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 . . . [more]

Trouble sleeping? Try having your phone read the Rules of Civil Procedure to you. You’ll drift off to a soothing stream of minutiae, like sheep jumping over a fence. Very few Big Ideas will excite you. Most rules (not to mention the subrules and the clauses and the subclauses) are about what a party or court must do in a very specific scenario. For example, my civil procedure students always perk up when I tell them about Rule 20.04(4), which explains what to do if a summary judgment motion is deemed to involve only a question of law, but . . . [more]

As has been widely reported over the past two weeks, the Law Society of Ontario is considering eliminating the existing bar exams and replacing them with “a mandatory skills-based course with assessments”.

The LSO is currently seeking feedback from lawyers and the public on its proposal to replace the existing barrister and solicitor examinations with an online course involving training and instruction as well as both interim and final assessments by trained lawyers.

Ontario’s Attorney General, Doug Downey, came out strongly against reform, tweeting:

“An objective, written and rigorous test is an important part of proving new lawyers are ready

“Reserves do not improve with age. The longer a decision sits unwritten, the heavier it becomes.”

When the Honourable Deena Baltman (retired) offered this observation during a recent continuing professional development session for Deputy Judges, she articulated something that every judge knows but rarely voices. Her presentation, titled Managing Reserves, was pragmatic and concrete: write promptly, ideally within 48 hours; avoid over-reserving; schedule writing time ruthlessly; resist the temptation to wait for motivation, inspiration, or provocation.

Yet what has stayed with me is not just the efficiency of her techniques but the unspoken premise beneath them: that timeliness in . . . [more]

Guidance for lawyers on generative AI use consistently urges careful verification of outputs. One popular framing advises treating AI as a “first-year associate”—smart and keen, but inexperienced and needing supervision. In this column, I take the position that, while this framing helpfully encourages caution, it obscures how generative AI can be deceptive in ways that make it fundamentally dissimilar to an inexperienced first-year associate. How is AI deceptive? In short, generative AI can fail in unpredictable ways and sometimes in ways that mimic reliability, making errors harder to detect than those flowing from simple inexperience.

Before elaborating, three important caveats . . . [more]

You’re running a fever and have been coughing for the past few days, so you head down to your local clinic. You wait and wait, and finally the receptionist calls your name.

Walking into the examination room, you’re surprised to see not one but three doctors. “We’re a Cough Board,” one of them says, “and we’re here to diagnose and propose treatment for you.”

You stare at them blankly for a second. But then you remember something you saw in a medical drama on TV. A “tumour board,” you recall, is a meeting of specialists convened to try to figure . . . [more]

“A lawyer must encourage public respect for and try to improve the administration of justice.”[1]

This is a rule from the Model Code of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. The commentaries to the rule identify a more specific component duty to defend judges and other tribunal members from “unjust criticism”, because there is no way for them to appropriately defend themselves.[2] But the rule would also apply to unjust criticism of lawyers, especially those who, like judges, cannot defend themselves, particularly Crown attorneys.

This rule may appear to be aspirational. Indeed, Harry Arthurs has characterized this . . . [more]

Many legal ethics issues are interesting to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. There’s the “buried bodies case”, where two lawyers’ commitment to maintaining client confidentiality (in horrifying circumstances) destroyed their practices, sparked harassment and death threats, and caused them to be criminally charged. There’s the lawyer who gossiped with his spouse about his clients’ affairs, only for the spouse to report the lawyer to the Law Society for breaching confidentiality when their marriage broke down. My students are always engaged when we have in-class debates about the good character requirement, or the (lack of) regulation of lawyer-client sex . . . [more]

In July, I was counsel in a voir dire in BC Supreme Court, where four police officers testified over three days. While the officers gave evidence, I took over 30-pages of handwritten notes. I could capture verbatim maybe 30 percent of what was said. The rest of the time — when answers went on for too long or counsel and the witness talked over one another — I got only the gist of it. Yet, precision was key.

At one point, we stood down for over an hour for the court clerk to go through the recording to find a . . . [more]

The 2022 release of ChatGPT led to many breathless headlines about how generative AI would be an A2J boon. The mood is now more muted: while AI has driven some change in the legal context over the last three years, much has stayed the same. Given the time that has passed, some reckoning with where we are at seems appropriate. In this column, I focus on one piece of the A2J and AI puzzle: generative AI and self-represented litigants (SRLs) in Canadian courts and tribunals.

How has generative AI impacted the experiences of SRLs in Canada?

To answer this question, . . . [more]

In recent months, there have been several reports of lawyers for the US Department of Justice facing employment consequences for what the US Attorney General describes as failures of zealous advocacy. While I cannot speak to the US context, it seems worthwhile and timely to reflect on the role of zealous (resolute) advocacy for Canadian lawyers, including government lawyers.[1] Here I synthesize what I think is a fair consensus view in the Canadian context and then add some important points on which there is less consensus.[2]

The Consensus

Yes, government lawyers, like all lawyers,[3] unquestionably have a . . . [more]

The Hon. Leonard Marchand is Chief Justice of British Columbia, and a member of the Sylix Okanagan Nation. Justice Marchand was the guest on a recent episode of the excellent Canadian Lawyer Magazine podcast. He suggested that we think about the access to justice problem in terms of three groups of people.

The Strugglers

First are people who try to use the justice system, but fail to get justice because of barriers such as cost, time, and the system’s complexity. I think of these people as the strugglers, and their plight has been extensively studied. It is widely understood . . . [more]