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A managing partner rebuilt her firm’s compensation system around who actually mentors the next generation. A lawyer funded a disability-rights program himself rather than wait years for a grant. A litigator turned a coroner’s review into provincial law. A firm became the first in Canada to put AI in front of every lawyer it employs. An immigration lawyer fought the same case in two courts at once – one judicial, one public.

None of them waited for the profession to catch up.

Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada honours the 25 people building what the profession needs before anyone asks them to: new departments, new compensation models, new legislation, new technology. Artificial intelligence runs through part of this year’s list, adoption has more than doubled in 12 months, and it’s forcing hard questions about what a lawyer is actually for, but it’s one current among several, not the whole story.

Now in its 17th year, Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers, sponsored by Thomson Reuters, were selected across five categories. The names change every year, but the pattern doesn’t: see last year’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers roster for the throughline that connects both editions.

As Hilary Young, PhD, professor and acting associate dean at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) Faculty of Law, puts it, today’s legal leaders have to find ways to work efficiently without closing off the path future leaders need to develop the same skills and knowledge. 

That balance, using new tools without hollowing out the profession’s future, runs through every category on this year’s list.

This year’s winners cluster in seven cities, and Toronto alone accounts for more than half the list, weighted heavily toward human rights and in-house leadership. The other three categories spread out from there.

This year’s business honourees are steering Canada through a period of real market pressure. Martha Harrison and Raj Juneja, both at McCarthy Tétrault in Toronto, are carrying the trade law and tax files that matter most as Canada-US trade tension reshapes cross-border deal-making. In Montreal, Shahir Guindi at Osler and Claudia Desjardins Bélisle at Miller Thomson are anchoring the country’s two largest deal markets outside Toronto, while Yola Ventresca in London, ON shows that business influence increasingly means firm governance, not just billable transactions. Her overhaul of Lerners’ advancement and mentorship structures is as much a business story as a changemaker one.

Ian Hull, LSM, partner at Hull & Hull LLP and a judge for this year’s list, points to client service as the clearest throughline among the business nominees, treated as a leadership priority rather than an afterthought.

The changemaker category spans the widest range of practice areas of any group this year. Patrick Brown has spent decades turning road deaths into legislation. Brendon Pooran built a national pro bono model for disability rights from a single Toronto firm. 

Yameena Ansari is fighting what may be the first transgender American asylum case in Canadian history from her Calgary practice. Amy Salyzyn and Paul Saunders round out the group from opposite ends of the profession, one shaping how courts think about AI and legal ethics from academia, the other rebuilding how a full-service firm delivers legal work in the first place.

This is the only category with a truly national footprint as Ottawa, Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver are all represented. Colin Feasby’s Alberta Court of King’s Bench ruling on the province’s separation referendum was one of the most consequential constitutional decisions of the year. 

Michael Tulloch continues to push Ontario’s courts toward greater public access, while Richard Wagner’s tenure as chief justice of Canada keeps returning to a single theme, judicial independence, as political pressure on the courts intensifies. Niki Sharma and Michael Geist round out the group from the policy and academic sides of the same conversation.

Toronto anchors this category, though not exclusively, Gideon Christian’s AI bias research is based out of Calgary, but the subject matter varies sharply even among the Toronto-based winners. Elizabeth Bowker’s work defends institutions in class actions brought by vulnerable populations, a notably different kind of influence than the rest of the category, which leans toward advocacy for the vulnerable, not institutions responsible for them. 

Gideon Christian’s research into AI bias against Black communities, Michael Rosenberg’s Charter advocacy on behalf of marginalized groups, Muneeza Sheikh’s employment and human rights practice, and Stephanie Willsey’s Indigenous rights litigation each push on a different fault line in Canadian law.

Hull also singled out a distinctly Canadian-centred approach among this year’s human rights nominees: work with global relevance but a sustained focus on Canadian communities and context.

Every in-house winner this year is solving the same underlying problem, building serious legal infrastructure inside organizations that historically ran without it. Farah Ismail built SE Health’s first legal department from nothing. 

Arun Krishnamurti, Christine Chen, Lorne O’Reilly, and Rustam Juma are doing similar work at Google Canada, University Pension Plan Ontario, Dow Chemical, and Volkswagen, each translating legal expertise into operational, ESG, and AI governance strategy at the centre of some of the country’s largest institutions.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a side conversation in Canadian law; it’s the dominant one. Generative AI adoption among legal professionals has more than doubled in the past year, with 69 percent of legal professionals now reporting personal use of AI tools. 

Thomson Reuters’ latest research shows a similar acceleration at the institutional level, with 41 percent of law firms and 47 percent of corporate legal departments now using generative AI, up from 28 percent and 23 percent, respectively, in 2025. 

In-house adoption has moved even faster, according to the ACC/Everlaw GenAI Survey, more than doubling in a single year from 23 percent to 52 percent, a pace legal tech leaders say has outpaced expectations among in-house legal teams. Canada is keeping pace with, and in some respects outpacing, this global shift. 

LEAP Legal Software’s Profitability in Law report for 2026, based on a survey of 700 legal professionals across six countries, found that 43 percent of Canadian legal professionals say legal-specific AI tools are delivering the greatest impact on their firm’s profitability, the highest proportion of any market surveyed. That statistic sits directly behind this year’s list, as five winners work on AI ethics, bias research, policy, or contract automation as a core part of their practice. 

Institutional trust in the judiciary forms a second major current running through this year’s honourees. According to the OECD’s 2026 Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions for Canada, 61 percent of Canadians say they trust the courts, compared with just 37 percent who trust political parties. 

A separate Angus Reid Institute poll found 62 percent of Canadians believe the Supreme Court is impartial, and 65 percent believe law carries more weight than politics in the court’s decisions. That relative trust is being tested directly this year. Alberta Court of King’s Bench Justice Colin Feasby’s rulings on the province’s separation referendum, and the Supreme Court’s pending decision on Quebec’s Bill 21, are both forcing the country’s courts to define the outer limits of constitutional and treaty law under intense public scrutiny. 

