Illustration: Kim Rosen

Lawyers who work in big firms receive a lot of administrative support. There are entire departments devoted to handling the very basics of conducting business: hiring and firing, billing, collections, paying rent, ordering supplies, not to mention courier and catering services. With all of the basics covered, each lawyer is free to do what is expected of him or her: bring in clients and earn money. The problem with this big-firm model is that when lawyers want to practise on their own or within a small firm or company, they quickly discover their knowledge of how to run a business is as limited as their experience in ordering paperclips — that is, very little.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, but if so, then it’s pointing in the wrong direction. As society has adopted, if not embraced, more superficial forms of communications, that informality and a certain lack of decorum and professional courtesy appear to be seeping into the manner in which some barristers conduct themselves both inside and out of the courthouse.

“He is not an international lawyer.”

 

The start of this new decade coincides with the beginning of a new era in civil litigation in Ontario with the coming into force of the most significant amendments to the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure since 2005.