP, gives an insider’s account of what AI adoption actually looks like on the ground at one of Canada’s largest firms. His overall picture is unambiguous: change is no longer theoretical. “This is no longer something coming; this is now here,” Peters says. “You really need to lean into it.” When Canadian Lawyer spoke with Peters for a 2017 cover story on AI in the legal profession, he warned firms not to get seduced by the hype and urged a focus on process improvement first. Eight years on, he says that advice has shifted. “I think that now I’d be more careful about using the hype as an excuse not to move quickly,” he says. Lawyers, he notes, are naturally change-resistant – “we have this narrow psych profile that we all fit
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into and hate the idea of anything changing” – and that instinct to wait is no longer a defensible position. The pace of change has made that clear. Peters recently received an email from a lawyer at the firm, who was incredulous about what an AI tool had done during a term sheet review. What would have taken six hours took one. He says he gets an email like that “probably every other day from lawyers at the firm,” describing a near-universal sense of amazement at the tools’ current effectiveness. The gains aren’t limited to speed. Peters also points to the ability to crawl internal data for
framework early – human-in-the-loop, security protocols, training requirements – and has since built its approach around workflows rather than tools. With lawyers in Canada now navigating Co-Counsel, Copilot, Legora, and Claude, among others, Peters says coherence matters. “You just have to understand and hang on to the workflow. Our job is to tell you the best tool for the best part, best prompts, best data,” he says. That includes prompting partners to ask questions they wouldn’t have thought to ask before: How was this work product generated? Were the relevant cases actually loaded? Was the output verified?
“You just have to understand and hang on to the workflow. Our job is to tell you the best tool for the best part, best prompts, best data” market-position insights into deal terms and to run a quick quality check on work product before it leaves the firm, which can be helpful even if it improves the output only incrementally. The response at McCarthy Tétrault has been deliberate. The firm established a policy
That discipline extends to how the firm thinks about building versus buying. Peters is frank that jumping into tools without understanding their technical limits is a fast route to underperformance. His advice to other firms: ensure someone on the team is technically literate enough to know where
PROFILE Name: Matthew Peters Current position: National leader, transformation at McCarthy Tétrault Key Dates: » 1994: Graduated from the University of Victoria Faculty of Law » 1994: Joined McCarthy Tétrault as an articling student » 2001: Became a partner at McCarthy Tétrault » 2010: Named regional managing partner, Vancouver; received Lexpert Rising Stars: Leading Lawyers Under 40 award » 2016: Named national innovation leader at McCarthy Tétrault » 2019: Recognized as a Change Agent in Law at the Lexpert Zenith Awards; named one of Canada’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers (Business category) » 2025: Named national leader, transformation at McCarthy Tétrault
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FEATURE
CROSS EXAMINED
the off-the-shelf platforms end and where custom configuration begins. Python scripts, tailored workflows, for example, can push further. “So, in our workflow we’re actually going to [use] some, for lack of a better term, custom or differently configured ways to go beyond those limits.” That thinking is visible in MT❯Forge, the firm’s recently launched alternative legal service provider division, led by Toronto-based partner Sahil Zaman. Rather than applying AI as a catch-all solution, MT❯Forge is built around repeatable, high-volume transactional work – fund formation, lending transactions, acquisition agreements – where playbooks built from
competitors tomorrow – and he urges firms to engage them directly on strategic direction, scrutinize contract terms, and talk regularly to peer firms. That kind of cross-firm collaboration, he says, is already happening at the North American and global level. Those same ground-level pressures are reshaping what firms expect from new lawyers, and McCarthy Tétrault is acting on that directly. The firm is co-developing a new course with Western University’s Faculty of Law – AI-Enabled Corporate Practice: Business Law in Action – launching in the 2027 winter term, that will put students through simulated
“We’ve already heard narratives of some of these larger [legal tech] companies proposing that you can skip the law firms completely” the firm’s own expertise are combined with AI tools and contract lawyers to deliver speed, consistency, and cost predictability. Peters is candid that some of that work is replacing what the McCarthy teams currently handle. “We would rather essentially tackle that ourselves and do that first with clients,” he says. The competitive landscape is also shifting in ways that demand attention. Peters is careful not to name vendors, but his point is clear: law firms need to understand which technology partners are genuinely aligned with them and which are quietly positioning to compete. “We’ve already heard narratives of some of these larger companies proposing that you can skip the law firms completely,” he says. Those vendors are frenemies at best – useful partners today, potential
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transactions and AI-assisted drafting exercises before they set foot in a firm. The driver is straightforward: the lower-level drafting work that has traditionally taught junior lawyers their craft is being absorbed by AI, and the apprenticeship model is fraying as a result. Peters makes a concrete prediction on where this all lands. Within three years – not five – the gap between firms that have fully integrated AI and those that haven’t will be visible to clients and to the talent market alike. The firms that have done it right will be more human, not less: lawyers focused on judgment and client relationships, freed from administrative drag. “The firms that have … resisted it,” he says, “are not going to be able to compete from a value perspective with clients … and quite frankly for talent.”
CANADIAN LEGAL SUMMIT Matthew Peters will appear at the Canadian Legal Summit on a panel titled “The Key Elements of Winning GC–Law Firm Partnerships,” examining the following topics: The practical factors that strengthen and sustain high-performing GC–law firm relationships How firms can better align with client expectations on value, service, and strategic insight What differentiates firms that consistently retain and grow mandates How cross-border complexity is shaping stronger, more integrated partnerships Visit canadianlawyermag.com/ events for more information on the summit.
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UPFRONT
OPINION
The new unit of excellence When every firm has deployed AI, differentiation will come from capturing what people and technology produce together
IN A FEW years, every major law firm will have deployed roughly the same AI stack. AI capability will no longer differentiate, and the current conversation about which firms are ahead in AI will feel dated. What will separate firms is what they build around what they bought. AI equalizes access to capability. Every major firm can buy the same tools, so AI-assisted execution will soon be roughly equivalent across the market. But equal access does not produce equal outcomes. What people do with that access varies enormously, and AI makes those variations consequential. In an era of equalized tools, the differences in how people use them become the source of advantage. I have previously argued that judgment is the new differentiator in the AI era, but we have not defined what judgment entails. The individual-level answer is the tacit work of a senior lawyer: the reads and situational awareness, the compression of information, the trust built across years. But individual excellence is now inseparable from how the individual works with AI. The way a senior lawyer works with AI produces something that is neither purely human nor purely technological. It is a combined offering. Their reads, judgment, and framing of the problem are one input; AI’s pattern recognition, recall, and drafting are another. The way an experienced lawyer weaves those inputs together, iteratively refined across numerous matters, becomes a human−AI collaboration model that produces outcomes neither the lawyer nor the AI alone could produce.
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I see this in my work. AI produces a first pass of a commercial framework. What moves a deal, though, isn’t the draft but the decisions, informed by experience and tacit knowledge, about which clauses to reject, which to reframe, and how to compress the whole thing into three sentences the business sponsor could act on. And this iterative AI−human collaboration can become a firm’s most valuable asset. Which raises an important question. What happens to that combined offering when a lawyer leaves? In the “pre-AI” era, the loss of a senior partner meant losing a book of business. In this one, it means losing a collabo-
nology but the institutional discipline that made the knowledge capturable in the first place. Taxonomies, debrief practices, and the cultural expectation that partners contribute what they learned as a professional norm. The equivalent for law firms is a proprietary institutional memory of the firm’s own human−AI collaboration work. Concretely, every significant matter produces a captured record of how the lawyer reasoned through it with AI, what they used AI for, where they overrode the model, and what they learned, structured so it accumulates. A mid-level lawyer working on a novel problem can query it and pull not just precedents but also the compressed collaborative thinking of the partners they aspire to become. This cannot be replicated by buying tools. The library of a firm’s own compounded collaboration practice is the differentiator. This is the graduation of knowledge management for the AI era. It also forces a structural change. Senior partners have long been incentivized to keep expertise proprietary because their books of business depended on it. Asking them to contribute their collaboration patterns to a firm-wide repository requires a change to partnership economics. Possibly, a model that ties compensation to contribution, not just origination.
The way a senior lawyer works with AI produces something that is neither purely human nor purely technological ration model that takes significant time and trial and error to build and cannot be replicated unless captured through a process. Systems for capturing expertise were built for the previous era, when a document or precedent sufficed. What needs to be captured now is not just what a lawyer produced but also how they thought through the work. Elite consulting firms have figured this out. A junior consultant working on a problem can retrieve the compressed thinking of anyone in the firm who has worked on something similar – contextual knowledge that grows as new engagements yield new insights. What made this possible wasn’t the tech-
Firms and legal departments that start to think this way will build something structurally powerful and sustainable. AI-amplified individual talent is not the final unit of excellence. The final unit is the combined human− AI offering that is proactively refined by the most talented individuals, captured by the firm at scale, and made available to everyone. The firms that build this now will lead institutional excellence in the next era. Jonathan Leibtag is assistant general counsel at Microsoft, leading lawyers across the Americas on commercial cloud, AI, and digital transformation deals. He previously practised M&A at a Toronto law firm.
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SPECIAL REPORT
Top 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL
LAWYERS 2026
From constitutional rulings to firm-wide AI rollouts, these influential lawyers are taking Canada’s legal system forward
CONTENTS
PAGE
Feature article............................................................ 18 Methodology ............................................................. 19 Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers 2026 ................... 38
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SPECIAL REPORT
TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS 2026
BUILDING THE FUTURE OF CANADIAN LAW A MANAGING PARTNER rebuilt her firm’s compensation system around who actually mentors the next generation. A lawyer funded a disability-rights program himself rather than wait years for a grant. A litigator turned a coroner’s review into provincial law. A firm became the first in Canada to put AI in front of every lawyer it employs. An immigration lawyer fought the same case in two courts at once – one judicial, one public. None of them waited for the profession to catch up. Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada honours the 25 people
building what the profession needs before anyone asks them to: new departments, new compensation models, new legislation, new technology. Artificial intelligence runs through part of this year’s list, adoption has more than doubled in 12 months, and it’s forcing hard questions about what a lawyer is actually for, but it’s one current among several, not the whole story. Now in its 17th year, Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers, sponsored by Thomson Reuters, were selected across five categories. The names change every year, but the pattern doesn’t. Last year’s roster shows the throughline that connects both editions.
Business
SEVEN NUMBERS BEHIND THIS YEAR’S TOP 25 17,862
#1
7
69%
61%
5
reader votes helped select this year’s 25 winners from 121 qualifying nominees in the report’s 17th annual edition
cities are represented across the list, though more than half of winners cluster in Toronto alone
of Canadians trust the courts, and that trust is being tested by major rulings still under appeal or reserve
0
winners were chosen for title or seniority alone; influence this year belongs to those building new structures from nothing
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As Hilary Young, PhD, professor and acting associate dean at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) Faculty of Law, puts it, today’s legal leaders have to find ways to work efficiently without closing off the path future leaders need to develop the same skills and knowledge. That balance, using new tools without hollowing out the profession’s future, runs through every category on this year’s list. This year’s winners cluster in seven cities, and Toronto alone accounts for more than half the list, weighted heavily toward human rights and in-house leadership. The other three categories spread out from there.
theme this year is artificial intelligence, touching ethics, bias research, policy, and contract automation alike
of legal professionals now report personal use of generative AI, more than double last year’s adoption rate
categories define this year’s list, from litigation and policy to in-house leadership and firm governance
This year’s business honourees are steering Canada through a period of real market pressure. Martha Harrison and Raj Juneja, both at McCarthy Tétrault in Toronto, are carrying the trade law and tax files that matter most as Canada-US trade tension reshapes crossborder deal-making. In Montreal, Shahir Guindi at Osler and Claudia Desjardins Bélisle at Miller Thomson LLP are anchoring the country’s two largest deal markets outside Toronto, while Yola Ventresca in London, ON, shows that business influence increasingly means firm governance, not just billable transactions. Her overhaul of Lerners’ advancement and mentorship structures is as much a business story as a changemaker one.
Ian Hull, LSM, partner at Hull & Hull LLP and a judge for this year’s list, points to client service as the clearest throughline among the business nominees, treated as a leadership priority rather than an afterthought.
Changemakers The changemaker category spans the widest range of practice areas of any group this year. Patrick Brown has spent decades turning road deaths into legislation. Brendon Pooran built a national pro bono model for disability rights from a single Toronto firm. Yameena Ansari is fighting what may be the first transgender American asylum case in Canadian history from her Calgary practice. Amy Salyzyn and Paul Saunders round out the group from opposite ends of the profession, one shaping how courts think about AI and legal ethics from academia, the other rebuilding how a full-service firm delivers legal work in the first place.
Government, non-profits, associations, and judiciary This is the only category with a truly national footprint as Ottawa, Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver are all represented. Colin Feasby’s Alberta Court of King’s Bench ruling on the province’s separation referendum was one of the most consequential constitutional decisions of the year. Michael Tulloch continues pushing Ontario’s courts toward greater public access, while Richard Wagner’s tenure as chief justice of Canada keeps returning to a single theme, judicial independence, as political pressure on the courts intensifies.
Human rights, advocacy, and criminal Toronto anchors this category, though not exclusively. Gideon Christian’s AI bias research is based out of Calgary, but the subject matter varies sharply even among the Toronto-based winners. Elizabeth
Bowker’s work defends institutions in class actions brought by vulnerable populations, a notably different kind of influence than the rest of the category, which leans toward advocacy for the vulnerable, not institutions responsible for them. Gideon Christian’s research into AI bias against Black communities, Michael Rosenberg’s Charter advocacy on behalf of marginalized groups, Muneeza Sheikh’s employment and human rights practice, and Stephanie Willsey’s Indigenous rights litigation each push on a different fault line in Canadian law. Hull also singled out a distinctly Canadiancentred approach among this year’s human rights nominees: work with global relevance but a sustained focus on Canadian communities and context.
In-house Every in-house winner this year is solving the same underlying problem, building serious legal infrastructure inside organizations that historically ran without it. Farah Ismail built SE Health’s first legal department from nothing. Arun Krishnamurti, Christine Chen, Lorne O’Reilly, and Rustam Juma are doing similar work at Google Canada, University Pension Plan Ontario, Dow Chemical, and Volkswagen, each translating legal expertise into operational, ESG, and AI governance strategy at the centre of some of the country’s largest institutions.
AI adoption, judicial trust, and in-house growth define 2026 Artificial intelligence is no longer a side conversation in Canadian law; it’s the dominant one. Generative AI adoption among legal professionals has more than doubled in the past year, with 69 percent of legal professionals now reporting personal use of AI tools. Thomson Reuters’ latest research shows a similar acceleration at the institutional level,
METHODOLOGY Canadian Lawyer’s 17th annual Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers called for nominations between March 13 and April 17 from legal groups, readers, and our panel of writers and editors. Qualifying nominees were then included in a reader survey in the following areas: changemakers; human rights, advocacy, and criminal law; business; in-house; and government, non-profits, associations, and judiciary. Based on the reader survey results, a short list of nominees was then sent to our Editorial Board members to vote for a maximum of five winners in each category. Board members who are on the shortlist are excluded from voting in that category. The board was asked to select winners who had most significantly influenced the legal system over the last 18 months. The Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada report is sponsored by Thomson Reuters.
451 submissions
121 nominees
17,862 votes
with 41 percent of law firms and 47 percent of corporate legal departments now using generative AI, up from 28 percent and 23 percent, respectively, in 2025. In-house adoption has moved even faster, according to the ACC/Everlaw GenAI Survey,
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TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS 2026
REPORT HIGHLIGHTS: AI USE IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION AI use among Canadian legal professionals has doubled in a year - and it’s reshaping who holds influence The data points behind this year’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada
69%
of Canadian legal professionals now report personal use of Al tools – more than double the rate recorded a year ago Source: Thomson Reuters, 2026 research on generative Al adoption
Institutional adoption is accelerating, 2025
2026
Law firms using generative Al
+13 pts
28%
2025
41%
2026
Corporate legal departments using generative Al
+24 pts
23%
2025
47%
2026
Source: Thomson Reuters, 2026 research on generative Al adoption
In-house legal teams reporting GenAl use
+29 pts
23%
2025
52%
2026
Source: ACC/Everlaw GenAl Survey (a separate survey population from the Thomson Reuters figures above)
43%
HIGHEST SURVEYED
Who Canadians trust
of Canadian legal professionals say Al tools deliver the greatest impact on firm profitability - the highest share of any market surveyed
Courts
Source: LEAP Legal Software, 2026 Profitability in Law report (700 professionals, six countries)
more than doubling in a single year from 23 percent to 52 percent, a pace legal tech leaders say has outpaced expectations among in-house legal teams. Canada is keeping pace with, and in some respects outpacing, this global shift. LEAP Legal Software’s Profitability in Law report for 2026, based on a survey of 700 legal professionals across six countries, found that 43 percent of Canadian legal professionals say legal-specific AI tools are delivering the greatest impact on their firm’s profitability, the highest proportion of any market surveyed. That statistic sits directly behind this year’s list, as five winners work on AI ethics, bias research,
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Political parties
61% 37%
A 24-point trust gap now being tested by this year’s constitutional rulings Source: OECD, 2026 Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions for Canada
policy, or contract automation as a core part of their practice. Institutional trust in the judiciary forms a second major current running through this year’s honourees. According to the OECD’s 2026 Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions for Canada, 61 percent of Canadians say they trust the courts, compared with just 37 percent who trust political parties. A separate Angus Reid Institute poll found 62 percent of Canadians believe the Supreme Court is impartial, and 65 percent believe law carries more weight than politics in the court’s decisions. That relative trust is being tested directly this year. Alberta Court
of King’s Bench Justice Colin Feasby’s rulings on the province’s separation referendum, and the Supreme Court’s pending decision on Quebec’s Bill 21, are both forcing the country’s courts to define the outer limits of constitutional and treaty law under intense public scrutiny. A third shift is playing out inside organizations, not courtrooms. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2026 Chief Legal Officer Survey found that 84 percent of chief legal officers now report directly to the CEO, a marked change in how companies structure legal authority. The shift tracks closely with how AI is reshaping day-to-day law firm operations, which is pulling legal further into core business decisions. Closer to home, the 2026 Canadian In-House Counsel Report from CBA In-House Lawyers and Mondaq, drawing on nearly 500 responses from in-house lawyers across the country, found that legal departments are absorbing rising workloads and broader non-legal responsibilities without corresponding increases in staffing or support. This year’s in-house winners stand out for building legal infrastructure from the ground up instead of simply managing an existing one.
What’s next for AI governance and judicial independence in Canada Several of the year’s defining legal matters remain unresolved, and each is likely to shape the profession for years past this report’s publication. The fight over Alberta’s separation referendum is now before the Alberta Court of Appeal, where Justice Alice Woolley has already signalled discomfort with aspects of the lower court’s reasoning during arguments over a potential stay. The Court of Appeal has since allowed the underlying petition process to move forward, though only after addressing what it called serious legal issues. Whatever the eventual outcome, the case has already established
To p 2 5 M o s t I n f l u e n t i a l L a w y e r s
Congratulations, Patrick Brown For over three decades, Patrick Brown has dedicated his career to fighting for those injured through no fault of their own. At McLeish Orlando LLP, he has secured landmark victories in catastrophic injury cases, holding powerful institutions accountable and reshaping how Ontario courts approach the rights of injured Canadians. Beyond the courtroom, Patrick has been a leading advocate for road safety, working to advance protections for cyclists, pedestrians and other vulnerable road users across Ontario. McLeish Orlando LLP is proud to congratulate Patrick on being named one of Canadian Lawyer's Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers — Changemaker Category.
SPECIAL REPORT
TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS 2026
that Indigenous treaty rights function as a binding constitutional limit on provincial secession efforts, a precedent Feasby’s original ruling put in place and that now works its way through appellate review. The Supreme Court’s decision on Quebec’s Bill 21 carries similar weight. The Supreme Court of Canada’s official case docket for English Montreal School Board v. Attorney General of Quebec confirms the four-day hearing concluded in March 2026, and the ruling remains under reserve. Legal observers have described Chief Justice Wagner’s handling of the case as a test of his ability to hold together a court navigating one of the most politically charged constitutional questions in a generation, whether the notwithstanding clause can insulate legislation entirely from judicial review, or whether some outer limit still applies. AI governance shows no sign of slowing. Statistics Canada’s second-quarter 2026 analysis of AI use by businesses reports that AI adoption across Canadian businesses has tripled since the second quarter of 2024, and professional services firms are adopting faster than the economy-wide average. With legal ethics scholarship, bias research, and contract automation now converging on the same set of problems inside this year’s list, next year’s report may need to treat AI governance as a practice area in its own right, not just a theme running through several categories. Finally, in-house legal departments are likely to keep absorbing responsibilities that once sat with outside counsel or other parts of the business. The CBA/Mondaq report found this shift is most pronounced in public companies and government organizations, where complexity and accountability continue to intensify, a trend this year’s in-house winners are already living out inside healthcare, pension management, and manufacturing.