A third shift is playing out inside organizations, not courtrooms. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2026 Chief Legal Officers Survey found that 84 percent of chief legal officers now report directly to the CEO, a marked change in how companies structure legal authority. The shift tracks closely with how AI is reshaping day-to-day law firm operations, which is pulling legal further into core business decisions. 

Closer to home, the 2026 Canadian In-House Counsel Report from CBA In-House Lawyers and Mondaq, drawing on nearly 500 responses from in-house lawyers across the country, found that legal departments are absorbing rising workloads and broader non-legal responsibilities without corresponding increases in staffing or support. This year’s in-house winners stand out for building legal infrastructure from the ground up instead of simply managing an existing one.

Several of the year’s defining legal matters remain unresolved, and each is likely to shape the profession for years past this report’s publication. The fight over Alberta’s separation referendum is now before the Alberta Court of Appeal, where Justice Alice Woolley has already signalled discomfort with aspects of the lower court’s reasoning during arguments over a potential stay. 

The Court of Appeal has since allowed the underlying petition process to move forward, though only after addressing what it called serious legal issues. Whatever the eventual outcome, the case has already established that Indigenous treaty rights function as a binding constitutional limit on provincial secession efforts, a precedent Feasby’s original ruling put in place and that now works its way through appellate review.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Quebec’s Bill 21 carries similar weight. The Supreme Court of Canada’s official case docket for English Montreal School Board v. Attorney General of Quebec confirms the four-day hearing concluded in March 2026, and the ruling remains under reserve. 

Legal observers have described Chief Justice Wagner’s handling of the case as a test of his ability to hold together a court navigating one of the most politically charged constitutional questions in a generation, whether the notwithstanding clause can insulate legislation entirely from judicial review, or whether some outer limit still applies.

AI governance shows no sign of slowing. Statistics Canada’s second-quarter 2026 analysis of AI use by businesses reports that AI adoption across Canadian businesses has tripled since the second quarter of 2024, and professional services firms are adopting faster than the economy-wide average. 

With legal ethics scholarship, bias research, and contract automation now converging on the same set of problems inside this year’s list, next year’s report may need to treat AI governance as a practice area in its own right, not just a theme running through several categories. 

Finally, in-house legal departments are likely to keep absorbing responsibilities that once sat with outside counsel or other parts of the business. The CBA/Mondaq report found this shift is most pronounced in public companies and government organizations, where complexity and accountability continue to intensify, a trend this year’s in-house winners are already living out inside healthcare, pension management, and manufacturing.

WHEN CULTURE BECOMES THE BUSINESS CASE

Managing partner, Lerners LLP, London, ON

Yola Ventresca is managing partner at Lerners LLP in London, ON, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Business category. Her nomination could just as easily belong among the changemakers, and that overlap isn’t a coincidence. It’s the reason she made this list. 

Ventresca has spent her tenure as managing partner treating culture, mentorship, and advancement as business infrastructure, not a separate, softer conversation happening alongside the firm’s actual work, precisely the kind of structural thinking reshaping how influence gets defined across this year’s list.

Built the case before she built the policy

Ventresca was elected managing partner of Lerners LLP’s London office in 2021 and took up the role on January 1, 2022, becoming the first racialized woman, the first woman with young children, and the youngest person in the firm’s history to hold the position. She inherited a compensation system rooted, like most firms’, in billable hours and financial metrics alone. 

She championed a restructuring that the executive committee embraced, tying rewards for culture-building directly to profitability, client retention, and recruitment as part of the bottom line.

That reframing extended to how the firm measures its own results. Ninety-four percent of associates eligible for advancement to non-equity partner, the step that falls under her direct authority as managing partner, moved up during her tenure. The equity partnership decision that follows sits with the partnership as a whole, a distinction Ventresca is precise about. She also personally sponsored two women lawyers through the equity partnership process, both successfully. “It wasn’t hard,” she says. “They kind of came to me ready made.” Understated as that sounds, it draws a sharp line between mentorship, which offers advice, and sponsorship, which changes careers.
 

 

Independence has two different meanings

Ventresca’s practice outside firm leadership has tested her thinking on independence from two directions. As lead counsel for a faculty association that successfully challenged a university’s unilateral restructuring decision, and separately as an investigator retained to examine allegations of sexual assault involving leadership, she has come to see independence less as a matter of resisting outside pressure and more as a discipline of recognizing her own bias, then setting it aside to follow the evidence.

Welcoming dissent by design

That comfort with scrutiny carries into how she runs a room. Ventresca says she wants people around her who see things differently, not people who fall in line. “If you think I’m wrong and you don’t tell me that, to me that’s like sending me off a cliff,” she says. “You need to be able to tell me, ‘We disagree with you.’”

Building the pipeline she didn’t have

Ventresca is candid about where the Embrace Equity Summit came from. “I came out of the public school system, and I hadn’t had anyone in my family who was a lawyer before me,” she says. “I didn’t have the blueprint or the language for it.” 

That gap is why she helped conceive the Embrace Equity Summit, a program that has reached more than 500 female-identifying students before university, framed around imposter syndrome and the possibility of a career they might not have pictured for themselves.

She’s candid about how much work remains, too. “We’ve done a lot of good with women in the law generally,” she says, “not well with individuals from equity-deserving groups, especially at the partnership level.” It’s a rare moment where a winner profiled for her own success points just as directly at where the profession still falls short.

What she’d tell another managing partner

Asked what she’d change first if another leader wanted to replicate her approach, Ventresca points to decision-making itself – getting the empirical evidence on what your people are experiencing before making structural decisions, then acting on what you hear. She still remembers how disorienting that responsibility felt on day one.

Failing to act on what you hear, she says, breaks the trust that made people speak up in the first place.

 

 

 

A: Like most firms, our associate compensation, the base and the bonus program, was rooted firmly in traditional financial metrics: hours worked and numbers hit. I wanted to make sure the people doing the hard work of building our culture were rewarded for it, because that work isn’t just a nice-to-have. It drives profitability, client attraction and retention, and associate retention and recruitment. So, the new structure allows that kind of work to be valued and rewarded alongside the traditional metrics.

