Legal Ethics: 2025 Year in Review

As 2025 draws to a close, this column looks back on three high-profile areas of development in Canadian legal ethics and lawyer regulation over the past year. It also flags several major court cases and disciplinary proceedings from 2025, as well as cases to watch for in the year ahead.

Three High-Profile Areas of Development

1. Rule of Law Concerns

The first year of Donald Trump’s second presidential term sent shock waves through the American justice system. In the spring, it was reported that U.S. federal judges were experiencing “unusually high threat levels” amid often vicious partisan attacks. Some began discussing the possible need to manage their own armed security force given the Trump administration’s control over their current protectors, the U.S. Marshals Service. As for lawyers, a New York Times story last month reported that “President Trump’s second term has brought a period of turmoil and controversy unlike any in the history of the Justice Department.” As summarized in the story, “Trump and his appointees have blasted through the walls designed to protect the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency from political influence; they have directed the course of criminal investigations, openly flouted ethics rules and caused a breakdown of institutional culture.” So much more could be said about the situation in the United States (and, if you want to read more, I would recommend the Substacks published by leading American legal ethics scholars Renee Knake Jefferson and Brad Wendel).

I offer these examples of American developments as background to the heightened attention to—and anxiety surrounding—the rule of law among Canadian lawyers this year. Examples abound.

• The Rule of Law Project, spearheaded by a small group of Canadian lawyers, has called on colleagues to “unite and collectively pledge to uphold the Rule of Law”, citing the fact that “in recent months we have seen how fragile the Rule of Law can be and how quickly it can be eroded.”
• A coalition of nine Canadian law societies launched the Ours to Protect campaign “to unite Canadians around the rule of law” in the context of “concerns over the strength of democratic freedoms dominat[ing] international headlines.”
• The Quebec bar and the Quebec notaries’ association have launched their own public campaign Protégeons notre État de droit with the goal of “informing the public about how the rule of law protects their freedom every day and to remind everyone that ‘no one is above the law’ in Canada.”
• The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) issued a statement on threats to the rule of law, courts, and the legal profession, expressing solidarity with the U.S. legal community and reaffirming the Canadian legal profession’s own commitments. A similar statement was also published by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. Even CanLII got into the mix with its own statement in support of the rule of law.

I’m no doubt missing other initiatives, but readers get the gist: the rule of law was a hot topic in 2025.

Things are not going terribly well in the United States and this has us worried. But what of the rule of law in Canada itself? In 2025, we ranked 13th out of 143 countries in the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, which is well ahead of the United States at 27th place. Also, the most troubling things that have happened in the United States in the last year have not happened here. We are, relatively speaking, in good shape.

Still, it seems wise to heed Chief Justice Wagner’s caution not to take “anything for granted.” And, indeed, there are some reasons to be concerned. Take, for example, the fact that Canadian premiers have, over the past year, labelled both policy and legal decisions made by courts as “disgusting” (see here and here) and ranted against “terrible, bleeding-heart judges” who issue rulings they don’t like. Politicians have also waded into criminal proceedings—one calling an untried suspect a “murderer” who “should spend the rest of his life in custody” (see here). Introducing judicial elections has also been floated as a way to combat an “entitled” judiciary and judges who are driven by “ideology” (see here). To be sure, these developments don’t signal that the rule of law has collapsed in Canada. And, of course, some criticism of our courts is a good thing! It helps keep our justice system accountable. That said, both language and accuracy matter. Inflammatory and/or misleading critiques risk doing more damage than good, and we ought to be on guard against such critiques and speak out when they occur.

2. Governance and the Regulation of the Profession

Governance was a major theme in my 2024 round up column and is still at the forefront. One of the biggest stories remains British Columbia’s Legal Professions Act (LPA), under which the Law Society of British Columbia (LSBC) will cease to exist, replaced by a new single regulator for all legal professions (lawyers, notaries public, and paralegals).