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What some of 2026’s most influential lawyers are up to BUSINESS
Yola Ventresca WHEN CULTURE BECOMES THE BUSINESS CASE Managing partner, Lerners LLP, London, ON Yola Ventresca is managing partner at Lerners LLP in London, ON, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Business category. Her nomination could just as easily belong among the changemakers, and that overlap isn’t a coincidence. It’s the reason she made this list. Ventresca has spent her tenure as managing partner treating culture, mentorship, and advancement as business infrastructure, not a separate, softer conversation happening alongside the firm’s actual work, precisely the kind of structural thinking reshaping how influence gets defined across this year’s list. Built the case before she built the policy Ventresca was elected managing partner of Lerners LLP’s London office in 2021 and took up the role on January 1, 2022, becoming the first racialized woman, the first woman with young children, and the youngest person in the firm’s history to hold the position. She inherited a compensation system rooted, like most firms’, in billable hours and financial metrics alone. She championed a restructuring that the executive committee embraced, tying rewards for culture-building directly to profitability, client retention, and recruitment as part of the bottom line.
That reframing extended to how the firm measures its own results. Ninety-four percent of associates eligible for advancement to non-equity partner, the step that falls under her direct authority as managing partner, moved up during her tenure. The equity partnership decision that follows sits with the partnership as a whole, a distinction Ventresca is precise about. She also personally sponsored two women lawyers through the equity partnership process, both successfully. “It wasn’t hard,” she says. “They kind of came to me ready made.” Understated as that sounds, it draws a sharp line between mentorship, which offers advice, and sponsorship, which changes careers. Independence has two different meanings Ventresca’s practice outside firm leadership has tested her thinking on independence from two directions. As lead counsel for a faculty association that successfully challenged a university’s unilateral restructuring decision, and separately as an investigator retained to examine allegations of sexual assault involving leadership, she has come to see independence less as a matter of resisting outside pressure and more as a discipline of recognizing her own bias, then setting it aside to follow the evidence. Welcoming dissent by design That comfort with scrutiny carries into how she runs a room. Ventresca says she wants people around her who see things differently, not people who fall in line. “If you think I’m wrong and you don’t tell me that, to me that’s like sending me off a cliff,” she says. “You need to be able to tell me, ‘We disagree with you.’”
Building the pipeline she didn’t have Ventresca is candid about where the Embrace Equity Summit came from. “I came out of the public school system, and I hadn’t had anyone in my family who was a lawyer before me,” she says. “I didn’t have the blueprint or the language for it.” That gap is why she helped conceive the Embrace Equity Summit, a program that has reached more than 500 female-identifying students before university, framed around imposter syndrome and the possibility of a career they might not have pictured for themselves.
She’s candid about how much work remains, too. “We’ve done a lot of good with women in the law generally,” she says, “not well with individuals from equity-deserving groups, especially at the partnership level.” It’s a rare moment where a winner profiled for her own success points just as directly at where the profession still falls short. What she’d tell another managing partner Asked what she’d change first if another leader wanted to replicate her approach,
Ventresca points to decision-making itself – getting the empirical evidence on what your people are experiencing before making structural decisions, then acting on what you hear. She still remembers how disorienting that responsibility felt on day one. “I feel terrified. I’m responsible for all of you now, and how can I know what to do for you if I don’t know what your lived experience here is like?” she says. Failing to act on what you hear, she says, breaks the trust that made people speak up in the first place.
CHANGEMAKER. Paul Saunders is helping law firms prepare for the AI era through strategic leadership, innovation, and organizational transformation. His work has shaped how leaders think about strategy, compensation, data, technology, change, and long-term resilience. That vision continues through The Fortified Firm, a new advisory venture focused on helping law firms build lasting capabilities in the age of AI, enabling adoption and transformation with confidence. thefortifiedfirm.com | stewartmckelvey.com
Learn more about The Fortified Firm.
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SPECIAL REPORT
TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS 2026
IN PRAISE OF THE TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS
Amy Salyzyn University of Ottawa · Changemakers
“A leader in the global dialogue on legal ethics and AI, and a truly great colleague to boot.” Arun Krishnamurti Google Canada · In-house
“Such a pleasure to work with, always available to help and provide sound, businessfriendly advice.” Brendon Pooran PooranLaw · Changemakers
“A real champion for the challenged, an articulate advocate and an incredible human being.” Christine Chen University Pension Plan Ontario · In-house
“An exceptional role model in the legal industry. I feel very fortunate to be part of her team.” Claudia Desjardins Bélisle Miller Thomson · Business
“A force. She has accomplished more than most do over the course of their entire careers.” Elizabeth Bowker Stieber Berlach LLP · Human rights, advocacy & criminal
“Has set the gold standard for excellence across Canada’s legal landscape.” Farah Ismail SE Health · In-house
“A visionary. Bringing to life a whole department is no small feat, and she did so graciously.” Gideon Christian University of Calgary · Human rights, advocacy & criminal
“A trailblazer in the intersection of law and artificial intelligence.” Honourable Niki Sharma Deputy Premier and Attorney General of BC · Government, non-profits, associations & judiciary
“A leader in equity-driven law reform.” Justice Colin C.J. Feasby Alberta Court of King’s Bench · Government, non-profits, associations & judiciary
“Has quickly become one of Canada’s most closely watched public law judges” Justice Michael Tulloch Court of Appeal for Ontario · Government, non-profits, associations & judiciary
“He’s a caring, balanced, wise, thoughtful person.” Lorne O’Reilly, KC Dow Chemical Canada · In-house “Known for delivering tactical and innovative solutions that reduce liability while advancing business objectives.” Martha Harrison McCarthy Tétrault LLP · Business
“An inspiration and one of the biggest names in trade law in Canada.”
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Q&A with Yola Ventresca Lerners LLP, London, ON Q: What did the compensation and advancement structure look like before you revised it, and what specifically changed? A: Like most firms, our associate compensation, the base and the bonus program, was rooted firmly in traditional financial metrics: hours worked and numbers hit. I wanted to make sure the people doing the hard work of building our culture were rewarded for it, because that work isn’t just a nice-tohave. It drives profitability, client attraction and retention, and associate retention and recruitment. So, the new structure allows that kind of work to be valued and rewarded alongside the traditional metrics. Q: You were retained to investigate allegations of sexual assault involving leadership. What does independence require in a situation like that, and how do you protect it? A: I think about independence very differently depending on the mandate. As a workplace investigator, my role is to follow the evidence, not to serve the interests of the institution that provided me with the mandate. That distinction is essential. There’s an impulse to want to do right by the institution that retained you, and every investigator has to resist that and let the evidence lead. But the bigger challenge is independence from your own bias. The first step is recognizing you have it, then making sure you’ve been trained to set it aside and truly listen to the whole person giving evidence in front of you. Q: What resistance did you meet when you tried to formalize mentorship and revise advancement structures? A: I wouldn’t call it resistance so much as principled debate, and I don’t experience a different perspective as an attack on my leadership. The obvious question anywhere is what this does to the bottom line. That forced me to make the connection explicit, that culture and retention aren’t a minus against
“Having people around you who think very differently from you, that’s something on which your ideas become much more crisp and clear and sharp, because there are people who push you, and I’m lucky to have them” Yola Ventresca, Lerners LLP the business, they boost it. The partnership put me in this role knowing exactly where I stood on these issues, so the debates we had were principled ones, and the results, associate retention and engagement, have spoken for themselves. Q: If another managing partner wanted to replicate what you’ve done at Lerners, what’s the one structural change you’d tell them to make first? A: Flip the decision-making tree. If decisions are being made purely top-down, you need to get the real evidence of what your people are experiencing first. I did a lot of listening sessions early on, and if you ask people for feedback, you have to be prepared to act on it. If you listen and don’t act, you break the trust that got them to confide in you in the first place.
CHANGEMAKERS
Brendon Pooran INVESTING IN THE DECISION NO ONE ELSE WOULD FUND Founder and managing partner, PooranLaw, Toronto, ON Brendon Pooran, founder and managing partner at PooranLaw in Toronto, is named
one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Changemakers category. He founded the firm as a multidisciplinary practice serving individuals, families, and not-for-profit organizations in the disability and human services sectors across Canada. Canadian Lawyer named PooranLaw one of the country’s top 10 pro bono firms, a distinction tied directly to the I Decide Law Program. The program was founded by nowpartner Stephanie Dickson at a legal aid clinic in Windsor to promote decision-making rights and individualized planning for people with intellectual disabilities living below the poverty line. When it lost its funding, PooranLaw adopted the program, designed and funded a second iteration, and brought Dickson on board to lead it. It remains the only program of its kind in Canada, funded entirely by PooranLaw and sustained through a social enterprise model built to remain financially resilient while prioritizing community benefit. Betting on it himself Pooran didn’t wait for outside funding to offer the program. Rather than pursue outside grants or partners, he decided the firm would fund the I Decide Law Program itself, betting that acting immediately mattered more than waiting years for outside money while people
remained excluded from decisions about their own lives. Funding it independently gave the firm room to build around the people it serves, not a funder’s priorities, and to adjust course as it learned. For Pooran, that wasn’t a business calculation. It was a values one. Redefining what capacity means Pooran’s influence reaches into national policy through his work developing a Canadian standard on legal capacity, a framework meant to support legal and supported decision-making over substitute decision-making. He argues the shift that matters most is definitional, moving law away from treating capacity as a diagnosis and toward recognizing the support people need to make and communicate their own decisions. He serves as course director at York University, teaching critical disability law to future lawyers, advocates, and policy makers, and has been appointed to the board of Accessibility Standards Canada. Policy work that reaches into daily life Pooran has advocated alongside financial institutions for more accessible banking policies for people with intellectual disabilities, and pushed for the elimination of barriers to accessing the Registered Disability Savings Plan and the Canada Disability Benefit. He points to the binary thinking baked into most systems – either a person decides independently or someone else decides for them – as the real obstacle. He advocates for laws and policies which recognize some people rely on supports and accommodations when dealing with other parties, such as financial and government. Recognition and reach Pooran received the 2025 Empowered Kids Ontario Tribute Award for Service and will be honoured at Corbrook’s Awakening Abilities
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SPECIAL REPORT
TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS 2026
REPORT HIGHLIGHTS: THE TOP 25 ACROSS CANADA Toronto is home to more than half of this year’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada Category breakdown by city for the 2026 winners Business
Changemakers
Human rights, advocacy & criminal
Toronto
2
Government, non-profits, associations & judiciary In-house
2
4
4
Calgary
4 2
Ottawa Montreal
13
3
2
2
London
1
Halifax
1
Vancouver
1
Winners cluster in seven cities. Toronto alone accounts for 13 of the 25 winners (52%), weighted heavily toward human rights, advocacy & criminal, and in-house categories. The other three categories are spread across the remaining six cities.
75th anniversary gala this November. Over the past 18 months, he has led disabilityrelated planning sessions for more than 100 organizations, including the Ontario Bar Association, and served as one of 12 expert advisors on the Canada Revenue Agency’s Disability Advisory Committee. What he’d tell another firm Asked what another firm would need to get right to build something similar, Pooran doesn’t hesitate. For him, it starts with the right people, including Cheryl Wiles Pooran, his partner in life and work, with whom he has shared the vision and journey of building the firm.
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Q&A with Brendon Pooran PooranLaw, Toronto, ON Q: What made you decide to fully fund the I Decide Law Program yourself, instead of seeking outside funding for it? A: If you truly believe in an idea, sometimes you have to be willing to invest in it yourself. We knew there was a gap in access to legal services for people with intellectual disabilities, but we also knew that waiting for funding could mean waiting years while people continue to be excluded from decisions affecting their own lives. By funding the program ourselves, we had the freedom to build it around the needs of the people we serve, rather than the
priorities of a funder. It allowed us to innovate, to learn, and to refine the model quickly. For us, it wasn’t a business decision. It was a values decision. Our firm has spent years advocating for disability rights, and this was simply the next step in ensuring those rights are meaningful in practice. Q: What would you change first for people with intellectual disabilities if your legal capacity standard becomes national policy? A: If we were able to impact legal capacity laws in the various provinces, and even at a federal level, the biggest change would be a shift in how people are treated. Too often, people with intellectual disabilities are defined by what they can’t do, instead of what they can do with the appropriate supports. Law reform would recognize that legal capacity isn’t about a diagnosis. It’s about providing the support people need to make and communicate their own decisions. In practical terms, it’s a shift from making decisions for people to supporting them to make their own decisions. That’s what true autonomy looks like. Q: In your experience, what’s the biggest barrier you run into trying to make banking and disability benefits more accessible? A: The challenge is changing systems that were designed around a binary choice, that being either a person can make decisions independently, or someone else steps in to make a decision for them. There is another path, and that is supporting people to make their own decisions, and that’s what our laws and institutions need to embrace. So many people make decisions with support from trusted family members, friends, and professionals. That’s true for all of us. But our legal systems often don’t recognize supported decision-making very well. Q: If another firm wanted to build something like the I Decide Law Program, what would you tell them is essential to get right? A: I’d say there are three things. First, solve a real problem with the right people,
“Solve a real problem with the right people. Think like an innovator, not a charity. And measure impact, not effort. If people leave with greater confidence, greater autonomy, and greater control over the decisions that affect their own lives, then we’ve built something that truly matters” Brendon Pooran, Pooran Law
build a team that’s united by shared values and a commitment to filling a genuine gap in access to justice. Second, think like an innovator, not a charity, design a model that can change how legal services are delivered. And third, measure impact, not effort. For us, if people leave with greater confidence, greater autonomy, and greater control over the decisions that affect their own lives, then we’ve built something that truly matters.
Patrick Brown TURNING TRAGEDY INTO TRAFFIC LAW Principal partner, McLeish Orlando LLP, Toronto, ON Patrick Brown is principal partner at McLeish Orlando LLP in Toronto and one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers for 2026 in the Changemakers category. He has spent decades at the front of Ontario’s plaintiffs’ bar, serving as past president of the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association and
chairing the Ontario Bar Association’s insurance law section. But it’s his work outside the courtroom that colleagues across the profession point to most often. Injury prevention researchers, road safety advocates, and legal educators alike describe him as someone who treats advocacy as unfinished until it shows up in policy, not just in judgments. From coroner’s review to provincial law Brown served as counsel for a year on Ontario’s most extensive coroner’s review into cycling deaths, work he still walks through in granular detail. The review produced 14 recommendations, several of which reached the statute books directly. “They passed the one-metre law, became a law under the Highway Traffic Act, that anybody passing a cyclist has to give one metre, and if you don’t, it’s against the law,” Brown says. The Ministry of Transportation updated its driver’s handbooks, Ontario’s cycling strategy followed, and municipalities began adopting complete streets guidelines that reshaped bike and pedestrian infrastructure across the province.
British Columbia and Quebec later passed their own one-metre laws. The review’s findings have since resurfaced as evidence in the section 7 Charter challenge to Bill 212, the case testing the province’s move to remove bike lanes in Toronto. A decade of bills that keep dying Not everything has landed. Brown has drafted the same vulnerable road user bill five times over 10 years, and it has failed five times. The government eventually folded a version into careless driving law as an aggravating factor at sentencing, a change Brown says lacks real teeth. He points to a case where a driver who killed a cyclist received a $75 fine as the kind of outcome the bill was built to prevent. Getting it passed, he says, requires a broader cultural shift, one where road violence stops being treated as an acceptable cost of moving people quickly through cities. Training the next generation of litigators For more than a decade, Brown has served as the civil law subject matter expert for the Law Practice Program, shaping training that reaches hundreds of new lawyers each year through mock files, live-actor examinations, and hands-on discovery exercises. He built the program the way he wished his own articling experience had worked, practical instead of left to chance, and points to mentorship as the piece no training video can fully replace. The fight that isn’t finished Brown’s litigation has already reshaped policy more than once: a daycare death that led to new Ontario childcare legislation, a ski hill injury that produced new safety protocols for terrain parks, a boating death that changed compensation limits under maritime law. Still, he returns to one unresolved goal, reducing road violence broadly, through the vulnerable road user law that
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MORE PRAISE FOR THE TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS
Michael Geist University of Ottawa · Government, non-profits, associations & judiciary
“Undisputed leader in tech law, thought leader and important advocate in equity matters.”
hasn’t passed and through CRASH, the coalition he helped launch to confront the danger oversized pickups and SUVs pose to pedestrians and cyclists. Brown doesn’t expect a perfect outcome, only sustained effort from everyone with a hand in it.
Michael Rosenberg McCarthy Tétrault LLP · Human rights, advocacy & criminal
“His brave and ambitious advocacy on behalf of marginalized groups is pushing the Charter in new directions.” Muneeza Sheikh Muneeza Sheikh Employment and Human Rights · Human rights, advocacy & criminal
“Muneeza is changing the face of human rights in Canada.” Patrick Brown McLeish Orlando LLP · Changemakers
“Patrick’s tireless advocacy for vulnerable road users will never be forgotten.” Paul Saunders Stewart McKelvey · Changemakers
“To use the hockey expression, he is skating to where the puck is going.” Raj Juneja McCarthy Tétrault LLP · Business
“An exceptional leader and one of the most brilliant minds I have had the pleasure to meet.” Richard Wagner Chief Justice of Canada · Government, non-profits, associations & judiciary
“A judiciary that is independent, and seen to be independent, benefits all Canadians.” Rustam Juma Volkswagen Group Canada · In-house
“A terrific leader who runs a wonderful, dedicated team at VW.” Shahir Guindi Osler · Business
“One of the most impressive business lawyers I have ever seen” Stephanie Willsey Cochrane Sinclair LLP · Human rights, advocacy & criminal
“Fights with her whole heart for First Nation Canadians.” Yameena Ansari Ansari Immigration Law · Changemakers
“The most courageous, passionate, considerate, and down-to-earth lawyer I have had the privilege of knowing.” Yola Ventresca Lerners LLP · Business
“One of the most fearless leaders I know, never ducking the hard discussions and decisions.”
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What his nominators said Those who nominated Brown described a lawyer whose influence reaches well past his casework, crediting him with sustained commitment to the brain injury community, meaningful collaboration on concussion research and injury prevention, and a training program that has shaped hundreds of new litigators annually for over a decade. Several credited his coroner’s review work as the evidentiary foundation now underpinning Ontario’s active fight to preserve protected bike lanes, and pointed to his role in helping launch a national coalition against oversized vehicle risk as proof his advocacy keeps expanding instead of settling.
Q&A with Patrick Brown McLeish Orlando LLP, Toronto, ON Q: You served as counsel for a year on the most extensive coroner’s review into cycling deaths in the province’s history, and it led directly to the Bike Plan and the one-metre passing law. Walk me through how a review like that turns into legislation. A: After a full year of comprehensive review, we came out with 14 recommendations, and many were influenced by the groups I represented, like Cycle Toronto and ARC. They passed the one-metre law under the Highway Traffic Act, the Ministry of Transportation updated its driver’s handbooks, and the Ontario government’s cycling strategy followed, which gave rise to the Bike Plan. Municipalities then incorporated complete streets guidelines into how they redesign their cities and towns, including bike lane and pedestrian infrastructure. We
“For 20 years, I have fought in courts, on the streets, at Queen’s Park, City Council ... to reduce road violence” Patrick Brown, McLeish Orlando LLP also recommended side guards on trucks. The government didn’t pass that, but the City of Toronto started redesigning its own fleet to include them. British Columbia and Quebec later passed their own one-metre laws, and the review has since been used as evidence in the Charter challenge over the government’s removal of bike lanes. It’s not perfect, but it moved the needle. Q: What’s the status of the five vulnerable road user bills you’ve drafted, and what would it take to get one across the finish line? A: It’s been five private members’ bills over 10 years. I drafted the first one with a legislative drafter, and it was one of the most comprehensive laws of its kind put together in North America. Each time, it passed first reading and died. The government did fold a version into the careless driving laws as an aggravating factor at sentencing, but it lacks teeth. I’ve seen drivers get $75 fines after killing cyclists, and the community is outraged by that. To get something like this across the finish line requires a much broader shift, a change in culture where we stop treating this kind of road violence as an acceptable
cost of moving people around quickly in cars, and a government that puts people’s safety ahead of treating a driver’s licence as an unconditional right. Q: You’ve shaped the civil litigation training for hundreds of candidates a year for over a decade. What’s one thing new litigators consistently get wrong that your training tries to fix? A: I’m the civil subject matter expert for the Law Practice Program, which trains new lawyers who haven’t done articles. We use real teaching videos, mock case files, and live actors for interviews and examinations, so candidates get a genuine feel for practice rather than rolling the dice on what kind of articling placement they land. I sincerely wish I’d had a program like this when I started. The most important thing for a young lawyer is a sincere desire to practice with as much competence as possible, and the best way to get there is connecting with mentors who’ll guide you, or, failing that, having a program like this one to build your skills from. Q: Looking at everything you’ve built, the coalitions, the legislation, the litigation, what’s the one change you’re still fighting for that hasn’t happened yet? A: I’m a personal injury and wrongful death lawyer, and I’ve made meaningful change through that work directly, cases that led to new Ontario childcare legislation, new safety protocols at ski hills for terrain parks, and changes to compensation limits under maritime law. But for 20 years I’ve fought in courts, on the streets, and at Queen’s Park to reduce road violence, and far too many people are still struck down and hurt on our roadways. I believe it’s preventable. I’m still working with good people through CRASH, the Coalition to Reduce Auto Size Hazards, on the risk oversized pickups and SUVs pose. Many of the coroner’s review recommendations still haven’t been adopted. We’re not
there yet, and I’d like to see that happen. It will never be perfect, but the effort should be there by everybody.