A: I think about independence very differently depending on the mandate. As a workplace investigator, my role is to follow the evidence, not to serve the interests of the institution that provided me with the mandate. That distinction is essential. There’s an impulse to want to do right by the institution that retained you, and every investigator has to resist that and let the evidence lead. But the bigger challenge is independence from your own bias. The first step is recognizing you have it, then making sure you’ve been trained to set it aside and truly listen to the whole person giving evidence in front of you.

A: I wouldn’t call it resistance so much as principled debate, and I don’t experience a different perspective as an attack on my leadership. The obvious question anywhere is what this does to the bottom line. That forced me to make the connection explicit, that culture and retention aren’t a minus against the business, they boost it. The partnership put me in this role knowing exactly where I stood on these issues, so the debates we had were principled ones, and the results, associate retention and engagement, have spoken for themselves.

A: Flip the decision-making tree. If decisions are being made purely top-down, you need to get the real evidence of what your people are experiencing first. I did a lot of listening sessions early on, and if you ask people for feedback, you have to be prepared to act on it. If you listen and don’t act, you break the trust that got them to confide in you in the first place.

INVESTING IN THE DECISION NO ONE ELSE WOULD FUND

Founder and managing partner, PooranLaw, Toronto, ON

Brendon Pooran, founder and managing partner at PooranLaw in Toronto, is named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Changemakers category. He founded the firm as a multidisciplinary practice serving individuals, families, and not-for-profit organizations in the disability and human services sectors across Canada. 

Canadian Lawyer named the firm one of the country’s top 10 pro bono firms, a distinction tied directly to the I Decide Law Program. The program was founded by now-partner Stephanie Dickson at a legal aid clinic in Windsor to promote decision-making rights and individualized planning for people with intellectual disabilities living below the poverty line. 

When it lost its funding, PooranLaw adopted the program, designed and funded a second iteration, and brought Dickson on board to lead it. It remains the only program of its kind in Canada, funded entirely by PooranLaw and sustained through a social enterprise model built to remain financially resilient while prioritizing community benefit.

Betting on it himself

Pooran didn’t wait for outside funding to offer the program.

Rather than pursue outside grants or partners, he decided the firm would fund the I Decide Law Program itself, betting that acting immediately mattered more than waiting years for outside money while people remained excluded from decisions about their own lives.

Funding it independently gave the firm room to build around the people it serves, not a funder’s priorities, and to adjust course as it learned. For Pooran, that wasn’t a business calculation. It was a values one.

Redefining what capacity means

Pooran’s influence reaches into national policy through his work developing a Canadian standard on legal capacity, a framework meant to support legal and supported decision-making over substitute decision-making. 

He argues the shift that matters most is definitional, moving law away from treating capacity as a diagnosis and toward recognizing the support people need to make and communicate their own decisions. 

He serves as course director at York University, teaching critical disability law to future lawyers, advocates, and policy makers, and has been appointed to the board of Accessibility Standards Canada.
 

 

Policy work that reaches into daily life

Pooran has advocated alongside financial institutions for more accessible banking policies for people with intellectual disabilities, and pushed for the elimination of barriers to accessing the Registered Disability Savings Plan and the Canada Disability Benefit. He points to the binary thinking baked into most systems – either a person decides independently or someone else decides for them – as the real obstacle. He advocates for laws and policies, which recognize some people rely on supports and accommodations when dealing with other parties, such as financial and government.

Recognition and reach

Pooran received the 2025 Empowered Kids Ontario Tribute Award for Service and will be honoured at Corbrook’s Awakening Abilities 75th anniversary gala this November. Over the past 18 months, he has led disability-related planning sessions for more than 100 organizations, including the Ontario Bar Association, and served as one of 12 expert advisors on the Canada Revenue Agency’s Disability Advisory Committee.

What he’d tell another firm

Asked what another firm would need to get right to build something similar, Pooran doesn’t hesitate. For him, it starts with the right people, including Cheryl Wiles Pooran, his partner in life and work, with whom he has shared the vision and journey of building the firm

 

A: If you truly believe in an idea, sometimes you have to be willing to invest in it yourself. We knew there was a gap in access to legal services for people with intellectual disabilities, but we also knew that waiting for funding could mean waiting years while people continue to be excluded from decisions affecting their own lives. 

By funding the program ourselves, we had the freedom to build it around the needs of the people we serve, rather than the priorities of a funder. It allowed us to innovate, to learn, and to refine the model quickly. For us, it wasn’t a business decision. It was a values decision. Our firm has spent years advocating for disability rights, and this was simply the next step in ensuring those rights are meaningful in practice.

A: If we were able to impact legal capacity laws in the various provinces, and even at a federal level, the biggest change would be a shift in how people are treated. Too often, people with intellectual disabilities are defined by what they can’t do, instead of what they can do with the appropriate supports. 

Law reform would recognize that legal capacity isn’t about a diagnosis. It’s about providing the support people need to make and communicate their own decisions. In practical terms, it’s a shift from making decisions for people to supporting them to make their own decisions. That’s what true autonomy looks like.

A: The challenge is changing systems that were designed around a binary choice, that being either a person can make decisions independently, or someone else steps in to make a decision for them. There is another path, and that is supporting people to make their own decisions, and that’s what our laws and institutions need to embrace. So many people make decisions with support from trusted family members, friends, and professionals. That’s true for all of us. But our legal systems often don’t recognize supported decision-making very well.

A: I’d say there are three things. First, solve a real problem with the right people, build a team that’s united by shared values and a commitment to filling a genuine gap in access to justice. Second, think like an innovator, not a charity, design a model that can change how legal services are delivered. And third, measure impact, not effort. 

For us, if people leave with greater confidence, greater autonomy, and greater control over the decisions that affect their own lives, then we’ve built something that truly matters.