Both the LSBC and the British Columbia Trial Lawyers Association (BCTLA) have challenged the constitutionality of the LPA alleging, among other things, that it is inconsistent with the independence of the bar. This constitutional challenge was heard October 14-28, 2025. Intervenors included the CBA, the Law Society of Manitoba, the Society of Notaries Public of BC, and the Indigenous Bar Association. A decision will presumably be released in 2026 (unless it comes in the few remaining 2025 days!). For updates and a detailed timeline, check out LSBC’s dedicated webpage. Of note, considerable transition work has already been done with more scheduled to happen in 2026, including the drafting and finalization of the new code of professional conduct inclusive of lawyers, notaries public, and regulated paralegals (see overview of transition here and work plan here).

Governance issues also loomed large in Ontario in 2025. Early in the year, a firestorm erupted over public reporting about an “employment contract that raised [then] CEO Diana Miles’s annual salary by more than 50 per cent to nearly $1 million without the approval of the society’s governing board.” In true Canadian fashion, a retired judge, Dennis O’Connor, was quickly retained to produce an independent report on the matter. Following the delivery of O’Connor’s Report, the LSO issued a press release stating that Miles was “no longer employed with the Law Society of Ontario.” Initially, the Report was not made public, but after considerable pressure from the legal community, a redacted version was released. Spanning 67 pages, the Report covers a lot of ground, but two key take-aways, as summarized by the LSO itself, were that: “(1) the correct process was not followed by the former CEO and former Treasurer in approving a CEO pay increase; and (2) there are governance changes that can be made to help ensure that doesn’t happen again.” In late November, the LSO’s Governance Review Taskforce provided its final report to Convocation, with the Treasurer reporting that “all recommendations [from the O’Connor Report] have been fulfilled, with some work continuing.”

Another major development under this heading is Alberta’s proposed Regulated Professions Neutrality Act—or, as Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has called it, Alberta’s “Peterson law” (a reference to Jordan Peterson, who was disciplined by the College of Psychologists of Ontario after complaints about his online conduct – more background on that here). According to the Government of Alberta, the Act aims to “ensure regulated professionals may freely express themselves while still being entitled to fair treatment by professional regulatory bodies.” The Act would apply to a wide range of regulated professions and their regulators, including the legal profession and the Law Society of Alberta (LSA). Among other things, the Act would prohibit regulators from sanctioning professionals for expressive conduct that occurs outside their practice, subject to some exceptions such as threats of physical violence and certain sexual misconduct. The Act also seeks to restrict the nature of the mandatory training and education requirements, including specifically prohibiting mandating training or education that addresses cultural competency, unconscious bias, or diversity, equity or inclusion. As a CBC article noted earlier this month, this legislation, if passed, would seem to imperil the LSA’s requirement that lawyers complete The Path, an Indigenous cultural competency training program. Notably, The Path also faced scrutiny earlier this year after an Alberta lawyer brought a judicial review challenging, inter alia, certain actions taken by the LSA in developing its continuing professional development program. The judicial review was unsuccessful, with the court finding, among other things, that a requirement to complete The Path does not violate the lawyer’s Charter rights to freedom of religion or expression.

A final space to watch in the area of lawyer regulation is licensing. In October, the Law Society of Ontario launched a consultation regarding its proposal to adopt a mandatory skills-based course with assessments for all lawyer licensing candidates as a replacement for the current licensing examinations. Also in October, the Law Society of British Columbia announced that it was going to retire the Professional Legal Training Course, which had been in place since 1984, and replace it with the Canadian Centre for Professional Education’s (CPLED) Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP). In adopting PREP, British Columbia will join several other Canadian jurisdictions that already use the program in their bar admission programs.

3. AI Errors Abound

AI and its intersections with lawyers’ professional obligations continue to be a major topic. While much is happening in the legal AI space, the most obvious thing to highlight here is the explosion of problematic AI-generated legal authorities being included in submissions to Canadian courts.

ChatGPT was released in late 2022. In 2023, following reported U.S. mishaps, a number of Canadian courts published either AI disclosure mandates or cautionary notices about the potential unreliability of AI tools. According to Damien Charlotin’s global database, Canada had one reported case involving a lawyer submitting hallucinated case law in 2024 and three involving self-represented litigants (SRLs). In 2025, those numbers have jumped to 10 cases involving lawyers and 36 involving SRLs. This is not a problem that is going away. It is accelerating. And, of course, the reported cases in this database are an undercount. Not every instance of this sort of thing makes its way to a reported decision.