Yameena Ansari FIGHTING IN TWO COURTS AT ONCE Founding lawyer, Ansari Immigration Law, Calgary, AB Yameena Ansari is founding lawyer at Ansari Immigration Law in Calgary, AB, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Changemakers category. She represents Hannah Kreager, a 22-year-old transgender woman from Arizona who fled the United States in spring 2024 fearing persecution under the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies. The case may be the first transgender American asylum application filed in Canada, though Ansari is careful about that distinction. “We always say we believe this is the first transgender American claim, but we don’t know,” she says, since refugee decisions are rarely published. That’s precisely why she chose to fight this one in public. “It was important to me that she was somebody who was very presentable, very passionate, very educated, and she wanted to make this public,” Ansari says. If the claim succeeds, the decision becomes citable, giving other transgender Americans considering asylum something concrete to point to, and giving future adjudicators a public record to draw on instead of facing the question cold. Two courts, one strategy Ansari doesn’t see legal advocacy and public advocacy as separate tracks. She frames
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“I tell my clients there are two courts we’re fighting in: the judicial court and the court of public opinion. You don’t have to win in both, and winning one makes it easier to win the other” Yameena Ansari, Ansari Immigration Law
them as two different courts, the judicial one and the court of public opinion, where a win in either makes the other easier to win. She applies the same logic to her work with the Gaza Family Reunification Project, which she co-founded in November 2023 alongside a small team of colleagues. Sustained public pressure, a national petition, media coverage, open letters, pushed the federal government to expand acceptance numbers and eligibility for Gazans with Canadian family ties. But the win was incomplete: very few Gazans have actually entered Canada under the program, and colleagues from the same organization are now in court fighting to get the government to honour the measures it already agreed to. Why she calls it life or death Ansari resists reducing her work to paper-
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work. On any given day, she’s handling a young man facing deportation after building his entire adult life in Canada, a father from Yemen whose only path forward runs through a country in famine, and transgender clients afraid to even file, unsure whether their claims will be taken seriously. For Ansari, a lawyer who is only filling in forms isn’t doing the job. What clients retain her for, she says, is turning their stories into something that gets results. Building a public record for those who follow Ansari has also built education directly into her practice, hosting free webinars on Canada’s immigration system, a free legal clinic for LGBTQ+ refugees, and a session during the University of Alberta’s Pride Week on navigating claims based on sexual orientation. She’s also contributed to policy research examining systemic barriers in Canada’s temporary resident visa program for Gazans.
Q&A with Yameena Ansari Ansari Immigration Law, Calgary, AB Q: If Hannah Kreager’s claim is recognized as the first transgender American asylum application in Canada, what precedent do you think it should set for how the system handles gender-based persecution claims going forward? A: Historically, Canada has viewed the United States as a safe place for transgender people to be, and that’s something we’ve seen change in the second Trump presidency. If the Immigration and Refugee Board accepts this case, it’s going to make it a whole lot easier for transgender Americans, because right now a lot of them feel afraid to file because they don’t know if their claim will be accepted. Hannah has been very outgoing about sharing her case publicly, on purpose, not just for herself but for the wider transgender
American community. If we’re successful, the decision will be public, and other lawyers can cite it when they bring their own clients’ cases forward. Q: Your advocacy has been tied to expanded acceptance numbers and broader eligibility for Gazans with Canadian family ties. Which of those changes came fastest, and which took the longest to move? A: It kind of happened all together. We founded the Gaza Family Reunification Project, and between the petition, the open letters, and the media advocacy, we came out with a cohesive plan, and when the government opened the program, it read a lot like they’d taken what we wrote and passed it directly. What’s been disheartening is what came after. The government introduced the measures, but hardly any Gazans have actually entered Canada on that program, so my colleagues are now having to litigate its implementation. Families fought so hard to get this introduced, and now Canada is making them go to court just to get the government to use the program it already created. Q: You’ve said immigration law isn’t just paperwork, it’s life or death. What’s the moment in your career that made that true for you? A: I wouldn’t say it’s a single moment; it’s many experiences that happen every day. Right now, I’m working on a file for a young man who could be deported despite having his entire adult life in Canada, and another for a father whose wife and child are Canadian, but he’s from a country facing a massive famine, so returning isn’t an option. My transgender clients carry a different kind of fear, but it’s just as real. If all a lawyer is doing is filling in forms, they’re probably not doing their job. What people retain me for is to tell their stories in a compelling manner and get the result they
need, and when we get a refusal, it feels very personal. Q: You’re pushing on two very different fronts right now, an individual asylum case and a systemic policy campaign. Which kind of work do you think changes the system faster? A: I tell my clients there are two courts we’re fighting in, the judicial court and the court of public opinion. You don’t have to win in both, and winning one makes it easier to win the other. With Hannah’s case, by the time we reach the actual hearing, I want the adjudicator to already have a real understanding of what transgender Americans are experiencing, because the news has been full of it. With the Gaza file, we introduced the initial measures through advocacy alone, the press, the petition, but it took my colleagues going to court to actually get the program moving. I’m not afraid to use those other levers. A legal case matters, but there are other tools in society that can accomplish the change you’re after.
HUMAN RIGHTS, ADVOCACY, AND CRIMINAL
Elizabeth Bowker DEFENDING THE LINE BETWEEN FAIRNESS AND OVERREACH Partner, Stieber Berlach LLP, Toronto, ON Elizabeth Bowker is partner at Stieber Berlach LLP in Toronto, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Human Rights, Advocacy, and Criminal category. She represents 49 Children’s Aid Societies in a proposed class action challenging the use of birth alerts. In G.G. v. Ontario, the motions judge declined to certify claims against the
“I like to think that throughout my career, I’ve always aimed to treat people with respect and kindness. From a defence counsel’s perspective, I view it as being able to defend my clients on the facts, on the law, on the damages, while still treating the person opposite from me with kindness and respect” Elizabeth Bowker, Stieber Berlach LLP
Children’s Aid Societies alleging Charter breaches, privacy torts, and conspiracy, reaffirming the Ragoonanan principle that a representative plaintiff must have a viable cause of action against each defendant. The plaintiffs’ appeal challenging the Ragoonanan principle has since drawn multiple intervenors and was argued before a five-judge panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal, the first time this court has been asked to revisit the principle in 24 years, since it was first set out in Hughes v. Sunbeam. While declining to comment further while the appeal decision is under reserve, Bowker notes that this appeal was also the first time the Court of Appeal has been asked to consider whether the Ragoonanan principle remains good law in Ontario following the Supreme Court’s decision in Marcotte, a case dealing with Quebec’s Civil Code. Fairness on both sides of the file Bowker also defends institutional clients in sensitive class actions, including claims arising from seclusion and restraint in a forensic mental health setting and mass tort claims against long-term care homes tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.
She’s direct about what procedural fairness means to her in these matters: not shielding the plaintiff from the realities of litigation, but thinking carefully about how the existing rules get carried out with care on both sides. She also raises a less commonly discussed side of fairness, the evidentiary difficulty defendants face in historical abuse claims filed decades after the fact, when witnesses have died and records no longer exist. What trauma-informed litigation means to her Bowker doesn’t describe trauma-informed practice as a change in strategy so much as a standing commitment. She extends that thinking further than most conversations on the topic tend to go, to the institutional clients she represents, many of whom, she notes, went into their field hoping to make the world better and now face allegations against their own staff or volunteers, and to everyone else in the room, court reporters, judges, mediators, and her own students and clerks, who absorb these stories daily and are at risk of vicarious trauma. Her firm gives anyone the ability
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to opt out of a sexual abuse file entirely, no questions asked. Making the system work better, not just win Bowker sits on the Class Proceedings Committee, jointly appointed by the Law Foundation of Ontario and the Attorney General, though she’s careful to separate her committee work from her personal views. Speaking only for herself and based on her observations as defence counsel, she’d like to see more discipline from the plaintiffs’ bar in how class actions get structured. “Sometimes access to justice for plaintiffs who may have meritorious cases is delayed because a class action is made way too broad, or bites off more than it can chew,” she says, arguing that narrower, more carefully scoped claims would often serve plaintiffs better than expansive ones that trigger lengthy certification fights.
Q&A with Elizabeth Bowker Stieber Berlach LLP, Toronto, ON Q: The Ragoonanan principle case has attracted multiple intervenors and gone before a five-judge panel at the Court of Appeal. Why do you think this case has drawn that level of attention? A: The previous decision on the Ragoonanan principle was set out 24 years ago in Hughes v. Sunbeam, and that’s been the law in Ontario ever since, shaping how class actions are conducted. Our appeal in the birth alerts class action is the first time the Court of Appeal has been asked to reconsider it, and the first time since the Supreme Court’s decision in Marcotte, which dealt with Quebec’s Civil Code but made broader comments about the underlying principles of class actions, including access to justice. Q: You often defend institutions responsible for children, patients, or long-term care residents in class actions brought against them. What does procedural fairness look like to you when the stakes are this sensitive on both sides?
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A: Our existing rules of civil procedure already do a good job of ensuring fairness for both sides, so I don’t think we need to change the rules just because a case is sensitive. Procedural fairness includes the ability to test the other side’s evidence, and it doesn’t mean shielding the plaintiff from the realities of litigation. But these cases do involve very sensitive, personal information, so it’s incumbent on counsel for all sides to think about how to implement our existing rules in the most respectful way possible, whether someone needs a support person during discoveries or more frequent breaks. There’s also an evidentiary fairness question for defendants in historical abuse claims, when witnesses have died or records no longer exist decades later, that’s something our sector is grappling with, too. Q: You speak on trauma-informed approaches to civil sexual assault litigation. What does that look like in practice, and how has it changed the way you approach these cases? A: I don’t know that it’s changed my personal approach so much as it’s always been there. I like to think I’ve always treated people with respect and kindness, and at a fundamental level that’s a large part of what trauma-informed litigation means. It also means recognizing everyone’s humanity in the process. From a defence counsel’s perspective, I can defend my clients on the facts, the law, and the damages, while still treating the person on the other side with kindness. It also means recognizing that the individuals representing institutional defendants, people who often went into that field hoping to make the world better, are personally affected by these allegations too, and that court reporters, judges, mediators, and the people in my own office hearing these stories every day carry real risk of vicarious trauma.
We give people in my office the choice not to work on a sexual abuse file at all, no questions asked, and that choice stands at any point if they change their mind. Q: You sit on the Class Proceedings Committee, jointly appointed by the Law Foundation of Ontario and the Attorney General. What’s one change to how class actions work in Ontario that you’d like to see come out of that work? A: I want to be careful not to speak for the committee or use anything confidential from that work. Speaking only for myself, based on what I observe as defence counsel and in reading cases generally, I think access to justice for plaintiffs with meritorious cases sometimes gets delayed because a class action is structured too broadly, or takes on more than it can realistically prove, which leads to lengthy, expensive certification motions. Some cases would genuinely be better served as individual actions or as much narrower class actions. More critical analysis upfront by plaintiffs’ counsel, rather than a throw-everything-at-the-wall approach, would in the long run serve access to justice better.
IN-HOUSE
Farah Ismail BUILDING TRUST BEFORE BUILDING A DEPARTMENT Senior vice-president, chief legal, privacy, and compliance officer, SE Health, Toronto, ON Farah Ismail is senior vice-president and chief legal, privacy, and compliance officer at SE Health in Toronto, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the In-house category. When she joined SE Health in 2020, the organization
“What really surprised me most wasn’t the legal work; it was having to earn trust. There isn’t a playbook for introducing a legal team into an organization that’s been successful for over 100 years without one” Farah Ismail, SE Health
had operated for more than a century without a single in-house lawyer. In 2024, she founded the company’s first legal, privacy, and compliance department, now grown to 16 professionals spanning lawyers, paralegals, a law clerk, a contract specialist, privacy specialists, and a data privacy engineer. A centralized intake process, the first of its kind at SE Health, now manages more than 1,500 requests annually. Ismail says the legal work itself wasn’t the hard part. The bigger challenge was earning trust inside an organization with no template for what a legal department should look like, one where legal teams are often seen as “the department of no”. Before building any formal process, she focused on relationships, work she credits partly to a nursing background that gave her a built-in understanding of the business of caring. She credits her dual background for that. “Having a nursing background and deep understanding about the healthcare system in this country really helped,” she says. Instead of building a traditional legal department, she built what she calls a strategic advisory function, one whose tagline, “Helping Good People Do Good Things,” she says she still returns to.
Teaching AI where it belongs Ismail co-led development of an AI-powered contract review system targeting up to an 80 percent reduction in processing time, now past a successful pilot and moving toward a full rollout this fall. She’s precise about what she wants the technology to do and not do: augment human judgment, not replace it. AI can handle the repetitive work, identifying clauses, comparing versions, freeing her team up to provide strategic advice and giving business stakeholders direct access to information without routing every request through her department. What surprised her most was that the rollout turned out to be less about the technology itself and more about change management, rethinking how the organization operates without losing ownership of the final call. Placing functions where trust already lives Ismail expanded the legal pillar to include patient experience, reasoning that dissatisfied patients need an objective party to hear their concerns instead of complaining directly to the people delivering their care, which she says creates a natural power imbalance. Alternative dispute resolution, investigation, and records retention, all legal processes at their core, fit naturally under that office.
Occupational health and safety followed a different path. It moved under legal during the pandemic, when infection prevention and control sat under the same umbrella and the organization needed to manage WSIB claims, accommodations, and vaccine mandates under intense pressure. With the pandemic stabilized, Ismail has since shifted OH&S back to HR, freeing her team to build out enterprise risk management instead, including a full technology overhaul of SE Health’s risk management system now nearing completion. What the nursing background made possible Ismail is direct about what her dual training adds that legal training alone wouldn’t. “As a lawyer, I don’t think I would have been able to do my job as effectively,” she says, pointing to SE Health’s new social impact venture fund as the clearest example, work she says draws on strategic awareness her legal training alone wouldn’t have given her. Fellow honouree and nominator Yola Ventresca, managing partner at Lerners LLP, points to the same duality. “Her dual nursing-legal background isn’t just unique, it’s a strategic advantage that allows her to see issues through multiple dimensions simultaneously,” Ventresca says. “She doesn’t wait for problems, she anticipates them.”
Q&A with Farah Ismail SE Health, Toronto, ON Q: You built SE Health’s first legal department from the ground up in an organization that had operated for more than a century without in-house counsel. What did you have to figure out that no playbook could have prepared you for? A: What really surprised me most wasn’t the legal work, it was having to earn trust. There are plenty of resources that show you how to structure a legal department, recruitment, hiring, governance, but there isn’t a playbook for introducing a legal team into
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an organization that’s been successful for over 100 years without one. Legal departments are often seen as the “department of no,” and we would never have been invited into the conversations that mattered if we couldn’t demonstrate the value we could create. So before I built the processes, I focused on relationships. With my background as a nurse, understanding the business of caring helped. The role wasn’t to impose legal rules, it was making sure our advice practically resonated with the people we were giving it to. Rather than building a traditional legal department, we built a strategic advisory function that integrates legal, privacy, compliance, enterprise risk, and governance leading to great innovation. The biggest lesson was earning influence without relying on the authority I carried, and helping people see legal as a strategic partner rather than a gatekeeper. Q: Your AI-powered contract review system is aiming for up to an 80 percent reduction in processing time. What has building that system taught you about where AI helps in legal work, and where it doesn’t? A: Technology should augment human judgment, it can’t replace it, that’s not the goal. We’re a big organization without a longstanding in-house legal function, and our contracts are complex, vendor relationships, government-led work, broad scope. AI is really good at repetitive, structured work, identifying clauses, comparing versions, and it means my team spends less time searching for information and stakeholders can access things directly instead of routing everything through our department. Where AI doesn’t help is understanding organizational culture, commercial priorities, or the nuances that come from the trust we’ve built with a business partner. One unexpected lesson from the pilot was that AI is actually more about change management than the technology itself. The hardest question isn’t whether AI can do something;
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it’s how we redesign operations to achieve the highest value while staying accountable for our decisions. In healthcare, that question carries even more weight, because trust is foundational, and we have an obligation to be transparent about when and how we’re using it. Q: You’ve expanded the legal pillar at SE Health to include patient experience. What made you think that function belonged under legal in the first place? A: Patient experience is the more natural fit of the two. When someone is dissatisfied with their care, having them complain directly to the people delivering that care creates a power imbalance, it’s not natural. They need an objective party, and a legal department is well positioned to provide that objectivity. Alternative dispute resolution rests nicely there too, strategic writing, good investigation, follow-up, records retention – these are all legal processes at their core. I think the duality of my background as a nurse and a lawyer helped make that case, because there’s an inherent trust that comes from understanding the business itself. Q: You came into this role with a nursing background as well as a legal one. What’s a decision you’ve made as a lawyer that you think you’d have made differently without the nursing background? A: As a lawyer without a healthcare background, I don’t think I would have had the depth of knowledge to critically analyze what’s happening and help the organization the way I’ve been able to. We’re creating SE Health’s first social impact venture fund, and from a legal perspective, setting up a fund is something you can do anywhere, you can outsource that. But creating a fund with the impact we’re looking for, with the value proposition built in from the ground up, and being able to articulate that to attract the right investors, that’s different, and I can do that because of the awareness my nursing background gives me.
CHANGEMAKERS
Paul Saunders SKATING TO WHERE THE PUCK IS GOING Chief strategy and innovation officer and partner, Stewart McKelvey, Halifax, NS Paul Saunders is chief strategy and innovation officer and partner at Stewart McKelvey in Halifax, NS, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Changemakers category. When Stewart McKelvey became the first large Canadian law firm to publicly announce a firm-wide rollout of Legora across all six of its offices, the decision looked sudden from the outside. Paul Saunders says it wasn’t. He’s spent 11 years in his role building the case for adaptability, and the AI pitch drew directly on that decade of groundwork rather than standing as a single business case. “There were a whole bunch of nodding heads in the room, because this wasn’t the first time they’d heard this. The technology was different, but we’d really embedded into the DNA of our firm this idea that we need to be adapting,” he says. Saunders assembled the cross-functional team behind the rollout, ran a 58-person pilot, and secured buy-in from the Partnership Board by tying the decision directly to the firm’s Strategic Plan. He personally led in-person training sessions across all six offices as hundreds of lawyers began incorporating the tool into daily practice. Compensation as the real test of strategy Saunders has spent years redesigning Stewart McKelvey’s compensation and profitability frameworks, work he calls unglamorous but foundational.
“It’s funny that the very technology that’s so disruptive is a part of the solution to address that disruption as well” Paul Saunders, Stewart McKelvey
Get compensation misaligned with strategy, he argues, and compensation becomes the real strategic plan by default. The firm rebuilt its approach roughly six years ago, bringing in a third party to interview more than half its partners on what worked and what didn’t, a process it now repeats every year. For those changes to hold, he says the input has to come from the bottom up and stay organic to the firm. The AI training conundrum Saunders is candid about what worries him most in developing junior lawyers: keeping them in the loop validating and confirming AI-generated work, rather than letting the technology quietly take over the tedious groundwork he credits as foundational to his own legal judgment. His concern is straightforward: junior lawyers who lean on AI too heavily lose the reps that build real judgment, the kind no one develops without eventually writing the memo themselves. His answer leans on old-fashioned mentorship paired with a new mindset. “I like to channel Wayne Gretzky on this one and try to skate to where the puck is going
to be,” he says, describing an approach that identifies the skills future lawyers will need, pairs junior lawyers directly with senior mentors inside real workflows, and uses AI itself as a teaching tool to close gaps it also creates. A book, a business, and a shared name Saunders is finalizing the manuscript for his book, now retitled The Fortified Firm: How Organizations Can Thrive in the AI Era, expected in late October or early November 2026, drawing on more than a decade of lessons from Stewart McKelvey. The title now matches the name of a new advisory business the firm is simultaneously launching, also called The Fortified Firm, which will help other law firms work through the same strategic, compensation, and AI adoption challenges Saunders has spent years solving internally. Asked what capability he’d tell another firm’s leadership to build first, he resists a single answer, arguing it depends too much on the firm’s own starting point for a onesize-fits-all prescription. Still, one capability anchors the rest: a strategic plan with clearly identified trade-offs, since good strategy is defined more by what a firm chooses not to do than by what it chooses to do.