TURNING TRAGEDY INTO TRAFFIC LAW

Principal partner, McLeish Orlando LLP, Toronto, ON

Patrick Brown is principal partner at McLeish Orlando LLP in Toronto and one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Changemakers category. He has spent decades at the front of Ontario’s plaintiffs’ bar, serving as past president of the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association and chairing the Ontario Bar Association’s insurance law section. But it’s his work outside the courtroom that colleagues across the profession point to most often, injury prevention researchers, road safety advocates, and legal educators alike describe him as someone who treats advocacy as unfinished until it shows up in policy, not just in judgments.

From coroner’s review to provincial law

Brown served as counsel for a year on Ontario’s most extensive coroner’s review into cycling deaths, work he still walks through in granular detail. The review produced 14 recommendations, several of which reached the statute books directly.

“They passed the one-metre law, became a law under the Highway Traffic Act, that anybody passing a cyclist has to give one metre, and if you don’t, it’s against the law,” Brown says. 

The Ministry of Transportation updated its driver’s handbooks, Ontario’s cycling strategy followed, and municipalities began adopting complete streets guidelines that reshaped bike and pedestrian infrastructure across the province. 

British Columbia and Quebec later passed their own one-metre laws. The review’s findings have since resurfaced as evidence in the section 7 Charter challenge to Bill 212, the case testing the province’s move to remove bike lanes in Toronto.

A decade of bills that keep dying

Not everything has landed. Brown has drafted the same vulnerable road user bill five times over 10 years, and it has failed five times. The government eventually folded a version into careless driving law as an aggravating factor at sentencing, a change Brown says lacks real teeth. 

He points to a case where a driver who killed a cyclist received a $75 fine as the kind of outcome the bill was built to prevent. Getting it passed, he says, requires a broader cultural shift, one where road violence stops being treated as an acceptable cost of moving people quickly through cities.

Training the next generation of litigators

For more than a decade, Brown has served as the civil law subject matter expert for the Law Practice Program, shaping training that reaches hundreds of new lawyers each year through mock files, live-actor examinations, and hands-on discovery exercises. He built the program the way he wished his own articling experience had worked, practical instead of left to chance, and points to mentorship as the piece no training video can fully replace.

The fight that isn’t finished

Brown’s litigation has already reshaped policy more than once, a daycare death that led to new Ontario childcare legislation, a ski hill injury that produced new safety protocols for terrain parks, a boating death that changed compensation limits under maritime law. Still, he returns to one unresolved goal, reducing road violence broadly, through the vulnerable road user law that hasn’t passed and through CRASH, the coalition he helped launch to confront the danger oversized pickups and SUVs pose to pedestrians and cyclists.

Brown doesn’t expect a perfect outcome, only sustained effort from everyone with a hand in it.

What his nominators said

Those who nominated Brown described a lawyer whose influence reaches well past his casework, crediting him with sustained commitment to the brain injury community, meaningful collaboration on concussion research and injury prevention, and a training program that has shaped hundreds of new litigators annually for over a decade. 

Several credited his coroner’s review work as the evidentiary foundation now underpinning Ontario’s active fight to preserve protected bike lanes, and pointed to his role helping launch a national coalition against oversized vehicle risk as proof his advocacy keeps expanding instead of settling.

 

A: After a full year of comprehensive review, we came out with 14 recommendations, and many were influenced by the groups I represented, like Cycle Toronto and ARC. They passed the one-metre law under the Highway Traffic Act, the Ministry of Transportation updated its driver’s handbooks, and the Ontario government’s cycling strategy followed, which gave rise to the Bike Plan. 

Municipalities then incorporated complete streets guidelines into how they redesign their cities and towns, including bike lane and pedestrian infrastructure. We also recommended side guards on trucks. The government didn’t pass that, but the City of Toronto started redesigning its own fleet to include them. 

British Columbia and Quebec later passed their own one-metre laws, and the review has since been used as evidence in the Charter challenge over the government’s removal of bike lanes. It’s not perfect, but it moved the needle.

A: It’s been five private members’ bills over 10 years. I drafted the first one with a legislative drafter, and it was one of the most comprehensive laws of its kind put together in North America. Each time, it passed first reading and died. 

The government did fold a version into the careless driving laws as an aggravating factor at sentencing, but it lacks teeth. I’ve seen drivers get $75 fines after killing cyclists, and the community is outraged by that. 

To get something like this across the finish line requires a much broader shift, a change in culture where we stop treating this kind of road violence as an acceptable cost of moving people around quickly in cars, and a government that puts people’s safety ahead of treating a driver’s licence as an unconditional right.

A: I’m the civil subject matter expert for the Law Practice Program, which trains new lawyers who haven’t done articles. We use real teaching videos, mock case files, and live actors for interviews and examinations, so candidates get a genuine feel for practice rather than rolling the dice on what kind of articling placement they land. I sincerely wish I’d had a program like this when I started. The most important thing for a young lawyer is a sincere desire to practice with as much competence as possible, and the best way to get there is connecting with mentors who’ll guide you, or, failing that, having a program like this one to build your skills from.

A: I’m a personal injury and wrongful death lawyer, and I’ve made meaningful change through that work directly, cases that led to new Ontario childcare legislation, new safety protocols at ski hills for terrain parks, and changes to compensation limits under maritime law. 

But for 20 years I’ve fought in courts, on the streets, and at Queen’s Park to reduce road violence, and far too many people are still struck down and hurt on our roadways. I believe it’s preventable. I’m still working with good people through CRASH, the Coalition to Reduce Auto Size Hazards, on the risk oversized pickups and SUVs pose. Many of the coroner’s review recommendations still haven’t been adopted. We’re not there yet, and I’d like to see that happen. It will never be perfect, but the effort should be there by everybody.

FIGHTING IN TWO COURTS AT ONCE

Founding lawyer, Ansari Immigration Law, Calgary, AB

Yameena Ansari is founding lawyer at Ansari Immigration Law in Calgary, AB, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Changemakers category. She represents Hannah Kreager, a 22-year-old transgender woman from Arizona who fled the United States in spring 2024 fearing persecution under the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies. The case may be the first transgender American asylum application filed in Canada, though Ansari is careful about that distinction. 