I’ve written at more length about the issue of problematic AI-generated legal authorities in Slaw previously, both here and here. In short, this is a deeply concerning issue that is putting pressure on already overworked courts and tribunals. Last month, an article in the Guardian reported the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia as saying that “there was increasing evidence to suggest the courts had reached an ‘unsustainable phase’ of AI use in litigation, requiring judges and magistrates to act ‘as human filters and human adjudicators of competing machine-generated or machine-enhanced arguments.’” How regulators and courts respond to the challenge of AI misuse will continue to be a key story to watch in 2026.

Cases Concluded in 2025 and to Watch Out for in 2026

Several high-profile lawyer misconduct cases concluded in 2025. This year, James Bowie, a former Ottawa lawyer whose case was highlighted in my 2023 year-end column, had his law license revoked and was criminally convicted of death threats, criminal harassment, and extortion. A December 2 CBC article reports that Bowie “is currently in an Ontario prison awaiting an appeal of his criminal conviction.” The 2023 roundup also discussed the plea deal reached by John Carpay and Jay Cameron in relation to charges stemming from their involvement in hiring a private investigator to surveil a Manitoba judge; they, too, were disbarred in 2025.

This year also introduced some new high-profile cases of lawyers (allegedly!) gone bad. Canadian mainstream media has been closely following the story of Deepak Paradkar, who, as helpfully summarized in this Toronto Star article, “is facing extradition to the United States for his alleged role as a lawyer to Ryan Wedding, the fugitive former Olympic snowboarder whom American authorities describe as the modern-day Pablo Escobar.” One of the allegations against Paradkar is that he “advised Wedding to kill a co-operating witness to prevent him from testifying at trial.” Paradkar, who maintains his innocence, has had his license to practice law suspended on an interlocutory basis. This year also saw headlines about two other Ontario lawyers—Singa Bui and Nicholas Cartel—who face criminal charges in relation to embezzling a large amount of client funds and have pending law society proceedings (see here for more).

What are some other cases to watch out for in 2026? In May 2025, the Supreme Court of Canada heard His Majesty the King v. Sharon Fox. To repeat what I included in last year’s round up:

The underlying subject matter involves criminal charges against a defence lawyer alleging an attempt to obstruct justice based on comments she made during a phone call with her client that were intercepted pursuant to a judicially authorized wiretap. The lawyer was acquitted at trial and on appeal. Among other things, the rarely invoked “innocence at stake” exception to solicitor-client privilege is raised in the case. The Crown’s appeal before the Supreme Court engages two issues: (1) Did Fox’s position as a lawyer preclude her from applying to pierce solicitor-client privilege and give full answer and defence to the criminal allegation? and (2) Should the non-privileged portion of the intercepted communication be excluded as a result of the violation of Fox’s Charter right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

A decision in this case will presumably come in the new year.

Also pending is a decision in Law Society of Ontario v. AA, another case highlighted last year, which deals with the good character requirement. In August, the Court of Appeal for Ontario heard an appeal in this matter and reasons are still pending.

On the AI front, eyes will be on contempt proceedings against Ontario lawyer Jisuh Lee. The proceedings are in relation to the inclusion of AI-hallucinated case law in legal pleadings and subsequent dishonesty to the court about who had prepared such pleadings. More details can be found in this December 2 case conference endorsement.

Addendum: All I Want for Christmas (Not Really!)

Before closing out, a lingering issue from previous roundups: King’s Counsel designations in Ontario. In 2023, Ontario was in the hot seat for reviving this program amid critiques of apparent partisanship and lack of transparency. Reform was promised. Yet there were no new KC designations in 2024 or 2025, and, to my knowledge, no new process has been announced. As I noted last year, this leaves the 2023 group of KCs standing alone, under a cloud of criticism about the process that led to their designation. My wish for 2026? Some “KC Closure”, whether it be a reformed process or an announcement that the revival is being abandoned altogether.

With that final plea, I wish everyone all the best for the rest of 2025 and the new year ahead. Also, there are no doubt important things which have happened over the last year that I’ve missed mentioning in this column. Feel free to add more in the comments or on social media!