Q&A with Paul Saunders Stewart McKelvey, Halifax, NS Q: Stewart McKelvey became the first large Canadian law firm to publicly announce a firm-wide rollout of Legora. Walk me through what convinced the Partnership Board to move from a 58-person pilot to a firm-wide rollout across all six offices. A: I’ve been in this role for 11 years, and we’d been making the case that whole time about being adaptable to change and embracing innovation. When we made the pitch late last year, we leaned on that decade of work. AI is a transformative general technology that’s going to permeate every
industry, and legal is probably one of the most disrupted. That’s also a huge opportunity if you’re willing to be at the forefront of it, incorporating it into workflows, aligning pricing and processes, developing champions to make it stick. The case wasn’t difficult to make because it wasn’t the first time partners had heard it, the technology was different, but the mindset had already been embedded into the firm’s DNA over the last decade. Q: You’ve said compensation alignment is unglamorous work. What resistance did you run into trying to tie partner compensation directly to the firm’s strategic priorities? A: Change is hard, especially around something as sensitive as compensation. There’s a quote I love: “If your compensation system isn’t aligned with your strategic plan, your compensation system is your strategic plan.” We undertook that project about six years ago, and we run a continuous improvement process on it every year. Before implementing the new system, we brought in a third party who interviewed more than half our partners on what worked and what didn’t. We do extensive consultations, interviews after every compensation cycle, so changes reflect the will of our partners rather than being dictated from the top. It has to be organic in a law firm environment for it to stick. Q: You’ve written that developing junior lawyers to be resilient in the face of AI advancements is a real concern for you. What worries you most about how associates are learning the profession right now? A: It’s absolutely necessary that the next generation learns to use AI, that’s the reality of modern practice, but lawyers need to stay in the loop validating and confirming the accuracy of that work. I learned the hard way early in my career reviewing hundreds of leases during due diligence, hours of unglamorous work that turned out to be genuinely valuable. If people
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SPECIAL REPORT
TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS 2026
become overly reliant on AI, they’re deprived of that same learning opportunity. How are you going to litigate persuasively if you’ve never written your own research memo? The answer is to skate to where the puck is going. That means identifying the skills future lawyers will need, pairing junior lawyers with senior mentors inside real workflows instead of occasional check-ins, and using AI itself as part of the solution, since it can run simulations and act as a teacher for the very gaps it creates. Q: Your book, now titled The Fortified Firm, lays out what organizations need to survive the AI era, and you’re simultaneously launching an advisory business under the same name. What’s the one capability you’d tell another firm’s leadership to build first? A: It really depends on the firm. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer. A big part of the advisory work will be diagnosing each firm’s current state, whether they have a strategic plan, what their priorities are. That said, most of the time it’s critical that firms have a clearly defined strategic plan with real trade-offs. Good strategy is more about what you choose not to do than what you choose to do. Everything else, AI adoption, lawyer development, compensation, should align with that. The first core capability we outline in the book is think and act strategically. That’s usually where firms should start.
Expert insight Hilary Young Professor and acting associate dean, UNB Faculty of Law Hilary Young is a professor in the University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Law, one of Canada’s leading defamation scholars, whose work also covers torts, remedies, and health law, including the non-consensual disclosure of intimate images, informed consent to
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medical treatment, and genetic privacy. She joined UNB Law in 2012 after clerking for Justice Louis LeBel at the Supreme Court of Canada and practising civil litigation at Cox & Palmer in Halifax. Her research has been cited by courts including the Supreme Court of Canada and has been funded by granting agencies such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She holds an LLB from the University of Ottawa, where she won the Gold Medal, an LLM from Harvard Law School, and a PhD in linguistics from Rice University. Q: How is generative AI adoption and the new rules around disclosure and oversight reshaping how lawyers build and exercise influence? A: I am a legal educator, and I see how difficult it is to incorporate AI into legal research and practice while still ensuring that students develop the skills and insights they will need to succeed. I see parallels between this and law firms’ need to train future leaders while no longer having to rely on junior associates to do certain kinds of work. This is cheaper for clients, but denies associates the experience that has historically provided the foundation of their expertise. Today’s legal leaders will find ways to work efficiently while not preventing future leaders from developing necessary skills and knowledge. Q: How does mentorship or advocacy work translate into professional influence, particularly for lawyers earlier in their careers? A: I am pleased to see that despite all the pressures to succeed, Canada’s legal leaders take seriously the need to give back to the profession and their communities. They mentor, volunteer, and seek to uphold high standards of professionalism. Q: What challenges will test Canada’s legal leaders in the year ahead? A: The coming year will challenge Canada’s legal leaders through a combination of economic, technological, and accessto-justice pressures. Legal leaders have to
balance efficient use of AI with the need to develop a new generation of skilled and knowledgeable legal professionals. And they will have to navigate this complex goal while facing economic and political uncertainty and ongoing barriers to access to justice. Successful leaders will have to be creative in mentoring and educating, while also promoting access to justice for clients.
Ian Hull, LSM Partner, Hull & Hull LLP Ian Hull is one of Canada’s leading estate litigators, co-founder of Hull & Hull LLP alongside his father, Rodney Hull, and a recipient of the Law Society Medal (LSM), the highest honour the Law Society of Ontario bestows. He was called to the Ontario bar in 1990 and has represented clients at every level of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He is a certified specialist in estate and trust law and civil litigation, a fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel and the American College of Trial Lawyers, and a member of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, the Canadian Academy of Distinguished Neutrals, and the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law. He received the Toronto Lawyers Association’s Honsberger Award in 2018 and the Ontario Bar Association’s award for distinguished service in 2020. Hull holds an LLB from the University of Windsor and an honours BA from the University of Western Ontario. Q: How is generative AI adoption and the new rules around disclosure and oversight reshaping how lawyers build and exercise influence? A: AI is no longer optional, and that’s clear from this year’s nominees. The real question is how you implement it day to day while treating it as a tool, not a replacement for judgment. The leaders who understand this next phase of adoption are the ones bringing junior lawyers
along concurrently with the skills they need, because we’re never going to lose the advisor role. Where it used to be a matter of simply buying the tools and letting them do the work, the real leaders sit at the table and explain to their junior lawyers why it matters and how, with a tangible understanding of it themselves. Q: How does mentorship or advocacy work translate into professional influence, particularly for lawyers earlier in their careers? A: Technology, even before AI became this strong, can make people forget they’re first and foremost advocating a position. The advocacy skills exercised at the senior level need to keep getting pushed down into mid-level and junior lawyers, and the true leaders across every sector make sure junior lawyers get real room to participate rather than just observe. That matters especially in human rights work, where the resources available in private-sector litigation often aren’t there, so bringing junior and mid-level lawyers into complex parts of a case counts for more. AI clears out the grunt work, which means we get to spend our time on what we’re best at, advocacy and advice, because people still want to be advised by people.
Q: What challenges will test Canada’s legal leaders in the year ahead? A: The profession is growing and, happily, becoming more diverse, which brings new perspectives into every area of law. Twenty years ago, there were far fewer lawyers across Canada, and opening up the profession has genuinely enhanced how we understand different communities and the perspectives they bring to legal problems. At the same time, that growth keeps us honest, we need to stay focused on differentiating our positions in the marketplace and being sensible about the legal services we provide and what we charge for them. That’s good for lawyers and for the profession both.
None of them treated influence as a title. They treated it as something built, tested, and rebuilt when the first version didn’t hold. That’s the throughline worth remembering long after this list is published. Influence in Canadian law right now belongs to the people willing to do the unglamorous, structural work everyone else assumes someone else will handle. Hull, who served as a judge for this year’s list, put it more simply: these are candidates who are “hardworking, decent, and focused,” proof that old-fashioned effort still carries as much weight as any new technology.
Influence built, not inherited
INSIGHTS
What connects this year’s Top 25 isn’t a shared practice area, it’s a shared instinct to build, not simply practise. Ventresca rebuilt a firm’s advancement structure. Ismail built a legal department from nothing. Pooran built a program no one else would fund. Brown spent a decade rebuilding the same bill five times instead of walking away from it. Ansari built a case designed to outlast her client’s file. Saunders built the infrastructure an entire firm now runs on. Bowker has spent her career defining the limits collective litigation shouldn’t cross.
As part of our editorial process, Canadian Lawyer’s researchers interviewed the subject matter experts below for an analysis of this report and its findings. Hilary Young, PhD Professor and Acting Associate Dean UNB Faculty of Law
Ian Hull, LSM Partner Hull & Hull LLP
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TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS 2026 TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS 2026 CHANGEMAKERS Patrick Brown Principal Partner McLeish Orlando LLP Phone: 866 683 3311 Email: info@mollp.com Website: mcleishorlando.com Yameena Ansari Founding Lawyer Ansari Immigration Law Phone: 647 494 8299 Email: immigrate@ansarilaw.ca Website: ansarilaw.ca Brendon Pooran Managing Partner PooranLaw Amy Salyzyn Associate Professor and Dean’s Research Professor in Technology and Justice Futures University of Ottawa Faculty of Law Paul Saunders Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer and Partner Stewart McKelvey BUSINESS Yola Ventresca Managing Partner Lerners LLP
Gideon Christian Associate Professor and Research Chair in AI and Law University of Calgary Michael Rosenberg Partner McCarthy Tétrault LLP Muneeza Sheikh Founding Partner Muneeza Sheikh Employment and Human Rights Stephanie Willsey Lawyer Cochrane Sinclair LLP
IN-HOUSE Farah Ismail Senior Vice-President, Chief Legal, Privacy and Compliance Officer SE Health Phone: 416 722 7882 Email: farahismail@sehc.com Website: sehc.com Christine Chen Chief Legal Officer University Pension Plan Ontario Rustam Juma General Counsel, Corporate Secretary and Privacy Officer Volkswagen Group Canada
Phone: 519 640 6378 Email: yventresca@lerners.ca Website: lerners.ca
Arun Krishnamurti Senior Counsel Google Canada
Claudia Desjardins Bélisle Office Managing Partner Miller Thomson LLP
Lorne O’Reilly, K.C. Lead Counsel Dow Chemical Canada ULC
Shahir Guindi Partner, Corporate, Former National Co-Chair Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
GOVERNMENT, NON-PROFITS, ASSOCIATIONS, JUDICIARY
Martha Harrison Partner McCarthy Tétrault LLP
Justice Colin C.J. Feasby Justice Alberta Court of King’s Bench
Raj Juneja Partner and Co-Head of the National Tax Group McCarthy Tétrault LLP
Michael Geist Professor University of Ottawa
HUMAN RIGHTS, ADVOCACY, CRIMINAL
Honourable Niki Sharma Deputy Premier and Attorney General of British Columbia
Elizabeth Bowker Partner Stieber Berlach LLP
Justice Michael Tulloch President and Chief Justice of Ontario Court of Appeal for Ontario
Phone: 416 594 4677 Email: ebowker@sblegal.ca Website: sblegal.ca/lawyer/elizabeth-bowker
The Right Honourable Richard Wagner, P.C. Chief Justice of Canada
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SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR EDITORIAL BOARD FOR SELECTING THE TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL CANADIAN LAWYERS
Gerry Apostolatos
Beth Beattie, LSM
Bindu Cudjoe
Jeff Davis
Craig Ferris
Cheryl Foy
Fernando Garcia
Monica Goyal
Deborah Greenberg
Pam Hrick
Ian Hull
Lorin MacDonald
Andrew McLaughlin
Doug Nathanson
Peter V. Nguyen
Lorne O’Reilly, K.C.
Dale Orlando
Karrin A. Powys-Lybbe
Emmanuel Pressman
Donna Purcell
Quinn Ross
Janice Rubin
Lisa Skakun
Michael Spratt
Raphael Tachie
Sarah Teich
Tanya Walker
Andrea Wood
Hilary Young
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LEGAL REPORT
FAMILY LAW
Navigating the common-law property problem As common-law relationships increase, lawyers tell Jessica Mach they are navigating the varied provincial rules on property-division rights 40 www.canadianlawyermag.com
AS COUPLES across Canada increasingly choose to build lives together without plans to marry, some are finding ways to establish their legal rights and obligations regarding shared property in case they separate – even if they live in jurisdictions that guarantee property-division rights only to married spouses. That’s according to family law lawyers in Ontario, which is one of several provinces that do not require common-law partners to split property they’ve accumulated over the course of their relationship. Over the last few years, Toronto-based lawyer Melanie Battaglia has seen an uptick in couples asking her firm to draw up contracts outlining their property and support rights in the event of a separation. These types of clients are not new: historically, they have run the gamut from individuals looking to safeguard generational wealth to those seeking to clarify their obligations because they have children from previous relationships. Lately, though, the Battaglia Law founder says many of her clients fit another profile altogether. “Where I’ve seen the most increase are younger couples now entering their first relationship,” Battaglia says. “When I say younger, I’m talking about … late 20s, early 30s, and they’re entering into their first marriage or serious partnership where they’re moving in together. “They want domestic contracts to define their rights and obligations,” she says. Lorne Fine of Toronto-based firm Fine & Associates says he’s also seen increased demand for domestic agreements among young couples, including those who are not married but living in common-law arrangements. In his practice, couples seeking these agreements typically approach him to clarify rights regarding a residence one of them owns. Common-law partnerships are “more and more common nowadays,” Fine says. “And it’s very difficult for them to go through the
[separation] process with the uncertainty of not knowing exactly how things are going to end up.” According to Statistics Canada, the number of common-law couples across the country increased by 447 percent between 1981 and 2021, accounting for nearly a quarter of couples by 2021. In contrast, the number of married couples grew only 26 percent over the same 40-year period. Young people are especially likely to live in common-law arrangements. Statistics Canada found that in 2021, 79 percent of people aged 20 to 24 who were in a couple were living with a common-law partner. But
older people are increasingly living with common-law partners, too. Among people aged 55 to 69 who are in couples, 16 percent were living in common-law arrangements in 2021, up from 13 percent in 2016.
Despite these trends, Ontario is one of several provinces that do not automatically grant common-law partners the same property-division rights as married spouses.
“It’s very difficult … to go through the [separation] process with the uncertainty of not knowing exactly how things are going to end up” Lorne Fine, Fine & Associates
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FAMILY LAW
For married couples in Ontario, the province’s Family Law Act governs how they must divide their property when they separate. Under the act, separating spouses generally divide their wealth by determining the value of the assets they each own as of the date of separation, subtracting any debts and liabilities, and subtracting the value of the assets they initially brought into the marriage. The spouse calculated to have more assets then pays the difference – which is known as an equalization payment – to the spouse calculated to have the lower amount of assets. There is an exception for matrimonial homes, meaning the home that the couple lived in together. If one spouse owned the home before the couple married, the value of the home at the date of separation cannot be subtracted from that spouse’s total assets. Instead, its value must be counted as an asset to be split with the spouse who doesn’t own the home.
hypothetical scenario, the house is worth $1 million, and there’s a $500,000 mortgage on it. The couple would have to divide that equity in the house by including it with the other assets accounted for in the equalization formula. However, “in the scenario where you have non-married spouses and only one of them owns the house, the [common-law] spouse who doesn’t own the house doesn’t get to share in the value of the house by way of equalization,” Battaglia says. “The Family Law Act says you’re not a legally married spouse, so we treat you differently.” British Columbia is one of several provinces that take a different approach from Ontario, granting common-law partners the same property-division rights as married spouses. This has been the case since 2013, when the province’s Family Law Act replaced its decades-old Family Relations Act, obliging unmarried couples who have
“I do think there is a disadvantage, certainly still in this day and age, for people who don’t marry in Ontario but live in and contribute to a home together” Melanie Battaglia, Battaglia Law This property-division framework does not apply to separating common-law partners in Ontario. “For common-law couples, there’s not an equalization payment,” Fine says. “Common-law partners don’t have an automatic right to equalize property like married couples do.” Battaglia offers an example of how this difference could play out. “If there were two people who were married and only one of the spouses owned the house [they lived in], they have to equalize the value of that house with their … spouse,” she explains. In her
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lived together for at least two years in a “marriage-like relationship” to split any property they acquired during the relationship when they separate. For Fraser MacLean, a partner at Vancouver-based firm MacLean Family Law, BC’s Family Law Act is an improvement over the province’s previous family law regime. “If two people have organized their lives as a family unit for more than two years, the fact that they did not have a wedding should not necessarily mean one partner walks away with no statutory-property protection,” he says.
In practice, however, the current rules can pose challenges. Because individuals need to prove they were in a “marriagelike” relationship for at least two years to qualify for property-division rights, many end up getting into disputes about whether their relationship was sufficiently “marriage-like” and whether the two-year requirement was met, MacLean says. “Not all serious relationships look the same,” he says. “Some couples maintain separate finances, some have separate bedrooms, some spend time apart for work, some intentionally avoid labels, so the ‘marriage-like’ analysis can become heavily evidentiary.” A high-profile decision issued by the BC Supreme Court last year, however, suggests the courts are likely to interpret “marriage-like” broadly. In the dispute, MacLean represented a woman who dated and lived with an older philanthropist, estimated to be worth $150 million, from 2018 to 2021. The court noted that sexual behaviour, social activity, and financial arrangements are among the factors that must be considered when determining whether a couple is in a “marriage-like” relationship. The philanthropist, Thomas Alan Budd, argued his former partner was not entitled to property-division rights because she did not love him and therefore lacked the “subjective intention” to be in a “marriage-like” arrangement. But the court disagreed, stating that love has never been a legal requirement for marriage. The court awarded his ex-partner more than $5 million in divided property. MacLean says another challenge with BC’s current regime is that many people don’t understand how it works. A lot of clients come to him “blindsided” by BC’s rules, he says. More public education about property-division rights “would go a long way in how people arrange things in their relationship,” he argues.
Beyond domestic contracts, Battaglia says individuals in common-law arrangements in Ontario can look to a growing range of remedies to recover their contributions to things like property. Evolving case law has empowered non-married partners to seek compensation for contributions they made to a property, such as mortgage and property-tax payments or renovation costs. If they can prove it was a joint family venture with their partner, they can also file an unjust-enrichment claim. However, these routes are not straightforward. Recovering money for contributions to a property, for instance, requires
“Not all serious relationships look the same … so the ‘marriage-like’ analysis can become heavily evidentiary” Fraser MacLean, MacLean Family Law proof of those contributions, like bank statements. This can be hard to recover if the relationship spans many years. “I do think there is a disadvantage, certainly still in this day and age, for people who don’t marry in Ontario but live in and contribute to a home together,” Battaglia says.
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FEATURE
IN-HOUSEINTERVIEWS INHOUSE PROFILES
Best of InHouse interviews Our sister publication, Lexpert, profiles in-house counsel regularly online at lexpert.ca/news/in-house-lawyer. Below is a selection of profiles featured by Lexpert this year
DOROTHY WONG Company: ICBC Title: Vice president, legal and corporate services
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PUBLIC-SECTOR IN-HOUSE WORK MEANS OWNING OUTCOMES, NOT WRITING MEMOS Public-sector in-house roles force lawyers to stop hiding behind memos and start helping decision-makers move. That is the view of Dorothy Wong, vice president, legal and corporate services at ICBC, who argues that legal advice matters only when it fits into the messy, time-pressured reality of how organizations actually operate. Wong began her career articling at Lang Michener, which later became McMillan LLP, where the full-service grind built technical muscle. But it also kept her away from the real-life consequences of the deals she helped close. Once the documents were signed, she found herself wondering what would happen after the transaction and why the organization had decided to pursue a particular path in the first place. That curiosity led her to an in-house opportunity at the Vancouver Airport Authority. At the airport, she watched executives weigh legal risk against serving the community,
financial constraints, and customer impact. Legal advice, she realized, is only one input in a larger decision-making matrix. Promoted to director of legal services, she moved from being responsible for her own files to being accountable for how the legal team served the organization. “It was this legal management role that I didn’t think about before when I went in-house,” she says. “And it’s now the trajectory that I am on.” By the time the ICBC opportunity came about, Wong was already drawn to the public-sector model. ICBC provides mandatory basic auto insurance for every driver in the province and delivers driver licensing, provincial identity cards, and a road safety mandate that touches nearly every resident. She pushes her team to get out from behind their desks and spend time with internal clients. Wong is candid that leadership is not a natural extension of private-practice success. “You have to go into it with some humility,” she says. “It’s a totally different skill set.”