“We always say we believe this is the first transgender American claim, but we don’t know,” she says, since refugee decisions are rarely published. That’s precisely why she chose to fight this one in public.

“It was important to me that she was somebody who was very presentable, very passionate, very educated, and she wanted to make this public,” Ansari says. If the claim succeeds, the decision becomes citable, giving other transgender Americans considering asylum something concrete to point to, and giving future adjudicators a public record to draw on instead of facing the question cold.

Two courts, one strategy

Ansari doesn’t see legal advocacy and public advocacy as separate tracks. She frames them as two different courts, the judicial one and the court of public opinion, where a win in either makes the other easier to win.

She applies the same logic to her work with the Gaza Family Reunification Project, which she co-founded in November 2023 alongside a small team of colleagues. Sustained public pressure, a national petition, media coverage, open letters, pushed the federal government to expand acceptance numbers and eligibility for Gazans with Canadian family ties. 

But the win was incomplete: very few Gazans have actually entered Canada under the program, and colleagues from the same organization are now in court fighting to get the government to honour the measures it already agreed to.

Why she calls it life or death

Ansari resists reducing her work to paperwork. On any given day, she’s handling a young man facing deportation after building his entire adult life in Canada, a father from Yemen whose only path forward runs through a country in famine, and transgender clients afraid to even file, unsure whether their claims will be taken seriously. For Ansari, a lawyer who is only filling in forms isn’t doing the job. What clients retain her for, she says, is turning their stories into something that gets results.

Building a public record for those who follow

Ansari has also built education directly into her practice, hosting free webinars on Canada’s immigration system, a free legal clinic for LGBTQ+ refugees, and a session during the University of Alberta’s Pride Week on navigating claims based on sexual orientation. She’s also contributed to policy research examining systemic barriers in Canada’s temporary resident visa program for Gazans.

 

A: Historically, Canada has viewed the United States as a safe place for transgender people to be, and that’s something we’ve seen change in the second Trump presidency. If the Immigration and Refugee Board accepts this case, it’s going to make it a whole lot easier for transgender Americans, because right now a lot of them feel afraid to file because they don’t know if their claim will be accepted. 

Hannah has been very outgoing about sharing her case publicly, on purpose, not just for herself but for the wider transgender American community. If we’re successful, the decision will be public, and other lawyers can cite it when they bring their own clients’ cases forward.

A: It kind of happened all together. We founded the Gaza Family Reunification Project, and between the petition, the open letters, and the media advocacy, we came out with a cohesive plan, and when the government opened the program, it read a lot like they’d taken what we wrote and passed it directly. 

What’s been disheartening is what came after. The government introduced the measures, but hardly any Gazans have actually entered Canada on that program, so my colleagues are now having to litigate its implementation. Families fought so hard to get this introduced, and now Canada is making them go to court just to get the government to use the program it already created.

A: I wouldn’t say it’s a single moment; it’s many experiences that happen every day. Right now, I’m working on a file for a young man who could be deported despite having his entire adult life in Canada, and another for a father whose wife and child are Canadian, but he’s from a country facing a massive famine, so returning isn’t an option. 

My transgender clients carry a different kind of fear, but it’s just as real. If all a lawyer is doing is filling in forms, they’re probably not doing their job. What people retain me for is to tell their stories in a compelling manner and get the result they need, and when we get a refusal, it feels very personal.

A: I tell my clients there are two courts we’re fighting in, the judicial court and the court of public opinion. You don’t have to win in both, and winning one makes it easier to win the other. 

With Hannah’s case, by the time we reach the actual hearing, I want the adjudicator to already have a real understanding of what transgender Americans are experiencing, because the news has been full of it. 

With the Gaza file, we introduced the initial measures through advocacy alone, the press, the petition, but it took my colleagues going to court to actually get the program moving. I’m not afraid to use those other levers. A legal case matters, but there are other tools in society that can accomplish the change you’re after.

DEFENDING THE LINE BETWEEN FAIRNESS AND OVERREACH

Partner, Stieber Berlach LLP, Toronto, ON

Elizabeth Bowker is partner at Stieber Berlach LLP in Toronto, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Human Rights, Advocacy, and Criminal category. She represents 49 Children’s Aid Societies in a proposed class action challenging the use of birth alerts. In G.G. v. Ontario, the motions judge declined to certify claims against the Children’s Aid Societies alleging Charter breaches, privacy torts, and conspiracy, reaffirming the Ragoonanan principle, that a representative plaintiff must have a viable cause of action against each defendant. 

The plaintiffs’ appeal challenging the Ragoonanan principle has since drawn multiple intervenors and was argued before a five-judge panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal, the first time this court has been asked to revisit the principle in 24 years, since it was first set out in Hughes v. Sunbeam.

While declining to comment further while the appeal decision is under reserve, Bowker notes that this appeal was also the first time the Court of Appeal has been asked to consider whether the Ragoonanan principle remains good law in Ontario following the Supreme Court’s decision in Marcotte, a case dealing with Quebec’s Civil Code.  

Fairness on both sides of the file

Bowker also defends institutional clients in sensitive class actions, including claims arising from seclusion and restraint in a forensic mental health setting and mass tort claims against long-term care homes tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

She’s direct about what procedural fairness means to her in these matters: not shielding the plaintiff from the realities of litigation, but thinking carefully about how the existing rules get carried out with care on both sides.

She also raises a less commonly discussed side of fairness, the evidentiary difficulty defendants face in historical abuse claims filed decades after the fact, when witnesses have died and records no longer exist.
 

 

What trauma-informed litigation means to her

Bowker doesn’t describe trauma-informed practice as a change in strategy so much as a standing commitment

She extends that thinking further than most conversations on the topic tend to go, to the institutional clients she represents, many of whom, she notes, went into their field hoping to make the world better and now face allegations against their own staff or volunteers, and to everyone else in the room, court reporters, judges, mediators, and her own students and clerks, who absorb these stories daily and are at risk of vicarious trauma.

