With the dollar hovering around par for the last year or so, and the U.S. housing market offering good deals, Canadians are heading south to buy vacation homes in greater numbers than ever.

The managing partners of BCF LLP admit that Quebec’s legal market is jammed with law firms yet is also somewhat anemic, so competition is tough. 

After many months of hard work, hearings, and recent setbacks, dozens of lawyers involved in the largest and most complex restructuring process in Canadian history are preparing for the conclusion of a nearly year-long saga, dealing with numerous issues and questions along the way that have tested the limits of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act.

Dale Ponder is the managing partner of Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, which has about 475 lawyers in five offices, including one in New York. She took on her management role just over three years ago, and while Ponder is one of the rare women in the top ranks of law firm management in Canada, she is not the first in her firm. She also continues her M&A practice while juggling management duties. Ponder talks to Canadian Lawyer about women in leadership and her role at Oslers.

When Juliet Knapton conducted an informal survey recently on parental-leave policies in small to mid-sized Ottawa law firms, the young associate was amazed to discover not only that most firms didn’t have a policy but also that most female associates didn’t know and were afraid to ask.

When Bill C-45 was passed by Parliament a few months before it came into law in March 2004, Canada’s then-minister of Justice Martin Cauchon called its Westray mine-inspired provisions on workplace safety and corporate liability a major step towards ensuring that employers would be held responsible for criminally negligent acts.

“June is our women’s issue,” e-mailed the editor of this magazine. “Please try and make your column relevant.” Later, to prod me along I suppose, she sent an article from Law Times that began: “A group of female lawyers have formed the Women’s Court of Canada to rewrite key Supreme Court of Canada decisions from a feminist perspective in hopes of ending what they call a recent neglect of equality rights.”

James R. Christie’s 14 years in senior management at Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP will draw to a close at the end of this year. 

Fifty-two days, 47 witnesses, 16 roundtable meetings, and 36,000 documents later, lawyers across Canada have all summer to wait before the final recommendations from the Inquiry into Pediatric Forensic Pathology in Ontario will markedly move the system forward.

If you’re a business generalist or in-house counsel, you likely wouldn’t try to complete a multimillion-dollar real estate transaction without benefit of counsel specialized in such work. So why would you think of flying solo on a blockbuster deal to acquire vital information technology services for your client or company?