YONNI FUSHMAN Company: Bird Construction Inc. Title: Executive vice president & chief legal officer
CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTS ARE RISK ALLOCATION DEVICES – AND AI IS CHANGING THE REVIEW Construction contracts seek to allocate risk to each party, and getting that balance right can make the difference between a billion-dollar project’s success or failure. That framing sits at the core of how Yonni Fushman leads the legal and risk management function at Bird Construction, one of Canada’s largest publicly traded general contractors. A year into his role as executive vice president and chief legal officer, Fushman is navigating an industry at an inflection point – shaped by collaborative contract models, AI-assisted legal review, and an acquisition strategy that keeps landing new businesses on his team’s doorstep. “Most of the businesses we acquire have never had an in-house legal function,” he says. “So our focus is on demonstrating through every interaction that we’re responsive, solution-oriented, and practical.” Poorly designed contracts in the industry have sometimes forced contractors to absorb
risks outside their control, Fushman says. “It reached an inflection point probably starting five to seven years ago, where the contracting community broadly started to push back.” The pushback produced a new generation of models – alliance contracting, integrated project delivery, progressive design-build – each featuring target prices rather than fixed prices and a collaborative front-end phase that can run up to two years. “It’s the adage of measure twice, cut once so that you have a more efficient and effective project execution plan,” he says. “We’re seeing very large, significant projects now executed without any of that commercial friction.” Since joining Bird, Fushman’s team has developed a custom tool to quantify systemic risks. “We’ve done a lot of testing on it, and it’s pretty accurate,” Fushman says. “It’s picking up most of the key issues.” On hiring, Fushman’s thinking has shifted. “My approach has definitely evolved to hiring the person, not the resume,” he says. “Every good hire I’ve made has been on the basis of fit and aptitude.”
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FEATURE
INHOUSE INTERVIEWS
FÉLIX TURGEON Company: Alto Title: Chief legal & real property assets officer
JANICE JONG Company: Special Forces Pension Plan Title: Chief operating officer and general counsel
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LAW, LAND, AND RECONCILIATION: INSIDE CANADA’S BIGGEST INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT Alto is developing the largest infrastructure project currently underway in Canada – a high-speed rail corridor connecting Quebec City and Toronto that will span more than 1,000 kilometres. For Félix Turgeon, the federal crown corporation’s chief legal and real property assets officer in Montreal, that scale demands more than technically sound legal advice. “We need to create value. We need to provide advice that is succinct and that is business,” he says. That mandate frames everything Turgeon’s team does – from a 1,000-kilometre landacquisition exercise involving thousands of properties to Indigenous consultation obligations, impact-assessment requirements, and a landmark deal with a private partner led by CDPQ Infra. Turgeon describes the legal function at Alto in two ways. The first, as the “goalie,” covers the protective work: contract negotiation, compliance with federal obligations, development of whistleblowing policies
and codes of ethics, and regular employee training. The second is as a value creator, where the team’s focus ultimately lies. “We are deeply involved in the definition of the strategies,” he says. Alto needs a right-of-way approximately 60 metres wide over 1,000 kilometres, affecting thousands of individual properties across Quebec and Ontario. “It’s massive,” he says. The strategy prioritizes willing-buyer, willingseller negotiations, with expropriation under the Federal Expropriation Act as the last resort. “We really hope that we can secure as many land acquisitions as possible through friendly deal processes,” Turgeon says. “We want to use this project as a way to support reconciliation with Indigenous communities,” he says, with commitments extending to employment contracts, supply opportunities, and archaeological work throughout the corridor. For lawyers on such projects, context matters as much as legal analysis. “You need to be curious, and you need to understand more than the legal framework applicable to the project.”
NO REGRETS GOING IN-HOUSE AFTER A DECADE AWAY FROM LEGAL PRACTICE Janice Jong left private practice in 2010 to spend a decade abroad with her family – no work permit, no practice, and no files. When she came back to Canada, she received two job offers on the same day, both at the same salary. One was a return to private practice; the other was something she had long been curious about but never managed to act on. She chose the in-house path. Jong’s legal career began at Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer LLP in Calgary, where she articled. Then she became a partner at Field Law – her practice centred on wills and estates, corporate law, banking, real estate, and trusts. She returned to Edmonton in 2020 and took her first in-house role at what was then known as Merit Contractors Association, a health and dental benefits organization that would later rebrand as OpenCircle. “I was the first lawyer to ever work there,” she says. “The role expanded around what the department became. It’s kind of an organic
process when you’re the first lawyer.” Over nearly five years, her title changed several times – from general counsel to chief legal and risk officer to acting CEO during a leadership transition.
“I try not to stay in the legal box” “When you’re a lawyer in a firm, you give best-practice advice… but once you’re internal and you’re a part of the decision-making and you know the business side of things, it becomes a lot more interesting and a lot more dynamic,” she says. In 2025, Jong joined the Special Forces Pension Plan. Her responsibilities as COO, effective March 2026, now include oversight of finance and HR. “I try not to stay in the legal box,” she says. “I try to see where my role can become more dynamic and how I fit overall, not just assuming, ‘Oh, that’s not my problem because it’s not legal.’”
CARLTON MATHIAS Company: Ontario Power Generation Inc. Title: Chief legal, ESG, and governance officer
ALLEN GARSON Company: Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO) Title: General counsel and corporate secretary
NUCLEAR AMBITION IS REWRITING WHAT IN-HOUSE LEGAL WORK LOOKS LIKE AT OPG Ontario’s clean energy surge is rewriting what in-house legal work looks like, and for Carlton Mathias, chief legal, ESG, and governance officer at Ontario Power Generation, the shift begins with attitude. “The old model and the old stereotype of lawyers only putting up red flags and telling people to go slow … that is not the way to succeed in a modern competitive world where there’s a huge demand for infrastructure buildout,” Mathias says. “Our advice must include taking risks, but it needs to be informed.” Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the provincially owned commercial corporation that produces roughly half of Ontario’s electricity through a mix of nuclear, hydroelectric, and other low-carbon sources, received provincial approval in spring 2025 to proceed with construction of the first small modular reactor (SMR) at its Darlington site – total program cost of this project is pegged at $20.9 billion. “We have first-of-a-kind projects,” he says. “We need highly innovative contracting
arrangements with our vendor partners.” When OPG launched its $13 billion Darlington Nuclear Refurbishment Project – completed ahead of schedule and under budget in March 2025 – the board created a dedicated standing committee to oversee that program. It has since evolved into the Major Projects Committee, which now provides oversight of the SMR project and the Pickering Nuclear Refurbishment Project. The corporation’s annual procurement runs at approximately $2.7 billion. “The technology and the work that we do here are then transferable across the world,” Mathias says. “We have countries from all around the world knocking on OPG’s door on a regular basis about what we are leading on the SMR front because they want to learn from us and replicate it at home. “Strong legal skills are table stakes,” he says. OPG’s lawyers visit plants and project sites regularly. “When you’re solving a legal problem, it’s really something you’re thinking about in three dimensions, not just black and white on a piece of paper.”
BUILDING IMCO’S LEGAL FUNCTION FROM SCRATCH – AND THE VALUE OF RISK-ADJUSTED ADVICE Building a multibillion-dollar investment manager from a government report turns out to be both a legal and an organizational challenge. That is the lesson Allen Garson drew from helping to launch the Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO), where he became the first general counsel and inherited the task of building the legal foundations needed to support the organization and its consolidation mandate. IMCO grew out of a 2012 review that recommended pooling Ontario’s fragmented public-sector funds, and it opened in July 2017, with Garson arriving a month later. Garson oversaw the establishment of IMCO’s pooledfunds structure, consolidating $52 billion in client assets across a wide range of asset classes. The pooling project “wasn’t just about creating legal structures. That was the easy part of the job,” he says. “This organization was young, effectively an early merger and startup,
and didn’t have the necessary integration across the organization just yet.” Today, IMCO manages more than $90 billion in assets across eight clients. Garson came to IMCO after decades in private practice, most of them at Heenan Blaikie LLP. Garson stayed “right until the end in 2014,” and the dissolution forced an abrupt transition. “In 2014, when Heenan’s closed the doors, I, together with a group of about 45 or so other people, went over to Dentons Canada,” he says. He was steering that move while closing Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s acquisition of AltaLink. What drew him to IMCO was the mandate itself. “The idea that it was in the public sector and for a really important public purpose was … really intriguing to me,” he says. He keeps the structure flat and treats trust as the currency that makes it work. “Trust comes in on foot and leaves on horseback,” he says. “I think our team is very good at trying to be a real business partner as opposed to just a service provider.”
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FEATURE
INHOUSE INTERVIEWS
ROSIE KOGAN Company: Medcan Title: General counsel & chief legal officer
LISA MARCUZZI Company: ArcelorMittal Dofasco Title: VP, head of corporate affairs, legal and ED&I, ESG
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FROM LITIGATION TO AI GOVERNANCE: BUILDING THE RIGHT FOUNDATION FIRST Legal innovation begins long before technology enters the room, says Rosie Kogan, general counsel and chief legal officer at Medcan in Toronto. “My experience has been that without rethinking the key elements of your foundation, your processes … it becomes very difficult to leverage technology in a way that’s productive.” That conviction comes from a career spent building legal functions in organizations under pressure – 12 years of acquisitive growth at Morneau Shepell and LifeWorks, rebuilding a legal department at GreenShield using fractional counsel, and now a year into Medcan’s governance infrastructure for responsible AI adoption in healthcare. Kogan joined Morneau Shepell expecting to do litigation-support work. The role expanded quickly. “It turned out that I had to learn how to do everything,” she says. She built the company’s first privacy office from a solo role to a five-person team before the acquisition by TELUS Health closed.
At GreenShield, Kogan had to rebuild the legal team while simultaneously learning the organization. Rather than default to law firm secondments, she brought in fractional counsel – former in-house lawyers with expertise in each line of business. The legal department tripled in size over two years. Now leading what she calls a “small and mighty team” of four at Medcan, Kogan is doing the same foundational work: templates, policies, contracting playbooks, and risk frameworks. That groundwork is enabling a formal AI governance model comprising a data- and AI-enablement committee, an AI use policy, a responsible use assessment process, and a data-governance framework. “I’ve seen a lot of projects fail because thought hasn’t been given to that foundation,” she says. “If you don’t have the right data, if you don’t have the right templates, if you don’t have the right risk tolerance established … you’re not going to be able to leverage technology in a way that’s going to allow you to see the value from it.”
TARIFFS, ESG, AND HIGH-STAKES CAPITAL – WHY LEGAL LEADS STRATEGY AT ARCELORMITTAL Trade shocks, decarbonization demands, and rising stakeholder scrutiny are forcing corporate legal teams to operate as strategic nerve centres rather than back-office risk filters, and few sectors feel that pressure more than steel. Lisa Marcuzzi leads corporate affairs, legal, and diversity and inclusion for ArcelorMittal Dofasco and ArcelorMittal Canada’s steel businesses. She did not move in-house to slow down her career; she moved because private practice kept her too far from the decision centre. After years as a partner, she had built a broad-based practice that, as she puts it, felt “almost like a GC, but external.” “Everything is big here,” she says. Capital projects range from hundreds of millions to billions and involve complex regulatory processes, attracting intense government and community attention. “We need to be there from the start,” she says. Her group now works at the front end of major initiatives, shaping bid
structures, allocating risk, aligning incentives, and building practical ways to solve disputes. Done well, that work “will enable the project”; done poorly, “you’re going to come to a halt … with really huge consequences.” Tariffs have turned steel into a live-fire exercise in this kind of risk management. “It’s anything but predictable,” she says of a regime defined by layered sectoral and global measures, Canadian countermeasures, shifting policies, and sudden quotas. Marcuzzi treats tariffs as “a core strategic issue, not just legal or compliance… Trade disputes and tariffs are here to stay. And anybody that’s sitting back and saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to go back to the way it was, is in trouble,’” she says. On outside counsel, she is direct: “I do not want a 50-page memo.” She expects “practical recommendations,” clear instructions followed at speed, and a willingness to act as an “extension of the in-house team.” “You’re making the calls with imperfect information, with not as many resources, and we’re holding hands and living with the consequences,” she says.
KATRINA HAYMOND Company: College of Licensed Practical Nurses and Health Care Aides of Alberta (CLHA) Title: General counsel
FRÉDÉRIC DUGUAY Company: Canada Infrastructure Bank Title: Chief legal and information officer
FROM PRIVATE PRACTICE TO ALBERTA’S FRONT LINE OF HEALTH REGULATION Bringing 40,000 healthcare aides into full regulation is forcing an Alberta regulator to revisit its assumptions about risk, fairness, and institutional change, says Katrina Haymond, the college’s first general counsel. Haymond holds that role at the College of Licensed Practical Nurses and Health Care Aides of Alberta (CLHA), which, until recently, regulated only about 21,000 licensed practical nurses. She provided the organization with external legal support as a partner at Fields LLP and joined to help with its expanding mandate. “As external counsel supporting the college from the outside, the work was more focused on discrete matters like professional conduct … and certain specific registration issues,” she says. “When you’re in-house as general counsel, it’s a whole different level of involvement.” Haymond joined in February 2025, with the proclamation of the healthcare
aide regulations later scheduled for February 2, 2026. That year was dominated by the work of turning a directory into a legislated registry, including consultation on regulatory amendments, new standards of practice, and policies. “There’s just been a magnitude of legal issues that … you try to anticipate, but there are just things that come up,” she says. The in-house vantage point has reshaped how she thinks about risk. “I’m gaining a much better understanding of all of the college’s program areas, and I’m much better able to make connections about how … something in their registration might be related to something in their program approval of post-secondary institutes, and how those things all fit together,” she says. For private practitioners contemplating a similar move in-house: “We like to think about the shiny new thing that we’re going to. But I think you have to think about, ‘What am I leaving behind?’ as well. And don’t take the things you’re leaving behind for granted.”
AS THE CIB’S MANDATE EXPANDS, LEGAL STEERS HOUSING, TRADE, AND CLEAN POWER By the end of 2025, the Canada Infrastructure Bank had committed more than $18 billion across about 108 projects, with roughly $28 billion of its original $35 billion capital envelope already spoken for. That trajectory has, according to chief legal and information officer Frédéric Duguay, pushed Ottawa to raise that envelope to $45 billion so the institution can keep backing housing-enabling infrastructure, trade corridors, clean power, and AI-related systems without imposing an artificial cap on new deals. He frames that shift less as a windfall than as a response to the pace the CIB has already established, noting that over roughly the past five years it has been committing between $3 billion and $5 billion a year to about 20 to 30 projects. Housing is the most visible front and, in his view, the most misunderstood, because the Canada Infrastructure Bank does not finance homes but, rather, the foundations that
make them buildable. “It’s the roads, it’s the district energy system, it’s the broadband, it’s essentially the site preparation that is needed to enable more development,” he says, allowing municipalities and developers to build at scale without carrying all the early-stage risk. Indigenous communities are the second pillar of where he wants the expanded envelope to land. The Indigenous Equity Initiative offers loans so communities can buy equity stakes in CIB-backed projects, shifting the conversation, as Duguay puts it, “from benefits to ownership.” Clean power now accounts for the largest share of the CIB’s portfolio. Duguay highlights the electricity link between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where the CIB and Mi’kmaq communities on both sides are investors and where the financing helps preserve more than $200 million in benefits for Nova Scotia ratepayers. On trade, Duguay calls it “a huge focus” as the federal government works to build “one Canadian economy” that grows exports and reduces reliance on a single trading partner.
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FEATURE
INHOUSE INTERVIEWS
SHERRY WENDT Company: Cenovus Energy Title: Vice president, legal & chief compliance officer
MELISSA REITER Company: Jobber Title: General counsel and senior director
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BUILDING CENOVUS’ GLOBAL COMPLIANCE PROGRAM – AND THE VALUE OF CURIOSITY Curiosity, more than legal expertise on its own, is what gets Sherry Wendt through the most complicated parts of her job. As vice president, legal and chief compliance officer at Cenovus Energy, Wendt oversees a compliance mandate that spans Canada, the United States, and Asia-Pacific – a multi-jurisdictional footprint the Calgary-based energy company inherited almost overnight after its combination with Husky Energy, which closed in January 2021. “It’s a labyrinth of complexity when you’re operating in multiple jurisdictions,” she says. Wendt’s path to her current mandate began in private practice. She joined Bennett Jones LLP as an associate in the firm’s energy and banking groups, working primarily on energy and banking deals during what she calls “a deal heyday in the oil patch.” That experience led to an opportunity at Penn West, where she became the first lawyer hired by the company’s newly appointed general counsel.
By her own account, the biggest leap in her career was a move from a director role in the legal department to director – and eventually vice president – of investor relations. Her CFO at the time told her that explaining the company’s story to investors required a different depth of understanding than simply meeting disclosure obligations: “The level of understanding of the business that you require to explain it to someone else is completely different.” “In a company of this size and age, it’s not often that you get an opportunity to build a new space in the company,” she says. Reconciling requirements that don’t always align between jurisdictions has become a defining part of the role. “I find it fun. It’s like a puzzle. I love that about it.” Wendt returns to curiosity when asked what advice she would give lawyers stepping into similarly complex in-house roles. “Ask the questions of your colleagues in legal, but more importantly, ask the questions of your peers across the business,” she says.
SCALING JOBBER’S LEGAL FUNCTION FOR AI – FROM ONE LAWYER TO FOUR “The process of building Jobber’s legal function required getting to know the business and designing a unique and customized roadmap based on how we do business here,” says Melissa Reiter, general counsel and senior director at Jobber, the Edmonton-based field service management platform. “And that roadmap is still changing.” Reiter joined Jobber in January 2022 as the company’s first in-house lawyer. Since then, the company has grown from roughly 400 employees to 1,200, with its platform now serving more than 100,000 businesses and 400,000 service professionals across 60 countries. Services invoiced through the platform have surpassed $100 billion. Her legal team has grown from one lawyer to four. Reiter is precise about how she frames AI’s role. “We’ve seen it as something that we are layering on top of processes … we can empower teams to change their workflows … to make it an innovation partner and not just
a replacement for something that exists, but an accelerator,” she says. The clearest example of this shift for Jobber is NDA processing. One member of Reiter’s team took on a legal operations mandate and built an automated workflow using tools already available across the company, connecting systems to pull data from spreadsheets directly into template documents. NDA turnaround time dropped from 24 hours to 5–10 minutes. “That’s been a significant gain in terms of speed and flexibility, especially for a task that we get quite frequently,” Reiter says. The most underrated skill for general counsel in a crisis is composure. “Being the calmest person in the room tends to be helpful, and I find that calm is contagious,” she says. “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” “Focusing on practicality and efficiency and the execution of your risk-management strategies is really key in this type of environment, and not getting too stuck on how you did things in the past, or how you are currently doing things,” Reiter says.
CANADA’S REGISTERED-DEALER REGIME GIVES COINBASE A CLEARER PATH THAN THE U.S. For a crypto exchange, a clear set of rules can be a competitive advantage rather than a burden. That is how Laure Fouin, associate general counsel for Coinbase in Canada, frames the registered-dealer regime that has governed Canadian crypto trading platforms for years – well before US lawmakers began assembling anything comparable. Fouin joined Coinbase in late 2024 after 11 years as a securities lawyer, first at McCarthy
LAURE FOUIN Company: Coinbase Canada Title: Associate general counsel, int’l legal, head of North America and Caribbean
RATIKA GANDHI Company: Alcon Title: Head of legal and compliance, Canada and Latin America
Tétrault LLP and later at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, where she co-chaired the digital assets and blockchain group. Those years taught her to treat unfamiliar technology with familiar discipline. Even when a product is unprecedented, she says, the legal analysis stays “grounded in core principles of what is proper risk management, how to look for precedent and then make your own statutory interpretations.” What pulled her in-house was the chance to stop handing off the analysis and start
owning the outcome. After years advising everyone from large financial institutions to early-stage startups, she wanted a single client and a seat at the table. She wanted to be “more embedded in the business, in decision-making and in strategy, and to have an impact.” In Canada, Coinbase operates as a restricted dealer with the Ontario Securities Commission as its principal regulator. “Legal and compliance at Coinbase are integral to the product life cycle from day one,” she says. She points to the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which is moving through Congress, as evidence that the United States is working toward a registration regime for crypto trading platforms that Canada has already had in place for years. Fouin is candid about how she uses AI and where it fails. She has seen tools cite statutory provisions that simply do not exist when she checks the source. “Legal cannot ever do this,” she says. Her advice for lawyers eyeing an in-house move: “Don’t fear asking stupid questions.”