Her firm gives anyone the option to opt out of a sexual abuse file entirely, no questions asked.

Making the system work better, not just win

Bowker sits on the Class Proceedings Committee, jointly appointed by the Law Foundation of Ontario and the Attorney General, though she’s careful to separate her committee work from her personal views. Speaking only for herself and based on her observations as defence counsel, she’d like to see more discipline from the plaintiffs’ bar in how class actions get structured.

“Sometimes access to justice for plaintiffs who may have meritorious cases is delayed because a class action is made way too broad, or bites off more than it can chew,” she says, arguing that narrower, more carefully scoped claims would often serve plaintiffs better than expansive ones that trigger lengthy certification fights.

 

A: The previous decision on the Ragoonanan principle was set out 24 years ago in Hughes v. Sunbeam, and that’s been the law in Ontario ever since, shaping how class actions are conducted. Our appeal in the birth alerts class action is the first time the Court of Appeal has been asked to reconsider it, and the first time since the Supreme Court’s decision in Marcotte, which dealt with Quebec’s Civil Code but made broader comments about the underlying principles of class actions, including access to justice. 

A: Our existing rules of civil procedure already do a good job of ensuring fairness for both sides, so I don’t think we need to change the rules just because a case is sensitive. Procedural fairness includes the ability to test the other side’s evidence, and it doesn’t mean shielding the plaintiff from the realities of litigation. 

But these cases do involve very sensitive, personal information, so it’s incumbent on counsel for all sides to think about how to implement our existing rules in the most respectful way possible, whether someone needs a support person during discoveries or more frequent breaks. 

There’s also an evidentiary fairness question for defendants in historical abuse claims, when witnesses have died or records no longer exist decades later, that’s something our sector is grappling with, too.

A: I don’t know that it’s changed my personal approach so much as it’s always been there. I like to think I’ve always treated people with respect and kindness, and at a fundamental level that’s a large part of what trauma-informed litigation means. It also means recognizing everyone’s humanity in the process. 

From a defence counsel’s perspective, I can defend my clients on the facts, the law, and the damages, while still treating the person on the other side with kindness. It also means recognizing that the individuals representing institutional defendants, people who often went into that field hoping to make the world better, are personally affected by these allegations too, and that court reporters, judges, mediators, and the people in my own office hearing these stories every day carry real risk of vicarious trauma.

We give people in my office the choice not to work on a sexual abuse file at all, no questions asked, and that choice stands at any point if they change their mind.

A: I want to be careful not to speak for the committee or use anything confidential from that work. Speaking only for myself, based on what I observe as defence counsel and in reading cases generally, I think access to justice for plaintiffs with meritorious cases sometimes gets delayed because a class action is structured too broadly, or takes on more than it can realistically prove, which leads to lengthy, expensive certification motions. 

Some cases would genuinely be better served as individual actions or as much narrower class actions. More critical analysis upfront by plaintiffs’ counsel, rather than a throw-everything-at-the-wall approach, would in the long run serve access to justice better.

BUILDING TRUST BEFORE BUILDING A DEPARTMENT

Senior vice-president, chief legal, privacy, and compliance officer, SE Health, Toronto, ON

Farah Ismail is senior vice-president and chief legal, privacy, and compliance officer at SE Health in Toronto, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the In-house category. When she joined SE Health in 2020, the organization had operated for more than a century without a single in-house lawyer. In 2024, she founded the company’s first legal, privacy, and compliance department, now grown to 16 professionals spanning lawyers, paralegals, a law clerk, a contract specialist, privacy specialists, and a data privacy engineer. 

A centralized intake process, the first of its kind at SE Health, now manages more than 1,500 requests annually.

Ismail says the legal work itself wasn’t the hard part.

The bigger challenge was earning trust inside an organization with no template for what a legal department should look like, one where legal teams are often seen as the department of no. Before building any formal process, she focused on relationships, work she credits partly to a nursing background that gave her a built-in understanding of the business of caring.

She credits her dual background for that. “Having a nursing background and deep understanding about the healthcare system in this country really helped,” she says. Instead of building a traditional legal department, she built what she calls a strategic advisory function, one whose tagline, ‘Helping Good People Do Good Things,” she says she still returns to.

Teaching AI where it belongs

Ismail co-led development of an AI-powered contract review system targeting up to an 80 percent reduction in processing time, now past a successful pilot and moving toward a full rollout this fall.

She’s precise about what she wants the technology to do and not do: augment human judgment, not replace it. AI can handle the repetitive work, identifying clauses, comparing versions, freeing her team up to provide strategic advice and giving business stakeholders direct access to information without routing every request through her department.

What surprised her most was that the rollout turned out to be less about the technology itself and more about change management, rethinking how the organization operates without losing ownership of the final call.

Placing functions where trust already lives

Ismail expanded the legal pillar to include patient experience, reasoning that dissatisfied patients need an objective party to hear their concerns instead of complaining directly to the people delivering their care, which she says creates a natural power imbalance. Alternative dispute resolution, investigation, and records retention, all legal processes at their core, fit naturally under that office.

Occupational health and safety followed a different path. It moved under legal during the pandemic, when infection prevention and control sat under the same umbrella and the organization needed to manage WSIB claims, accommodations, and vaccine mandates under intense pressure. 

With the pandemic stabilized, Ismail has since shifted OH&S back to HR, freeing her team to build out enterprise risk management instead, including a full technology overhaul of SE Health’s risk management system now nearing completion.

What the nursing background made possible

Ismail is direct about what her dual training adds that legal training alone wouldn’t.

“As a lawyer, I don’t think I would have been able to do my job as effectively,” she says, pointing to SE Health’s new social impact venture fund as the clearest example, work she says draws on strategic awareness her legal training alone wouldn’t have given her.

Fellow honouree and nominator Yola Ventresca, managing partner at Lerners LLP, points to the same duality. “Her dual nursing-legal background isn’t just unique, it’s a strategic advantage that allows her to see issues through multiple dimensions simultaneously,” Ventresca says. “She doesn’t wait for problems, she anticipates them.”

