On December 1st 2022, as part of a professionalism series, we had the pleasure of hosting and hearing from Marie Henein at the Toronto Lerners office. As an incredibly experienced litigator and former managing partner of Henein Hutchison Robitaille LLP, her words were insightful and informative for everyone in the room, ranging from articling students like myself to senior associates and partners at Lerners. Perhaps best known for defending Jian Ghomeshi in his criminal case, few Canadian lawyers gain public notoriety the way Marie Henein has. Likely alluding to this, she told us that she is often asked, “How do you do this work?” For Henein, practising law and representing clients is not a question of morality. Each and every person is entitled to the presumption of innocence under the Charter, and it is not a lawyer’s place to pass…

In December 2022, the Université de Sherbrooke, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and the Canadian Bar Association published the report on The National Study on the Psychological Health Determinants of Legal Professionals in Canada. This report is Phase I of the National Wellness Study. The data analyzed in the report comes from a national survey conducted between 2020-2022 on the wellness of legal professionals in Canada. More than 7,300 legal professionals from all jurisdictions – lawyers, Quebec notaries, Ontario paralegals and articling students – participated in the survey. The study’s authors have now launched Phase II of the study, which will involve qualitative interviews with legal professionals to explore differences by province and territory. Phase II is expected to conclude in 2024. The National Wellness Study report paints a troubling picture of the wellness of Canadian legal professionals. Its key…

Dear Jumpy Junior: The question that you have posed is an excellent one. This is exactly the sort of thing that you should be thinking about at this early stage in your legal career. Having strong relationships with senior counsel is important, as this will impact the sort of work you will be involved with, and who you will be working with during those early years while you have much to learn. Here are five areas that you can focus on to stand out as a junior lawyer and build positive professional relationships with the senior lawyers you work with: 1. Get to Know the Senior Lawyer Each lawyer has his or her own style and preferences for how they like to manage a file. As a junior, it is important to gain a good understanding about how the senior…

The 2022 Women in the Workplace report from Lean In and McKinsey & Co. is out and it is by no means rosy.  The report reveals that companies across corporate America are struggling to retain the relatively few women in leadership positions. The report is based on a study involving 333 companies employing more than 12 million people, and a survey of more than 40,000 employees including women of diverse identities and backgrounds. In short, it is comprehensive and provides an intersectional look at biases and barriers. So, what is causing senior women to leave their existing leadership positions in what McKinsey & Co. has coined the “the Great Breakup”? The authors suggest that lack of flexibility, being overworked and under-recognized, and microaggressions that continue even at the C-Suite level, are the primary reasons emerging from the study. What is…

We’ve seen law firms (and all employers) take large strides over the last couple of decades to improve gender diversity in their workforce. The research is clear: a diverse workplace is a better workplace. But why, despite these efforts, do gender inequalities in the workplace continue to persist? A new article out of Forbes entitled “Women’s Equality In The Workplace Requires Greater Inclusion”[1], suggests that the problem might be the single-minded focus on diversity, or specifically, numerical representation as a proxy for diversity, with not enough emphasis on inclusion and equity. Perhaps there has been less of an emphasis on the more “qualitative” factors of inclusion and equity because they are more difficult to measure. Attempting to tackle this problem, the author of this article and their colleagues developed a way of measuring inclusion at an organization by measuring the…