PRIVACY, AI, AND THE CHALLENGE OF KEEPING PACE WITH HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGY Ratika Gandhi was not looking for an in-house role when a recruiter called. Now she oversees legal and compliance for Alcon across Canada and Latin America. At Alcon, that work is defined by one particular tension: the law struggles to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology. Nowhere is that gap more visible than in privacy and artificial intelligence, where personal health information is involved and the regulatory environment has not yet caught up. Alcon has responded by structuring the company with a dedicated privacy function; regional privacy officers embedded across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia; and an internal AI committee that weighs new initiatives before they advance. Gandhi’s path to that role began at McMillan LLP’s business law group, where she focused on mergers and acquisitions while expanding into health law, privacy, and regulation. Private practice, she says, gave her “a great
opportunity to get exposure, especially as a business lawyer, to many different types of businesses.” She was not seeking an in-house position when a recruiter approached her. Gandhi joined as director of legal and compliance; within months, leadership changes created a vacancy at the top. She was confirmed as head of legal and compliance within her first year. Her goal is to position her group as a strategic asset, not a gatekeeper, coaching her lawyers “to be a business partner who is not just there to check a box but, rather, someone the business comes to early on to help think about options and understand the business objective and the way to achieve it.” The firms that stand out, Gandhi says, are those “that know my business really well and know the types of issues that I’m thinking about and also my risk profile” and proactively flag developments rather than circulating generic bulletins. Her advice to lawyers considering in-house work: “Sometimes people think that going in-house means it’s a nine-to-five job. It’s not.”
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FEATURE
INHOUSE INTERVIEWS
SAHIL RAZDAN Company: Samsung Electronics Canada Title: Senior legal counsel
WHY THE PRIVACY PROGRAM YOU BUILT YEARS AGO IS YOUR BEST AI GOVERNANCE TOOL The most important tool for governing artificial intelligence responsibly is one that most companies already own: the privacy program built years ago. That is the central lesson Sahil Razdan has drawn from a career spent where data privacy, technology, and advertising meet. Now senior legal counsel at Samsung Electronics Canada and chair of the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada (IAB Canada) AI and Emerging Technology Committee, Razdan is convinced that the lawyers best equipped to handle AI treat it as an extension of privacy, not a separate discipline. His own path into the work was unplanned. Early in his career, Razdan took an in-house role only to discover the company was being wound down. “[I] found out on my first day on the job and got thrown really directly into commercial litigation,” he says, describing international
contract disputes handled with no research tools or mentorship, on a simple brief: “Here [are] the problems. Figure out how to fix them.” That start, he says, taught him to move quickly and trust his own judgment instead of waiting for direction. “The basic building blocks of managing AI responsibly come from the privacy structures that you’ve built in your organization,” he says. “When you work with the ideas of privacy by design and transparency and getting the proper consents and managing those consents the correct way, you have the basic building blocks of managing an AI infrastructure as well.” For lawyers building a career in technology law, his advice is to go deep rather than broad: “You really need to have an in-depth and intricate understanding of the technology rather than just … a passable understanding.” And on AI in legal work: “Missing a word here or there, or missing a … clause here or there in a contract can be the difference of millions of dollars.”
thought out and drafted,” says Lara Merjane, corporate counsel at JBS USA. “One of the main instructions I gave was not to make anything up.” Merjane has built Microsoft Copilot agents embedded in her company’s contract
covers all global procurement contracts across the group’s entities, international logistics – air freight, ocean shipping, trucking, transloading, dry brokerage – IT agreements, some M&A, and responsibility for JBS Canada commercial matters.
“The main homework that we have to do is to understand the business”
LARA MERJANE Company: JBS USA Title: Corporate counsel AI AGENTS, CROSS-BORDER PRACTICE, AND THE VALUE OF UNDERSTANDING THE BUSINESS Artificial intelligence is useful only if you know how to ask the right question. “I think your prompt has to be something very well
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playbooks – a practice that traces directly to her years at The Ross Firm Professional Corporation, a boutique spread across six small Ontario towns where the firm used AI to redline contracts well before most practices had considered it. Licensed in Brazil, Ontario, California, and Colorado, Merjane arrived at JBS USA in December 2025 with a foundation built across civil and common-law jurisdictions, a background in agricultural and corporate-commercial work, and hands-on experience with contract review automation. JBS USA is part of JBS N.V., the world’s largest protein producer, with beef, pork, poultry, and leather operations spanning North America and beyond. Merjane’s mandate
“I built Copilot agents that have the contract review functionality,” she says. “So I put our playbooks into an agent.” The system flags deviations from the company’s standard positions. Two practical rules anchor her approach: the prompt must be precise and the tool must be told explicitly not to fabricate. “I also ask it to ask me questions if it’s unsure about something,” she says. Her advice for lawyers considering an in-house move: “The main homework that we have to do is to understand the business, understand all the business units, understand what you’re selling, what you’re purchasing, and what the leadership’s goals are so you can adapt your advice to achieve … those goals.”
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SPECIAL REPORT
Top LITIGATION LAW
BOUTIQUES 2026
PAGE
After 14 years of rankings, a select group
CONTENTS
of Canadian litigation law boutiques
Feature article............................................................ 54
continue to dominate due to peer
Methodology ............................................................. 55
recognition in 2026
Top Litigation Law Boutiques 2026 ........................ 66
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SPECIAL REPORT
TOP LITIGATION LAW BOUTIQUES 2026
CANADA’S TOP LITIGATION LAW BOUTIQUES FOR 2026 SHOW CONSISTENCY PAYS OFF LITIGATION IN CANADA is harder and more expensive than it used to be. However, the best firms have turned that into a competitive advantage by offering seniorlevel attention without the overhead of a fullservice practice. “The cost of running these cases has increased substantially, particularly over the past six years, and I attribute a lot of it to COVID,” says Richard M. Bogoroch, founder and managing partner of Bogoroch & Associates in Toronto. As an outside voice on litigation trends rather than one of this year’s ranked firms, he points to higher expert witness and disbursement costs as a major driver. Canadian Lawyer’s eighth bi-annual Top Litigation Law Boutiques survey shows one pattern standing out above all others. The
firms that win once tend to keep winning, but that’s not to suggest there isn’t dynamism in the area, with first-time winners being crowned. Six of this year’s 15 recognized firms, Lenczner Slaght LLP, Lax O’Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb LLP, Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP, Stockwoods LLP, Woods LLP, and Hunter Litigation Chambers, have appeared in the rankings since the survey’s earliest cycles in 2012, a level of staying power in a competitive, high-turnover legal market that illustrates what boutique litigation practice requires to endure.
The consistency behind Canada’s leading litigation law boutiques The litigation law boutique model asks something specific of a firm: deliver senior-
KEY INSIGHTS The eighth cycle of Canada’s longest-running litigation boutique ranking at a glance
6
9/10 East winners
West winners
Cross-recognition
Six firms on this year’s list have won every survey cycle since 2012, eight consecutive cycles of peer recognition apiece.
Nine of the 10 Eastern Canada winners are based in Toronto, with Woods LLP in Montreal the lone exception.
Vancouver accounts for three of the five Western Canada winners, with Calgary home to the other two.
Five of this year’s winners were also recognized at the 2026 Canadian Law Awards, including Lenczner Slaght’s outright category win.
Since 2012
3:2
5
Source: Canadian Lawyer’s eighth bi-annual Top Litigation Law Boutiques survey, 2026, and the 2026 Canadian Law Awards sponsored by Array
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level advocacy without the overhead and structural layers of a large full-service practice, a dynamic Canadian Lawyer has tracked among the country’s litigation law boutiques for years. The 2026 survey drew 473 votes across 57 nominated firms between April and June 2026, with lawyers, in-house counsel, and clients asked to rank up to 10 firms in order of preference. To be considered, a firm needed the majority of its business to come from litigation work, a threshold that keeps the comparison focused on genuine litigation specialists rather than full-service firms with a litigation department attached. The strength behind this year’s Top Litigation Law Boutiques list echoes elsewhere in CL’s own coverage. At the 2026 Canadian Law Awards, held in Toronto in May, Lenczner Slaght won Litigation & Dispute Resolution Boutique Law Firm of the Year outright, with Adair Goldblatt Bieber LLP, Lax O’Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb, Jensen Shawa Solomon Duguid Hawkes LLP, and Stockwoods all named Excellence Awardees in the same category. Stockwoods partner Brian Gover also took home the Lifetime Achievement in the Legal Profession award for private practice. Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein was recognized as an Excellence Awardee for Pro Bono Initiative of the Year for its work on Cycle Toronto et al. v. Attorney General of Ontario et al., and Jensen Shawa Solomon Duguid Hawkes also acted as counsel on Canadian Tobacco’s restructuring under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, the
year’s winning Insolvency & Restructuring Deal of the Year. The overlap between the two recognitions, a peer-voted boutique ranking and a judged industry awards program, points to the same handful of firms earning sustained respect across very different evaluation processes. For this report, respondents repeatedly point to bench strength as the differentiator, describing winning firms in terms usually reserved for much larger practices. That combination of senior lawyers genuinely present on files rather than delegating down appears to be what sustains a boutique’s reputation across multiple survey cycles. Several respondents also pointed to a willingness to take matters to trial rather than settle as a mark of confidence that clients notice. “Their commitment to excellence, ability to confront challenging problems, and take any matter, no matter how complex, to trial is a model for the profession,” says one respondent. Bogoroch comments that trial experience is not optional for lawyers handling complex litigation. “It’s difficult, in my opinion, to handle medical malpractice cases without that trial experience. Trial shapes you, it forms you. You learn lessons from every trial that you try,” he says. On the growing role of artificial intelligence in litigation practice, Bogoroch is measured. “AI is extremely important, but it’s not a substitute for doing your own
work,” he says. “It’s a tool to save time, to do processes more efficiently. It’s not a substitute for lawyers’ role in advocacy. It cannot yet be an advocate.” He adds that firms need clear internal policies before using AI tools with client information, given the privacy risks involved. Not every 2026 winner has a decade-long track record. This year’s list includes a newly combined entity still establishing its identity in the market, alongside a firm that has practised in Toronto for more than three decades but is earning CL’s recognition in this area for the first time. Both point to the same conclusion: consistent recognition is earned continuously, not inherited from firm tenure alone.
In praise of Eastern Canada’s top litigation law boutiques Lenczner Slaght LLP is recognized among Eastern Canada’s top litigation law boutiques for 2026, the firm’s eighth appearance since 2012. Peer feedback this cycle was the most extensive of any firm surveyed, with respondents repeatedly calling the firm the benchmark for litigation law boutiques in Canada. “Lenczner Slaght is routinely held up as the number one litigation firm in Canada,” says one respondent. Another notes the firm’s “tremendous depth of legal talent” and its consistent presence on complex, highprofile mandates.
“We view the practice of law as a privilege, and with that privilege comes the responsibility to contribute to the law by serving the needs of people who need advice and guidance, regardless of ability to pay” Emily Lawrence, Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP
METHODOLOGY Canadian Lawyer’s eighth bi-annual Top Litigation Law Boutiques survey asked lawyers, in-house counsel, and clients across the country to select the litigation firms that represented the best-in-class in 2026. To be considered in the vote, firms were required to have the majority of their business come from litigation work. The final rankings were determined by a points system that rewarded firms on a sliding scale for the number of votes received at each ranking. The winners were categorized by geography, including the Top 10 in Eastern Canada and the Top 5 in Western Canada. The quantitative results were, where applicable, combined with Lexpert peer survey results, feedback from respected senior members of the bar, and regional diversity considerations. The Top Litigation Law Boutiques report is sponsored by Array.
Lax O’Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb LLP has been recognized in every report since 2012. Survey respondents point to the firm’s depth across seniority levels and its willingness to take the most complex disputes to trial. “It is a powerhouse of litigation superstars. The quality and calibre of the litigation team is second to none,” says one. Another describes the firm as “an elite firm with an expertise in handling high-stakes litigation.”
Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP has been recognized since the first report in 2012. Respondents cite the firm’s breadth across appellate, administrative, and commercial litigation, along with its pro bono commitment. “Track record, strong appellate and
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WHAT MAKES A TOP LITIGATION BOUTIQUE, IN RESPONDENTS’ OWN WORDS The most frequently cited attributes across nomination comments in this year’s survey 1
Excellent lawyers, skilled team
11%
2
Track record, results
11%
3
Client service, responsiveness
10%
4
Trial and courtroom advocacy
9%
5
Bench strength, depth of talent
9%
6
Practical, cost-effective approach
6%
7
Reputation
6%
8
Strategic thinking
6%
9
Breadth of practice
6%
10
Firm culture, collegiality
5%
11
Pro bono commitment
3%
12
Associate mentorship
3%
Reputation, strategic thinking, and breadth of practice each appeared in roughly 6% of comments, with firm culture and collegiality close behind at 5%. Pro bono commitment and associate mentorship, while less frequently mentioned overall at 3% each, appeared disproportionately often in comments about firms with the longest track records in the survey. Source: Claude’s thematic analysis of respondent nomination comments from Canadan Lawyer’s Top Litigation Law Boutiques 2026 survey, keyword-coded by category across 234 comments. Percentages reflect share of commants mentioning each theme; a single comment may reference more than one theme. Not a scored survey matric.
administrative law, commercial litigation practices, pro bono work, creative counsel who work collegially with each other and opposing counsel,” says a respondent. Emily Lawrence, managing partner at Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein in Toronto, spoke with CL about what has sustained that recognition. Q: Your firm has won recognition every survey cycle since 2012. What do you think has allowed that consistency in a field where boutiques often rise and fall? A: One, we have a real steadfast commitment
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to exceptional client service. Our collegiality is really something that sets us apart. We work together very well as a growing team, and we’re known at the bar for our civility and our ability to collaborate with opposing counsel and co-counsel, which helps with a very strong referral network. And then we have this very deep bench of talent. We started as 18 lawyers in 2001, and we’ve worked very hard to find talented, bright students and associates, provide them with opportunities, and bring them up into the partnership. We’re celebrating 25 years this year, and we have really talented people at basically every age and stage.
Q: Peers point to your breadth across appellate, administrative, and commercial litigation. How do you decide which matters to take on given that range? A: We have experts in all of those practice areas, which sets us apart from boutiques that are practice area-based. We take on work that’s interesting and work that we think matters, and lawyers here can build practices they really hone and develop based on their own interests. We think that’s how good advocates are made; appearing before different kinds of decision-makers really does enhance one’s advocacy. We also have a number of institutional clients, universities, professional regulators, unions, whose challenges generate work in a lot of areas, and then we have a thriving commercial litigation practice as well, and both streams lead to appellate advocacy. Q: Pro bono work came up repeatedly in peer feedback about your firm. How does that commitment fit into the dayto-day practice here? A: Our commitment to pro bono is across the firm, from the most senior lawyers to our students. Some of it is very flashy. We act for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association on many cases at the appellate courts and the Supreme Court of Canada, but we also act pro bono on small consumer matters, and everything in between. Providing pro bono legal services has been a guiding force since the founding of the firm. Our founding partners and their mentors before then had such a strong commitment to pro bono. We view the practice of law as a privilege, and with that privilege comes the responsibility to contribute to the law by serving the needs of people who need advice and guidance, regardless of ability to pay. We know that pro bono work sharpens our skills, deepens our expertise, and makes us feel good to give back to the community using those skills.
Stockwoods LLP
Stockwoods LLP has appeared in the rankings since 2012, with peers this time around highlighting the firm’s securities litigation and regulatory practice alongside its classaction advocacy. “Stockwoods is simply the best. Unbelievably smart, great with clients, strategic, sees the big picture and litigates to win,” says one respondent. Paul Le Vay, partner at Stockwoods in Toronto, spoke with CL about what has sustained that recognition.
Q: Peers specifically cited your securities litigation and regulatory work. How has that practice area evolved for the firm over the last decade or so? A: Securities litigation and regulatory work are two distinct but related concepts. Securities litigation involves regulatory work, representing public market participants or registrants in front of the Ontario Securities Commission, the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization, and other bodies, involving breaches of Ontario securities law. It also involves civil litigation, investor claims, intra-industry claims, and securities class actions. How that work has evolved is really a function of the regulatory choices
made by those entities – we saw it go from transgressions by junior mining companies, to cannabis, and now a lot of cryptocurrency and AI-related work. That regulatory work also tends to be more resistant to swings in the economic cycle than something like commercial litigation. Regulators keep investigating and prosecuting compliance issues regardless of whether the economy is strong, which makes it a comparatively steady part of the practice. On the class-action side, there’s been a bit less volume in Ontario lately. Amendments to the Class Proceedings Act made Ontario less appealing to plaintiffs’ lawyers, so there’s higher volume now in British Columbia and Quebec, where the
Recognized among Canadian Lawyer’s Top Litigation Boutiques 2026, Hunter Litigation Chambers brings sophisticated advocacy, deep litigation expertise, and a forward-looking approach to complex, high-stakes matters across Canada.
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“In the modern world, developing specialties is often the way people have gone, and we do have subject matter specialists, but I think we’re closer to the old model: master advocacy, evidence, and procedure, and then apply that to several different areas” Paul Le Vay, Stockwoods LLP
regime is perceived to be friendlier to the plaintiff ’s side. Our regulatory practice is quite broad and involves public inquiry work and dealing with regulatory organizations. A group of my colleagues is doing a lot of work right now for an accounting regulator, investigating large accounting firms. Q: One respondent described your firm as one that sees the big picture and litigates to win. What does that mean in practice when you’re advising a client on strategy? A: If we’re acting for an institution in an inquest or a large public inquiry, we do a fairly intensive deep dive with the client at the front end into what their objectives are, what they want the recommendations to say, where the sensitive areas are. You start by thinking about what you want the outcome to be at the end and then work to build the case and the evidence toward that. A couple of years ago, my partner Nader Hasan defended Umar Zameer, who was acquitted of all charges, including first-degree murder, in the death of a Toronto police officer, in an incident where Zameer believed he was being attacked by what was in fact an undercover officer approaching his car.
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The focus was always on the defence while acknowledging the tragedy throughout. We don’t celebrate an acquittal; we recognize justice was done. You always have to look at how you’re going to get the best outcome, bearing in mind that your audience isn’t just your client. It’s the adjudicator, the court, the tribunal, or the jury deciding the case, and how your approach will be perceived publicly afterward. Q: Several respondents also mentioned your class-action advocacy as a distinguishing strength. What draws the firm to that kind of work? A: It’s really the flexibility of the firm to master complexity in various areas of the law with the teams we’re able to build. We have people who’ve done securities class actions, competition law class actions, and product liability class actions. It’s the ability to use our advocacy skills and our knowledge of how the Class Proceedings Act regime works and quickly master the subject matter with the help of the client or experts. In the modern world, developing specialties is often the way people have gone, and we do have subject matter specialists, but I think we’re closer to the old model: master advocacy, evidence, and procedure, and then apply
that to several different areas. What we’re expert in is convincing adjudicators about something and learning what we need to convince them about on a case-by-case basis.
Adair Goldblatt Bieber LLP Adair Goldblatt Bieber LLP has been an ever-present since 2018–19. Peer feedback in this report points to the firm’s lean staffing model and its stated priority on work-life balance alongside growth. “This firm, unlike any other, considers work-life balance, a healthy office culture, and delivering excellent work to be more important than growth and billable hours,” says one respondent. Jordan Goldblatt, managing partner at Adair Goldblatt Bieber in Toronto, spoke with CL about what has changed at the firm since it began winning recognition. Q: You’ve won in every cycle since 2018– 19. What’s changed about the firm’s practice in that time, and what hasn’t? A: What’s stayed the same is that since we started the firm, we’ve always tried to have a culture where we took the work extremely seriously but tried not to take ourselves so seriously and gave space for people to find the way they wanted to practise. We wanted to do top-tier work in a way that was authentic to the people doing it. What’s changed since we started in 2018 is the complexity and size of the files have expanded. When we started, it was probably rare for a file to support more than two lawyers. Now, we have a good chunk of those files in the office, so part of our growth has been trying to keep the core feeling and ethos of the firm consistent while the nature of the mandates has expanded. Q: Your lean staffing model came up specifically in peer feedback, along
“We think it’s really important as a litigation law boutique to give people the opportunity to get into court and take on substantive pieces of a file as early in their career as possible. The only way to learn this job is to get out and do it” Jordan Goldblatt, Adair Goldblatt Bieber LLP with a stated commitment to work-life balance over growth for its own sake. How do you make that model work as caseloads grow?
parts of an appeal, take witnesses at trial, and run motions and small trials. The quicker we can get people doing that type of work, the better the firm is as a whole.