 

A: What really surprised me most wasn’t the legal work, it was having to earn trust. There are plenty of resources that show you how to structure a legal department, recruitment, hiring, governance, but there isn’t a playbook for introducing a legal team into an organization that’s been successful for over 100 years without one. 

Legal departments are often seen as the “department of no,” and we would never have been invited into the conversations that mattered if we couldn’t demonstrate the value we could create. So before I built the processes, I focused on relationships. With my background as a nurse, understanding the business of caring helped. 

The role wasn’t to impose legal rules, it was making sure our advice practically resonated with the people we were giving it to. So rather than building a traditional legal department, we built a strategic advisory function that integrates legal, privacy, compliance, enterprise risk, and governance leading to great innovation. The biggest lesson was earning influence without relying on the authority I carried, and helping people see legal as a strategic partner rather than a gatekeeper.

A: Technology should augment human judgment, it can’t replace it, that’s not the goal. We’re a big organization without a long-standing in-house legal function, and our contracts are complex, vendor relationships, government-led work, broad scope. 

AI is really good at repetitive, structured work, identifying clauses, comparing versions, and it means my team spends less time searching for information and stakeholders can access things directly instead of routing everything through our department. Where AI doesn’t help is understanding organizational culture, commercial priorities, or the nuances that come from the trust we’ve built with a business partner. 

One unexpected lesson from the pilot was that AI is actually more about change management than the technology itself. The hardest question isn’t whether AI can do something, it’s how we redesign operations to achieve the highest value while staying accountable for our decisions. In healthcare, that question carries even more weight, because trust is foundational, and we have an obligation to be transparent about when and how we’re using it.

A: Patient experience is the more natural fit of the two. When someone is dissatisfied with their care, having them complain directly to the people delivering that care creates a power imbalance, it’s not natural. 

They need an objective party, and a legal department is well positioned to provide that objectivity. Alternative dispute resolution rests nicely there too, strategic writing, good investigation, follow-up, records retention, these are all legal processes at their core. I think the duality of my background as a nurse and a lawyer helped make that case, because there’s an inherent trust that comes from understanding the business itself.

A: As a lawyer without a healthcare background, I don’t think I would have had the depth of knowledge to critically analyze what’s happening and help the organization the way I’ve been able to. We’re creating SE Health’s first social impact venture fund, and from a legal perspective, setting up a fund is something you can do anywhere, you can outsource that. But creating a fund with the impact we’re looking for, with the value proposition built in from the ground up, and being able to articulate that to attract the right investors, that’s different, and I can do that because of the awareness my nursing background gives me. 

SKATING TO WHERE THE PUCK IS GOING

Chief strategy and innovation officer and partner, Stewart McKelvey, Halifax, NS

Paul Saunders is chief strategy and innovation officer and partner at Stewart McKelvey in Halifax, NS, named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Changemakers category. When Stewart McKelvey became the first large Canadian law firm to publicly announce a firm-wide rollout of Legora across all six of its offices, the decision looked sudden from the outside. 

Paul Saunders says it wasn’t. He’s spent 11 years in his role building the case for adaptability, and the AI pitch drew directly on that decade of groundwork rather than standing as a single business case. 

“There were a whole bunch of nodding heads in the room, because this wasn’t the first time they’d heard this. The technology was different, but we’d really embedded into the DNA of our firm this idea that we need to be adapting,” he says.

Saunders assembled the cross-functional team behind the rollout, ran a 58-person pilot, and secured buy-in from the Partnership Board by tying the decision directly to the firm’s Strategic Plan. He personally led in-person training sessions across all six offices as hundreds of lawyers began incorporating the tool into daily practice.

Compensation as the real test of strategy

Saunders has spent years redesigning Stewart McKelvey’s compensation and profitability frameworks, work he calls unglamorous but foundational. 

Get compensation misaligned with strategy, he argues, and compensation becomes the real strategic plan by default. The firm rebuilt its approach roughly six years ago, bringing in a third party to interview more than half its partners on what worked and what didn’t, a process it now repeats every year. 

For those changes to hold, he says the input has to come from the bottom up and stay organic to the firm.
 

 

The AI training conundrum

Saunders is candid about what worries him most in developing junior lawyers: keeping them in the loop validating and confirming AI-generated work, rather than letting the technology quietly take over the tedious groundwork he credits as foundational to his own legal judgment.

His concern is straightforward: junior lawyers who lean on AI too heavily lose the reps that build real judgment, the kind no one develops without eventually writing the memo themselves.

His answer leans on old-fashioned mentorship paired with a new mindset. “I like to channel Wayne Gretzky on this one and try to skate to where the puck is going to be,” he says, describing an approach that identifies the skills future lawyers will need, pairs junior lawyers directly with senior mentors inside real workflows, and uses AI itself as a teaching tool to close gaps it also creates

A book, a business, and a shared name

Saunders is finalizing the manuscript for his book, now retitled The Fortified Firm: How Organizations Can Thrive in the AI Era, expected in late October or early November 2026, drawing on more than a decade of lessons from Stewart McKelvey. 

The title now matches the name of a new advisory business the firm is simultaneously launching, also called The Fortified Firm, which will help other law firms work through the same strategic, compensation, and AI adoption challenges Saunders has spent years solving internally.

Asked what capability he’d tell another firm’s leadership to build first, he resists a single answer, arguing it depends too much on the firm’s own starting point for a one-size-fits-all prescription. Still, one capability anchors the rest: a strategic plan with clearly identified trade-offs, since good strategy is defined more by what a firm chooses not to do than by what it chooses to do.

 

A: I’ve been in this role for 11 years, and we’d been making the case that whole time about being adaptable to change and embracing innovation. When we made the pitch late last year, we leaned on that decade of work. AI is a transformative general technology that’s going to permeate every industry, and legal is probably one of the most disrupted. 

