Norm Letalik remembers the reaction he got the day in 2002 when he told a room of fellow lawyers and management experts at a monthly professional development meeting that he was helping his newly merged firm put the final touches on what soon became what he believes was the first national training program for associates in Canada. “There was a lot of chuckling,” recalls Letalik, a partner in the Toronto office of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP. “People basically said, ‘Good luck with that.’”

By the time you read this, the highest court in the land may have already ruled on a landmark case involving the country’s humblest workers. If and when the decision does come, it will bring relief to the many labour experts who have been waiting as eagerly as teenagers anticipating the launch of the next iPod. “I think it may be the most important case in Canadian labour law in a century,” says Roy J. Adams, professor emeritus of industrial relations at McMaster University and the Ariel F. Sallows Chair of Human Rights at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Law. “The implications are absolutely huge.”

 

Rob Donald was in private practice as a corporate litigator and partner in a Montreal law firm when he was hired by a British company in 1992 to help it retrieve a big Boeing jet it had leased to a Canadian firm in a deal gone south. “It was the first time I’d ever dealt with aviation law,” he recalls. “But the complexity of the case was extraordinary — trying to seize an aircraft that was flying around the world. It really hooked me.”

Personal injury lawyer and former Quebec justice minister Marc Bellemare thought he’d seen the summit of injustice 20 years ago, when a drunken army corporal who killed four young people during a high-speed chase through a Quebec City suburb received $86,000 in indemnities for a lost eye — twice the amount the victims’ grieving families got in total.

Quebec City lawyer Micheline Montreuil made history in the first case she pleaded as a woman.

Micheline Montreuil

It began in 1997 when Montreuil, an out-of-the-closet transgender who had practised law for 25 years as Pierre Montreuil, launched the first of three highly publicized court challenges against the refusal by Quebec’s registrar of civil status to allow her to legally change her name to Micheline.

Insolvency lawyer Sylvain Vauclair likes to compare the negotiations that take place between creditors of big corporate debtors before they go into proceedings to implement a restructuring plan to a high-stakes poker game. “The premise of the whole solvency thing is that there’s never enough money for everybody,” says Vauclair. “People struggle to get the biggest piece of the pie.”

Daniel Ages

A decade ago, Lady Luck smiled on Daniel Ages.

South America may not be the easiest place to do business, but the work and opportunities available for resource-based industries — and the lawyers who represent them — can be most interesting and very profitable.

When Pierre Cimon started practising law in his hometown of Quebec City 40 years ago, the picturesque provincial capital was dismissed by many as a sleepy bureaucratic backwater that relied on tourism and government to provide jobs.

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.