A: We want to make sure people have substantive experiences on files, which means we need more bodies because we want people, even at a junior level, to have carriage of significant parts of a file. We think it’s really important as a litigation law boutique to give people the opportunity to get into court and take on substantive pieces of a file as early in their career as possible. The only way to learn this job is to get out and do it. We staff files leanly because we have excellent people who can carry parts of a file, whether they’re a first year or a fifth year, in a way where the senior person trusts them to do the work.
Henein Hutchison Robitaille LLP returns to the winners’ list after being present five times since 2014. Respondents cite the firm’s balance of criminal, commercial, and public law mandates as a point of distinction. “Balance of criminal, commercial, public law, investigations mandates of national and international importance executed at the highest standards.”
Q: Peers noted that associates are given real leadership roles on files. How early does that start for someone joining the firm? A: Immediately. We don’t tend to think of people based on their year of call, but more in terms of what their skills are. We’ve had a first year cross-examining an expert at an arbitration because that person was capable of doing it, and the associate did an excellent job. We’ve had first-year lawyers make arguments to the Court of Appeal on substantive
Babin Bessner Spry LLP Babin Bessner Spry LLP has been recognized in many reports going back to 2016–17. Peers point to a practical and strategic approach to resolving disputes alongside strong courtroom advocacy. “Excellent strategy and advocacy, knowledgeable and skilled, takes a practical approach to resolve disputes quickly and in a costeffective manner,” says one survey respondent. Cynthia Spry (CS) and Michael Bookman (MB), both partners at Babin Bessner Spry LLP in Toronto, spoke with Canadian Lawyer about what has sustained the firm’s recognition.
Q: Your wins have come in many cycles since 2016–17. What do you think has kept the firm in peer consideration through that stretch? CS: We’ve been very successful in the mandates we’ve achieved, really since starting the firm, and definitely since 2016, 2017. We’ve always thought of ourselves as a small but mighty firm, primarily because of our exceptional clients who give us the work in the first place and our exceptional team whose support facilitates the work that we do. Another piece of peer consideration is connections with other lawyers in the industry. Our senior partner, Ed Babin, came from Torys and Davies. I came from Davies and Osler, and Michael came from Davies, as well, so we have great connections that have only grown as the firm has grown. MB: Cynthia’s speaking to the external factors; we get fantastic mandates, and as a result our peers regularly see us opposite them on significant, tough matters. On an internal basis, I think it’s a testament to the three original partners, Ed (Edward Babin), Ellen (Bessner), and Cynthia, that there’s a culture of excellence and honouring the best traditions and aspirations of the bar. That cultural element has been consistent since the very beginning. Q: Peers highlighted a practical, cost-effective approach to resolving disputes. How do you balance that against taking a hard line when a client needs to fight? CS: We try to be practical and cost-effective because we want to get the client the best possible result, whether that’s through a pitched battle, fighting on every point, or just a little help to reach a negotiated resolution. We don’t like waste, so we want to make sure all the work we’re doing is directed to the desired outcome. But if you have a counterparty who’s unreasonable, then
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“What’s in the best interests of the client is the strategic advice we want to give. To be hard on the issues when it’s in the client’s best interest, or to take a step back and look strategically when the analysis favours a different approach” Michael Bookman, Babin Bessner Spry LLP sometimes that is the approach you have to take. MB: What’s in the best interests of the client is the strategic advice we want to give. To be hard on the issues when it’s in the client’s best interest, or to take a step back and look strategically when the analysis favours a different approach. It’s an ongoing conversation with the client, keeping their best interests and desired outcome in mind. Q: Associate development and firm culture came up often in the feedback. What does that actually look like day to day at the firm? MB: I remember one of my first days at the firm, Ed and Cynthia taking me through how I’d be staffed on a matter, very much in the traditional model of a senior and a junior splitting responsibility, developing right at the limit of where I was comfortable, and maybe a bit further, because that’s the only way to get better. We’re not a big firm, so you’re going to have responsibility as a junior earlier, and we want that for our associates. CS: We think that to be a great litigator, you need to be in court getting experience, so we actively look for opportunities to develop our associates’ skills and get them on their feet litigating early.
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On firm culture, we care deeply about our team, and we’re very careful about who we hire. Ed’s tradition is being hard on the issues but soft on the people where we can, and we take that in spades with our associates. We have a really great group of associates and partners who enjoy working together. It’s a very collaborative culture.
Woods LLP
Woods LLP is the sole Montreal-based firm among the Eastern Canada winners, recognized in every report since 2012. Respondents point to the firm’s scale and the calibre of its senior litigators, including a former Supreme Court of Canada judge. “Number of top litigators, complexity of the files handled, [having a] former Supreme Court of Canada judge and a former Court of Appeal judge, quality of the entire team,” says one. Ross Nasseri LLP earns recognition among the Eastern Canada winners. The firm formed in February 2021 when Justin Nasseri’s Goddard Nasseri merged into Mark Ross’ Ross Barristers, a firm that had been practising since 2006, making this year’s recognition new for the combined
firm even though the underlying practice is well established. Peer feedback points to the firm’s growth trajectory under its current name. “The lawyers support and promote one another and are building a great new firm with smart strategic hiring,” says a respondent. Affleck Greene McMurtry LLP (AGM) earns recognition among the Eastern Canada winners for the first time in this report’s history, though the Toronto firm itself has practised since 1992. Peer feedback points to the firm’s combination of senior-level depth and boutique focus, with directory recognition across competition, corporate, and construction litigation. “What makes AGM exemplary is that it offers clients the strategic firepower of a toptier litigation shop without the structural dilution of a large full-service firm,” says one survey respondent.
In praise of Western Canada’s top litigation law boutiques
Hunter Litigation Chambers Hunter Litigation Chambers is recognized among Western Canada’s top litigation law boutiques, with wins in every edition since 2012. Respondents point to the depth of talent across seniority levels and the firm’s reputation with the courts. “The depth of talent, all the senior people are recognized as leading counsel, midlevel practitioners are highly regarded by the courts and administrative tribunals,” says one. Randal Kaardal, KC, counsel at Hunter Litigation Chambers in Vancouver, spoke with CL about what has sustained that recognition. Q: Your chambers has won recognition going back to 2012. What has
stayed consistent about the way you approach litigation over that stretch, and what has had to change? A: The main thing that has stayed the same is we’re a firm that very much enjoys, and is proud of, what we do. We take pride in our work, and that came from the founders at the very beginning, John Hunter, Peter Voith, Bill Berardino, and David Harris. They were all senior practitioners who set a very high standard, both in terms of understanding the client’s needs and what would best serve the client, and in advancing the law. We’ve always attracted people who are like-minded, and I like to think our current senior people, myself, Bill Smart, Claire Hunter, and Brian Duong, have a similar attitude and respect for the way to practise. We see a continuation of that ethic in the fact that our next generation of lead counsel are all recognized by their peers as leading practitioners. What’s changed is the speed with which we have to practise. Clients want answers more quickly, courts have put processes in place to get matters on more quickly, and there are often shorter time fuses with injunctions and other types of litigation than there used to be, so we’ve had to keep up to date with technology to make sure we’re well placed to respond. Q: Peers describe your senior counsel as consistently trusted by the courts and administrative tribunals. What do you think earns that kind of trust over time? A: The senior counsel here have worked very hard to make sure that when we go to court, the court can trust what we have to say. We’re very careful and thoughtful about ensuring our client’s best case, one that’s accurate, is put forward to the court. There’s a lot more law out there today, more reported decisions, and it’s very difficult for the courts to keep up with it all, so we have to be particularly careful to ensure we’re representing the state of the law accurately.
2026 WINNERS AT A GLANCE Lenczner Slaght LLP Since 2012 Toronto · General commercial litigation
Eastern Canada
Lax O’Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb LLP Since 2012 Toronto · Complex, high-stakes commercial litigation
Eastern Canada
Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP Since 2012 Toronto · Appellate, administrative & commercial litigation
Eastern Canada
Stockwoods LLP Since 2012 Toronto · Securities litigation, regulatory & class actions
Adair Goldblatt Bieber LLP Toronto · General commercial litigation
Henein Hutchison Robitaille LLP Toronto · Criminal, commercial & public law
Babin Bessner Spry LLP Toronto · General dispute resolution
Eastern Canada
Eastern Canada
Eastern Canada
Eastern Canada
Woods LLP Since 2012 Montreal · General commercial litigation
Ross Nasseri LLP Toronto · General commercial litigation
Affleck Greene McMurtry LLP Toronto · Competition, corporate & construction litigation
Eastern Canada
Eastern Canada
Eastern Canada
Hunter Litigation Chambers Since 2012 Vancouver · General litigation
Jensen Shawa Solomon Duguid Hawkes LLP Calgary · General commercial litigation
HMC Lawyers LLP Calgary · General commercial litigation
McEwan Partners LLP Vancouver · General litigation
Nathanson Schachter & Thompson LLP Vancouver · General litigation
Western Canada
Western Canada
Western Canada
Western Canada
Western Canada
Since 2012 marks a firm recognized in every cycle since the survey began Ranked by Canadian lawyers, in-house counsel, and clients in Canadian Lawyer’s 2026 Top Litigation Boutiques survey. 10 firms recognized in Eastern Canada, five in Western Canada.
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“The main thing that has stayed the same is we’re a firm that very much enjoys, and is proud of, what we do. We take pride in our work, and that came from the founders at the very beginning” Randal Kaardal, KC, Hunter Litigation Chambers Sometimes, we’re arguing in an area where the law isn’t very certain yet, and I think it’s important that we advise the court of that rather than overstate our position. We’re trying to assist the court at all times to come to the correct decision. I think we’ve gained the trust of the courts that they can rely on our submissions. They may disagree with them, but they can rely on the fact that we’re not there leading them astray. Q: The chambers model is different from a typical firm structure. How does that structure shape the way you take on and resolve high-profile matters? A: We don’t have a true chambers model the way they’d have in England, but our ethic is a bit more of a chambers model than our competitors’. Each of our counsel is encouraged to develop their practice as they see fit, provided there aren’t conflicts. So we have people with unique practices, more regulatory work, more criminal work, that wouldn’t touch on my own practice at all. We argue a full spectrum of cases for all different types of clients, and we’ve acted for and against governmental bodies on Charter cases because we don’t see ourselves as a firm that only supports one particular interest group. Because we can take on such a broad variety of work, we get referrals from family law firms, personal injury firms, large corpo-
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rate commercial litigation, and files for or against the government across all kinds of industries. Jensen Shawa Solomon Duguid Hawkes LLP has been recognized in most cycles since 2014. Peers point to the firm’s mentoring culture and its in-court experience. “Excellence, depth, and commitment to mentoring,” says one survey respondent, while another calls the firm “lawyers for lawyers, top-tier service and expertise.” Ryan Phillips, managing partner at Jensen Shawa Solomon Duguid Hawkes in Calgary, spoke with CL about what has sustained that recognition. Q: What’s kept the firm competitive in the Calgary litigation market over the past decade or longer? A: It’s one of those things that has just happened organically over time. I don’t think we’ve ever had a plan to grow or expand; it’s just happened naturally. We’re 41 lawyers now, it’s hard to keep track these days; it slowly keeps creeping up as we get busier. Clients seem to like the work we’re doing, and we enjoy doing it. We pride ourselves on providing a nimbler and responsive platform to serve clients’ interests and incorporate those interests directly into the work we do, to ensure we’re meeting their needs and advocating for them as best we can.
It’s worked out well for us in the past, and the results speak for themselves in that we continue to stay busy and grow. Q: Mentoring came up repeatedly in peer feedback. How is that built into the way the firm operates? A: We do undertake a deliberate effort to ensure we have a good mentorship structure. It starts from students and more junior lawyers. We implement a buddy system, where you have somebody from the moment you start at the firm to ask any questions about how things work, and to keep tabs on how your progress is going. When somebody gets a good decision, an email gets circulated around the firm giving accolades and congratulating people, which makes people feel good, gives them recognition more broadly across the firm, and alerts colleagues to an area someone’s interested in for future files. Across 41 lawyers, we all practise broadly in civil and commercial litigation, and within that, there are so many different areas we each focus on. We also have a mentormentee system where you’re assigned a mentor you check in with regularly. We had a lawyer start at the firm last year (2025) who comes to me regularly with questions on her files, and I really appreciate it, because I remember being in her shoes. When you finish articling, the thought is that you’re a lawyer and ready to practise, but there are a lot of questions that remain, and you learn as you go. Having somebody in a formal structure that you feel comfortable going to is invaluable. I’ve been at the firm for almost 13 years now, and I really appreciated having that when I was more junior – being able to go to court and questioning and actually see the senior lawyer on the file in action because there’s no substitute for seeing how it plays out. You’re also not just assigned to one or two lawyers. If you express interest in something, you can work with any number of lawyers, see their style, and over time, develop your
own by incorporating bits of what each of them does. Q: Strong in-court experience was mentioned by respondents as a hallmark of your firm. How do you make sure that experience gets passed down to more junior lawyers? A: It’s really a function of being expected as part of the team to carry through the entire file, from the initial analysis and developing the case through to interim hearings and occasionally trial, incorporating more junior lawyers into those aspects. I was in a hearing yesterday with a more junior associate who’s been helping me on the matter, and in many situations, we actually offer the opportunity for students to show up and observe without billing any time to the file, because that’s deliberate. It helps them learn and become excellent lawyers and fosters a cohesive culture. When those opportunities come up, we make an attempt to ensure that if you’re working with a more senior lawyer on a file, you’re involved at every stage, showing up at hearings and trials to contribute in a meaningful way. Relatively recently, the Alberta Court of King’s Bench sent out a notice encouraging more junior lawyers to give submissions. We support that, so where it’s appropriate, a junior lawyer helping on the file may take parts of the submissions, and as they get more comfortable, they take on more and more responsibility.
HMC Lawyers LLP HMC Lawyers LLP drew one of the highest comment volumes of any firm surveyed this cycle. Respondents describe a firm offering big-firm calibre work without big-firm structure, along with long-tenured staff.
“Repeat clients remember how quickly somebody responded to them, and they remember how they are treated, which I think, in many cases, is probably as important as the end result” Michael Hokanson, KC, managing partner at HMC Lawyers LLP “I have now stayed employed with HMC Lawyers for 30-plus years. Not only are they professional in their work and in their dealings with their clients – they also go out of their way to make their employees feel like family,” says one survey respondent. Michael Hokanson, KC, managing partner at HMC Lawyers in Calgary, spoke with CL about what sustains that culture. Q: Peers described a family-like culture and long-tenured staff at HMC Lawyers. What do you think keeps people at the firm for decades? A: We do a lot of stuff together. Many of the lawyers go out for lunch once a week as a group, and we have a retreat coming up in the fall where all of the lawyers in the office and their families are going to Victoria for a few days. It’s important to the firm that spouses and significant others are acknowledged, and that people can bring their kids, so our families spend time together. We have people at all sorts of different demographic levels, from old guys like me, younger families with toddlers running around, and also some of the younger people without families. There’s a real sense of belonging and family for the whole group. We’re friends outside of work, too. I think people see that lawyers in our office have been here a long time, and they understand what drives that. We’re also very careful to hire
lawyers we expect will fit into our culture and who genuinely want to be here. We want and expect our people to be excellent lawyers, but it’s a much bigger deal that the person will fit within the group, and I think the reason for the longevity of our office is because we genuinely like one another. We also take a genuine interest in the advancement and goals of each person. For instance, we have 1:1 partner/associate mentorship meetings every month. Q: Peers described HMC as offering bigfirm calibre work without big-firm structure. What does that distinction mean to you in practice? A: We do think we provide a pretty high level of litigation services within our lanes. We have a growing family law department, an employment law group, a construction law group, commercial litigation, and insurance, with a lot of cross-promotion between those groups. That means we find the right person to do the job rather than keeping work to ourselves, which lends itself to a lot more collaboration. I think that’s part of why we get work where there’s a national firm on the other side, because a number of our lawyers are regularly dealing with lawyers from the national firms on similar work. We also do a fair bit of conflict work for big firms because we’re smaller and don’t have the same massive volume of clients. So, we don’t run into the same conflict problems that
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LITIGATION LEADS A GROWING MARKET Where litigation fits within Canada’s expanding legal services industry
30% of legal services revenue
Litigation was the largest revenue-generating segment of Canada’s legal services market in 2024, ahead of corporate, real estate, and every other practice area tracked.
35,313 law firm businesses were operating in Canada as of 2025, up 1.1% from 2024 – continuing a slow but steady five-year growth trend.
Market Size 2024
2025
$21.9 bilion
$22.3 bilion
+1.8% year over year · 3.5% five-year CAGR (2020–2025)
Number of firms 2024
2025
34,929 firms
35,313 firms
+1.1% year over year · a slow, steady five-year growth trend
Market-size and firm-count figures are from IBISWorld’s Law Firms in Canada industry report, published December 2025, the most current data available, stated in Canadian dollars. The litigation segment share is drawn from a separate source – Grand View Research / Horizon Databook – using a different market definition, with 2024 as its most current reported year. Figures are independent of Canadian Lawyer’s own Top Litigation Law Boutiques survey.
they do, and the referring people know the work will be handled well. Q: Comprehensive client service and responsiveness came up often in the feedback. How does the firm structure itself to deliver on that consistently? A: We have a unique approach to file and client ownership that encourages collaboration rather than internal competition. This allows us to put the best lawyer on a task regardless of the client, and that encourages a quality of work and result that allows us to compete with anyone in the litigation market. We are small enough that we don’t need to formally track origination as a metric. Everyone who is here has a good idea of who brings what to the table, and we find that some of the traditional origination metrics can lead to behaviour that is much more
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oriented to the individual as opposed to the team. Because we aren’t meticulously tracking who opens what file, the person who’s available and right for the work can be assigned the work, rather than someone holding onto a client relationship. If it’s better for the client to have somebody else do the work, we have that other person do it, and the clients are happy. Repeat clients remember how quickly somebody responded to them, and they remember how they are treated, which I think, in many cases, is probably as important as the end result, though the end result obviously matters, too. Excellent lawyers lose cases, too. We have clients who’ve had a bad result who keep coming back because they appreciate how we do things. If the focus is on the work rather than on who gets credit for it, the clients tend to be happy.
McEwan Partners LLP returns to recognition this cycle from its Vancouver base. Peer feedback points to bench strength as the firm’s defining quality. “Excellent bench strength,” says one respondent. Nathanson Schachter & Thompson LLP has been recognized in most cycles since 2014. Respondents describe a strategic, client-tailored approach to litigation. “All partners are experienced litigation counsel who take a strategic approach from the outset of a file, tailored to the particular needs of the file and client,” one respondent says.
What’s ahead for litigation law boutiques As client demand for senior-level attention continues to outpace what many full-service firms can offer at a comparable cost, Canada’s litigation law boutiques appear well positioned heading into the next survey cycle, particularly as litigation risk continues to expand across jurisdictions from class actions to mass tort claims. The firms that have sustained recognition across multiple cycles point to a formula that seems durable regardless of market conditions: senior lawyer availability, trial readiness, and a scale small enough to keep clients working directly with the partners they hired. Several winners point to succession as the next test of that model. At Hunter Litigation Chambers, Randal Kaardal, KC, points to the firm’s own generational transition as proof the formula holds. “We’ve had good succession and evolution,” he says, citing Claire Hunter’s rise to a national profile more than 20 years after the firm’s founders began practising together, with a newer group of lawyers about a decade behind her already recognized in peer guides as leaders in their field. Jordan Goldblatt at Adair Goldblatt Bieber describes a similar deliberate approach, developing junior lawyers quickly enough that they can eventually take over the firm’s senior work. “The quicker we can get people doing that type of work, the better the
firm is as a whole,” he says. Keeping pace with a faster litigation environment is another pressure winners named directly. “Clients want answers more quickly. The courts have put processes in place to try and get matters on more quickly,” Kaardal says, pointing to shorter timelines on injunctions and other urgent matters as a reason firms have had to invest in technology to keep up. That pressure compounds as mandates grow in size and complexity, a trend Emily Lawrence at Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein and Goldblatt both raised independently when describing how their firms have grown their benches to match.
Expert insight with Richard M. Bogoroch Founder and managing partner, Bogoroch & Associates, Toronto, ON
Array
Q: Beyond medical malpractice, what dispute areas are generating the most litigation activity in Ontario right now? A: Personal injury litigation is still very active and will continue to be. There have been significant legislative changes, particularly to the Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule, which will have a real impact since they came into effect on July 1, 2026. Personal injury litigation continues to generate a great deal of cases, occupiers’ liability cases among them. We’re also aware of the activity in class actions, though we don’t handle those ourselves. Q: How have the skills expected of top litigators changed in recent years? A: Skill is a question of experience and the ability to handle complex cases. The more
cases you handle, sometimes the greater skill you obtain, and trying cases sharpens your skill set and enhances your experience. Lawyers who practise in this area also build their skills through organizations, seminars, and conferences, and by sharing what they learn from those with their colleagues. It’s evolving; it’s always evolving and growing, never standing still. Q: Where do you see the most practical value in AI adoption for litigation practices right now? A: AI is very helpful for indexing and summarizing records, particularly with the volume of medical records these cases generate, sometimes thousands of pages. It’s not a substitute for lawyers’ role in advocacy, and it cannot yet be an advocate, but it saves time and makes
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A
rray is a technology-driven litigation support company, helping law firms, corporate legal departments, and government organizations navigate the increasing complexity, volume, and pace of modern litigation. With operations across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, Array combines experienced legal professionals, advanced technology, and integrated workflows to help legal teams manage critical litigation processes with greater efficiency, control, and confidence. Array provides end-to-end litigation support across the litigation life cycle, including eDiscovery, managed document review, court reporting, and legal staffing services. From collecting and processing complex data to reviewing documents, preparing for testimony, and managing the logistics of proceedings, Array helps legal teams reduce administrative burdens and focus more of their time on strategy and the decisions that matter most. Array’s goal is simple: to simplify litigation so legal teams can focus on legal strategy. By bringing people, process, and technology together, Array helps clients streamline workflows, control costs, improve visibility, and maintain defensibility throughout the litigation process. As litigation continues to evolve, Array is focused on what comes next: applying intelligence where it creates meaningful value, connecting previously siloed workflows, and giving legal teams the insight and support they need to make better decisions with confidence.
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SPECIAL REPORT
TOP LITIGATION LAW BOUTIQUES 2026
processes more efficient. Firms need to be careful about privacy, though. You have to have policies and procedures in place to make sure client information isn’t put into tools like ChatGPT without safeguards.
The formula recognition
behind
lasting
Across 15 winners and eight survey cycles, the same qualities surface again and again:
• senior lawyers who stay close to the file • a genuine willingness to go to trial • a scale that keeps client relationships direct rather than layered What separates this year’s list from a simple ranking is how many firms have proven that more than once – and none of them are defending it passively. Hunter Litigation Chambers and Adair
Goldblatt Bieber both described deliberately developing junior lawyers into leadership roles well ahead of the traditional timeline, while Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein pointed to collegiality and referral relationships built over decades as a competitive asset in their own right. Recognition earned once is a moment. Recognition earned across 14 years is a discipline.
TOP LITIGATION LAW BOUTIQUES 2026 Top 10 – Eastern Canada
Top 5 – Western Canada
Stockwoods LLP
HMC Lawyers LLP
Phone: 416 593 7200 Email: reception@stockwoods.ca Website: stockwoods.ca
Phone: 403 269 7220 Email: info@hmclawyers.com Website: hmclawyers.com
Adair Goldblatt Bieber LLP Phone: 416 499 9940 Email: info@agbllp.com Website: agbllp.com Babin Bessner Spry LLP Phone: 416 637 3244 Email: ebabin@babinbessnerspry.com Website: babinbessnerspry.com Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP
Hunter Litigation Chambers Phone: 604 891 2405 Email: mabdollahi@litigationchambers.com Website: litigationchambers.com Jensen Shawa Solomon Duguid Hawkes LLP McEwan Partners LLP Nathanson Schachter & Thompson LLP
Phone: 416 646 4300 Email: info@paliareroland.com Website: paliareroland.com Woods LLP Phone: 514 982 4545 Email: general@woods.qc.ca Website: woods.qc.ca Affleck Greene McMurtry LLP Henein Hutchison Robitaille LLP Lax O’Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb LLP Lenczner Slaght LLP Ross Nasseri LLP
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Insights As part of our editorial process, Canadian Lawyer’s researchers interviewed the subject matter expert below for an independent analysis of this report and its findings.
Richard M. Bogoroch Founder and Managing Partner Bogoroch & Associates LLP Website: bogoroch.com
LEGAL REPORT
MEDICAL MALPRACTICE
Reproductive malpractice: where Canadian law stands As fertility clinics and obstetric delivery rooms generate more litigation, Canada’s legal framework for reproductive medicine is still being written
WHEN A woman enters a fertility clinic or a delivery room, she places extraordinary trust in medical professionals at one of the most vulnerable moments of her life. When that trust is violated – through a misused embryo, a contraindicated drug, or a failure to disclose a critical option – Canadian law is working out exactly what she and her family are owed and by whom. A Neinstein LLP survey released in February 2026 found that 34 percent of Canadian mothers describe their labour as challenging or distressing, rising to 37 percent among visible minority mothers. Those numbers map onto a legal landscape where the duty of care in reproductive medicine remains unsettled. Rose Leto, a medical malpractice partner at Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers in Toronto, says the most common breach she sees in obstetric cases involves oxytocin management. “Pitocin, which is the synthetic version of oxytocin, is a drug used to augment labour, and it often does a really good job in increasing the contractions,” she says, “but it’s also quite a dangerous drug, and there are some significant rules that come with using it.” When those rules are not followed, “they don’t take mom’s complaints seriously, and they don’t investigate those concerns, that can lead to a
disastrous outcome for both the mom and the baby,” she says. Establishing a viable claim requires more than a poor outcome. The breachcausation-damages framework still applies, and a distressing experience alone does not satisfy it. The survey findings that 32 percent of mothers felt dismissed by medical professionals and 28 percent felt pressured into decisions reflect a pattern that Leto’s firm consistently sees. “Women without a support system, a support person, and women of a visible minority tend to have poorer outcomes,” she says. “That’s just been
our anecdotal experience, and the study supported that finding.” One of the most consequential obstetric cases she flags is Hemmings v. Peng, which her firm argued as co-counsel before the Supreme Court of Canada in February 2026. It involves a high-risk obstetric patient who was not offered the right to terminate a pregnancy she did not want, and later suffered a cardiac arrest during a caesarean section under anaesthesia. At trial, the client was awarded $12 million, which was upheld by the Ontario Court of Appeal, but only against the anaesthesiologist. The case is
INSIDE CANADA’S UNREGULATED FERTILITY CLINICS Assisted Human Reproduction Act (federal, 2004) Prohibits the commercial sale of sperm, eggs, and paid surrogacy. Does not regulate clinic operations, lab standards, or error reporting. College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario Can inspect fertility clinics only where procedures involve anaesthesia. Laboratory practices fall outside its authority. Embryologists Not a licensed or regulated profession in any Canadian jurisdiction. Error reporting No mandatory reporting requirement exists anywhere in Canada.
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LEGAL REPORT
MEDICAL MALPRACTICE
testing whether a physician who fails to offer a patient the right to terminate the pregnancy should be held responsible for her devastating injuries.
Inside the fertility clinic: a legal frontier If obstetric malpractice operates within a relatively settled framework, fertility clinic negligence is something else. “The only meaningful regulation that governs the fertility industry is a federal piece of legislation called the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, and it’s essentially criminal legislation – breaches can actually constitute offences and attract significant penalties,” says Jan Marin, a senior lawyer at Gluckstein Lawyers in Toronto who practises in both birth injury and fertility negligence. The act prohibits the commercial sale of sperm, eggs, and surrogacy services but establishes no operational standards for
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“Women without a support system, a support person, and women of a visible minority tend to have poorer outcomes” Rose Leto, Neinstein LLP clinic practice. Embryologists who create and handle biological materials are not licensed professionals in Canada, and there is no mandatory error reporting in any jurisdiction. “There’s no tracking of major fertility errors,” Marin says. “So one clinic could have serious errors happening repeatedly, and there’s no centralized system that necessarily connects the dots. I certainly have multiple cases involving the same clinic.” The errors she encounters span accidental embryo destruction, wrong-donor implantation, and cases where an embryo is created using the wrong person’s sperm
or egg, leaving the child biologically connected to one parent but not the other. A growing category involves errors that are invisible at the time of treatment but surface years later through genetic testing. In law, almost nothing is resolved: “It is still a bit of the Wild West when it comes to the law,” she says. The primary Canadian precedent on damages is Dixon et al. v. Barwin, 2021 ONSC 7257, a class action against Ottawa fertility physician Dr. Norman Barwin, who for decades had inseminated patients using genetic material that was not that of the
correct father, including in some cases his own. Many affected families discovered this through DNA testing. The class covered mothers whose consent was violated, their
child – you’ve gained a child. So that’s not a damage,” she says. Neither this argument nor the insurer question has yet been tested by a Canadian court.
“There’s no tracking of major fertility errors. So, one clinic could have serious errors happening repeatedly, and there’s no centralized system that necessarily connects the dots” Jan Marin, Gluckstein Lawyers partners and spouses, and the children themselves. Regional Senior Justice Calum MacLeod approved a $13.375-million settlement in November 2021, with individual payouts reaching up to $50,000 depending on harm category.
The causation problem Shanti Barclay, a partner at Zarek Taylor Grossman Hanrahan LLP in Toronto whose health law practice includes institutional liability defence, says Barwin is the only reported Canadian decision to provide guidance on damages for fertility clinic claims. “If the wrong sperm had not been used, would this couple or person end up with a child at all?” she asks. “And then is the wrong child better than no child?” The defence relies on statistics: individual IVF success rates remain relatively low even when procedures are performed correctly, meaning a wrongdonor or wrong-embryo outcome may have produced the only live birth a given patient would have achieved. Barclay acknowledges the approach has limits: “That might get harder as the technology gets better,” she says. On damages, she argues for a deduction corresponding to the benefit of gaining a child, by analogy from Family Law Act claims. “So, if you have gained a
Where the law is heading The outer limit of the duty of care in reproductive medicine was addressed in Florence v. Benzaquen, 2021 ONCA 523, which tested whether pre-conception negligence gives rise to a duty of care to children not yet conceived. Writing for the majority with Justice MacPherson concurring, Justice Gillese upheld dismissal of the children’s claims: whether a drug is contraindicated goes to the standard of care owed to the mother, not to whether a duty was owed to unconceived children. In Ontario, no duty of care runs to a future child for pre-conception negligence. Justice Fairburn dissented. Prior caselaw drew a contrast between indicated drugs – where informed consent governs – and contraindicated drugs – where no non-negligent physician would have prescribed them. Where a drug is truly contraindicated, she argued, the conflict-of-interest concern falls away because the mother and future child’s interests align, and she would have allowed the claim to proceed to trial. Leave to the SCC was denied. The parents’ claims were resolved confidentially. For Leto, the dissent leaves the question open. “The dissenting judge drew an important distinction between the informed-consent analysis – whether the mother was adequately advised of the risks,
SURVEY FINDINGS AT A GLANCE 34% of mothers describe their labour as challenging or distressing 37% of visible minority mothers say the same – rising to 51% among those without a partner or support person 65% experienced unplanned complications or interventions; 70% of those said they were unexpected 32% felt dismissed or ignored by medical professionals at times 28% felt pressured into medical decisions 46% say the experience affected their mental health (rising to 64% among those with very challenging births) 65% feel society focuses only on a healthy baby outcome, ignoring what the mother goes through Source: Birthmarks: The Cost of Motherhood, Neinstein LLP / Fuse Insights, February 2026
including that the drug was contraindicated – and the separate question of whether a duty of care could be owed to a child who had not yet been conceived,” she says. Leto does not view the decision as necessarily foreclosing the issue. “I don’t think the door is necessarily closed to a claim involving a subsequently conceived child in a different factual context,” she says. How the Supreme Court rules in Hemmings will not resolve the Florence duty question directly but will signal how expansively Canadian courts are now prepared to define what physicians owe patients at the most consequential moments of their reproductive lives.
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FEATURE
CROSS EXAMINED
Pulling no punches on broken courts A new memoir and film, based on the life of Canada’s first openly gay judge, Harvey Brownstone, reckons with family and criminal court dysfunction
CANADA’S JUSTICE system is treating child custody as a legal problem when it’s actually a healthcare problem, says Harvey Brownstone – the country’s first openly gay judge – whose new memoir is both a personal reckoning and a sharp critique of the bench he served on for 26 years. Brownstone retired from the Ontario Court of Justice in December 2021. His memoir, Without Prejudice: My Life as a Gay Judge, published by ECW Press, traces a life that began with his mother, a FrenchAlgerian Holocaust survivor who arrived in Canada speaking almost no English, through years on welfare after coming out to his parents at 19 to his appointment in April 1995 as the first openly gay judge in Canada. The book covers the bullying, the homophobia he encountered trying to get hired as a lawyer in the 1980s, the old boys’ club that awaited him on the bench, his role officiating hundreds of same-sex weddings after Ontario legalized them, and the smear campaign that he says derailed his bid for chief justice in 2015. But it’s his critique of the courts – unfiltered now that he’s no longer bound by judicial conduct restrictions – that will land hardest on lawyers reading it. “Family court is much more emotionally draining than criminal court,” he writes in Without Prejudice. “In criminal court, we see bad people at their best behaviour… But, in family court, we see good people at
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their worst behaviour.” So enmeshed in the turmoil of their breakdown, they often can’t control themselves in court, he argues.
to create a family court system,” he says, “no one I know would create the system we have.”
A bench he helped transform A court system no one would build from scratch The adversarial structure designed for criminal matters, Brownstone argues, is poorly suited to the raw disputes between separating parents. “In family court, nobody wins. There’s only degrees of losing,” he says. “The biggest losers are the children.” Legal solutions are often the wrong approach. High-conflict parents need psychologists, therapists, and social workers
Brownstone was 38 when he was sworn in at Old City Hall in Toronto, with then attorney general Marion Boyd in attendance – a historically unusual event. The judiciary he entered was still at the tail end of the old boys’ club era. At his first posting, nearly all his colleagues were men in their 70s; beer filled the fridge at lunch and, on one occasion, they arranged a lap dance intended, he writes, as a form of conversion therapy. He says that culture had largely disappeared
“In family court, nobody wins. There’s only degrees of losing. The biggest losers are the children” at least as much as they need lawyers, he says. During his years on the bench, Brownstone tracked the causes of relationship breakdowns in his courtroom. Infidelity, he found, drove roughly 90 percent of cases – the deceived partner pouring that fury into litigation over pillowcases, lawn furniture, Air Miles, even a stain on a child’s T-shirt. He is clear-eyed about the scale of the problem. “If we were to start again from scratch
by about 2005 – partly due to the Hryciuk Judicial Council hearings of the mid-1990s and partly due to the Judicial Appointments Advisory Committee process introduced by then Attorney General Ian Scott, which replaced political appointments with an independent panel – producing “highly qualified lawyers who were experts in law and also had the people skills to preside in court with dignity,” he says.
WITHOUT PREJUDICE Without Prejudice: My Life as a Gay Judge was published this year by ECW Press. The film adaptation, Without Prejudice, will have its Canadian premiere on Sunday, November 1, at the Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre. The film is directed by Shane Stanley, stars David Arquette and David Mazouz as Brownstone, and co-stars Rachelle Lefevre and Danielle C. Ryan. Cinematography is by Joel Layogan and editing by Peter Devaney Flanagan.
His own contribution to the bench’s cultural shift included a practice then considered revolutionary: talking directly to litigants. When he was a lawyer, judges addressed only counsel – clients sat voiceless, often leaving with no idea what had been decided about their lives. Brownstone changed that, inviting litigants to ask him questions and explaining his decisions in plain terms. Within a few years, lawyers were pressuring their colleagues to do the same, he says. His 2009 book, Tug of War – the first book by a sitting Canadian judge written for a general audience on family law – was
an extension of that impulse. His chief at the time offered no support; Justice Rosalie Abella, then on the Supreme Court of Canada, urged him to publish it anyway. The book became a bestseller. All royalties went to the Children’s Wish Foundation.
Life after the bench Brownstone retired in late 2021, partly pushed by the pandemic’s shift to Zoom proceedings – “a very, very challenging way to try to connect with people emotionally,” he says – and still carrying what he describes as the bitterness of the 2015 chief justice
process. He says he was asked to submit his name to be chief justice at the time, but “I became the victim of some serious homophobia within the judiciary and a smear campaign that ended up in the media.” His reinvention since then has been striking. The YouTube program Harvey Brownstone Interviews launched in 2021, attracts millions of viewers, and airs on television in the United Kingdom. A Hollywood feature film based on the memoir, directed by Shane Stanley and starring David Arquette as the judge, with David Mazouz as the young adult Harvey, will premiere in Canada on November 1. For the legal community, it is the book’s account of the courts – written without the muzzle of judicial-conduct restrictions – that is particularly significant. The access-to-justice challenges Brownstone raises have preoccupied courts, bar associations, and governments for decades. His argument – that the family court model is structurally broken, and only a therapeutic, less adversarial approach will fix it – is not new in legal-reform circles. But it carries unusual weight from a judge who presided for a quarter century, tracked the data in his own courtroom, and is now free to say so.
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BACK PAGE
OPINION
The powers no body uses Law societies hold powers that reach law firms. Cases using them against a firm’s workplace: I found none FOR AN associate bullied by the lawyer who controls her work and references, reporting is not a neutral act. In a Law Society of British Columbia survey of 787 respondents, 78.7 percent had experienced discrimination, harassment, sexual harassment, or bullying. Among those who reported an incident, 9.1 percent reported it to the LSBC. Ontario’s Discrimination and Harassment Counsel is confidential and cannot investigate or discipline; discipline sits with the regulator, whose firm powers remain unused. Canadian law societies punish harassers one at a time. Not one, in any reported decision, has held a law firm to account for the workplace that allowed the harassment to occur. This begins with the gap in the rulebook. The Federation of Law Societies modernized its Model Code in October 2022, adding rules against harassment and reprisal that protect “a colleague, employee, client or any other person.” Every common-law jurisdiction in Canada has adopted that framework except one. Almost everywhere, a lawyer who bullies an associate now breaches a specific conduct rule, even absent a sexual advance or protected ground. Ontario, with the country’s largest bar, has adopted neither rule: its code names sexual harassment and discrimination, leaving bullying to general provisions written for other purposes. There are also dormant powers. Nova Scotia’s Legal Profession Act lets a discipline panel find a firm guilty of professional misconduct and fine it up to $50,000. Manitoba’s regulator fines a firm found in contravention up to $100,000. Saskatchewan treats firms as members, subject to discipline. Ontario’s legislature wrote firms into the Law Society Act in 2020, including
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granting bylaw-making authority, four years after Convocation approved seeking that authority. I searched for a single published decision sanctioning a firm over its workplace, in any province. I found none. The statutes are in force; the published record of their use is empty. The cost is clearest among women. Combing through court and tribunal records, the Toronto Star found 65 cases since 2000 alleging sexual misconduct by lawyers against colleagues. In 32 known outcomes, 23 complainants left their jobs. In the profession’s national health study, 72.2 percent
I know the objection: other workplace law already covers this. Provincial health and safety law may require harassment policies, programs, and investigations; human rights codes reach discriminatory harassment; civil remedies may exist. But those regimes leave gaps where law firms live. Equity partnerships will rarely be employment relationships for human rights purposes, the Supreme Court held in McCormick. Ontario’s top court declined to recognize a free-standing tort of harassment. For an associate whose supervisor controls work, advancement, and references, litigation is hardly a frictionless remedy. In its duty-to-report work last year, the Federation declined to propose making lawyers report harassment, citing Louise Arbour’s conclusion that the duty “has served only to terrorize and revictimize those it was meant to protect.” That logic points one way: the mandatory burden falls on firms and managers, not victims. It can be done: One BC lawyer’s return to practice is conditional on him or his firm maintaining an approved sexual harassment policy and engaging an external lawyer to investigate complaints against him. A reactive condition, once. Make prevention the rule.
Firms must maintain real anti-harassment systems, beyond mere policies framed and hanging in the lunchroom of reported uncivil and violent acts were committed by colleagues, supervisors, or judges. Women are 49 percent of practising lawyers, the IBA reports, but represent only 35 percent of senior lawyers in private firms. Harassment is a health hazard and a driver of attrition, one that a regulator can reach. England and Wales have gone further. Since April 2023, every solicitor must treat colleagues fairly, managers must challenge conduct that falls short, and firms carry the same duty as entities. The Bar Council named its first commissioner for conduct in January 2026. The barristers’ handbook now says serious bullying may amount to serious misconduct. In June, the solicitors’ regulator appealed a suspension imposed on a firm owner for bullying junior staff, arguing it was insufficiently severe.
The principle is simple. Write the bylaws: firms must maintain real anti-harassment systems, beyond mere policies framed and hanging in the lunchroom, and answer for systemic failures. Close the rule gap: adopt the Model Code’s harassment and reprisal rules in every jurisdiction, starting with the largest. Open the data: publish de-identified pattern reporting. The taxonomy does not separately identify harassment, so outsiders cannot see the pattern. The published discipline record is built around individuals. The firm around them barely appears. Regulate the room. Jason Ward is a retired, certified civil litigator who writes and speaks across North America on mental health and addiction in the legal profession.
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