That’s also a huge opportunity if you’re willing to be at the forefront of it, incorporating it into workflows, aligning pricing and processes, developing champions to make it stick. The case wasn’t difficult to make because it wasn’t the first time partners had heard it, the technology was different, but the mindset had already been embedded into the firm’s DNA over the last decade.

A: Change is hard, especially around something as sensitive as compensation. There’s a quote I love, if your compensation system isn’t aligned with your strategic plan, your compensation system is your strategic plan. 

We undertook that project about six years ago, and we run a continuous improvement process on it every year. Before implementing the new system, we brought in a third party who interviewed more than half our partners on what worked and what didn’t. We do extensive consultations, interviews after every compensation cycle, so changes reflect the will of our partners rather than being dictated from the top. It has to be organic in a law firm environment for it to stick.

A: It’s absolutely necessary that the next generation learns to use AI, that’s the reality of modern practice, but lawyers need to stay in the loop validating and confirming the accuracy of that work. 

I learned the hard way early in my career reviewing hundreds of leases during due diligence, hours of unglamorous work that turned out to be genuinely valuable. If people become overly reliant on AI, they’re deprived of that same learning opportunity. How are you going to litigate persuasively if you’ve never written your own research memo? The answer is to skate to where the puck is going.

That means identifying the skills future lawyers will need, pairing junior lawyers with senior mentors inside real workflows instead of occasional check-ins, and using AI itself as part of the solution, since it can run simulations and act as a teacher for the very gaps it creates.

A: It really depends on the firm. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer. A big part of the advisory work will be diagnosing each firm’s current state, whether they have a strategic plan, what their priorities are. 

That said, most of the time it’s critical that firms have a clearly defined strategic plan with real trade-offs, good strategy is more about what you choose not to do than what you choose to do. Everything else, AI adoption, lawyer development, compensation, should align with that. The first core capability we outline in the book is think and act strategically. That’s usually where firms should start.

 

Hilary Young is a professor in the University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Law, one of Canada’s leading defamation scholars, whose work also covers torts, remedies, and health law, including the non-consensual disclosure of intimate images, informed consent to medical treatment, and genetic privacy. She joined UNB Law in 2012 after clerking for Justice Louis LeBel at the Supreme Court of Canada and practising civil litigation at Cox & Palmer in Halifax. Her research has been cited by courts including the Supreme Court of Canada and has been funded by granting agencies including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She holds an LLB from the University of Ottawa, where she won the Gold Medal, an LLM from Harvard Law School, and a PhD in linguistics from Rice University. 

A: I am a legal educator, and I see how difficult it is to incorporate AI into legal research and practice while still ensuring that students develop the skills and insights they will need to succeed. I see parallels between this and law firms’ need to train future leaders while no longer having to rely on junior associates to do certain kinds of work. This is cheaper for clients, but denies associates the experience that has historically provided the foundation of their expertise. Today’s legal leaders will find ways to work efficiently while not preventing future leaders from developing necessary skills and knowledge.

A: I am pleased to see that despite all the pressures to succeed, Canada’s legal leaders take seriously the need to give back to the profession and their communities. They mentor, volunteer, and seek to uphold high standards of professionalism.

A: The coming year will challenge Canada’s legal leaders through a combination of economic, technological, and access-to-justice pressures. Legal leaders have to balance efficient use of AI with the need to develop a new generation of skilled and knowledgeable legal professionals. And they will have to navigate this complex goal while facing economic and political uncertainty and ongoing barriers to access to justice. Successful leaders will have to be creative in mentoring and educating, while also promoting access to justice for clients.

Ian Hull is one of Canada’s leading estate litigators, co-founder of Hull & Hull LLP alongside his father, Rodney Hull, and a recipient of the Law Society Medal (LSM), the highest honour the Law Society of Ontario bestows. He was called to the Ontario bar in 1990 and has represented clients at every level of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He is a certified specialist in estate and trust law and civil litigation, a fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel and the American College of Trial Lawyers, and a member of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, the Canadian Academy of Distinguished Neutrals, and the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law. He received the Toronto Lawyers Association’s Honsberger Award in 2018 and the Ontario Bar Association’s award for distinguished service in 2020. Hull holds an LLB from the University of Windsor and an honours BA from the University of Western Ontario.

A: AI is no longer optional, and that’s clear from this year’s nominees. The real question is how you implement it day to day while treating it as a tool, not a replacement for judgment. The leaders who understand this next phase of adoption are the ones bringing junior lawyers along concurrently with the skills they need, because we’re never going to lose the advisor role. Where it used to be a matter of simply buying the tools and letting them do the work, the real leaders sit at the table and explain to their junior lawyers why it matters and how, with a tangible understanding of it themselves.

A: Technology, even before AI became this strong, can make people forget they’re first and foremost advocating a position. The advocacy skills exercised at the senior level need to keep getting pushed down into mid-level and junior lawyers, and the true leaders across every sector make sure junior lawyers get real room to participate rather than just observe. That matters especially in human rights work, where the resources available in private-sector litigation often aren’t there, so bringing junior and mid-level lawyers into complex parts of a case counts for more. AI clears out the grunt work, which means we get to spend our time on what we’re best at, advocacy and advice, because people still want to be advised by people.

A: The profession is growing and, happily, becoming more diverse, which brings new perspectives into every area of law. Twenty years ago, there were far fewer lawyers across Canada, and opening up the profession has genuinely enhanced how we understand different communities and the perspectives they bring to legal problems. At the same time, that growth keeps us honest, we need to stay focused on differentiating our positions in the marketplace and being sensible about the legal services we provide and what we charge for them. That’s good for lawyers and for the profession both.

What connects this year’s Top 25 isn’t a shared practice area, it’s a shared instinct to build, not simply practise. Ventresca rebuilt a firm’s advancement structure. Ismail built a legal department from nothing. Pooran built a program no one else would fund. Brown spent a decade rebuilding the same bill five times instead of walking away from it. Ansari built a case designed to outlast her own client’s file. Saunders built the infrastructure an entire firm now runs on. Bowker has spent her career defining the limits collective litigation shouldn’t cross.

None of them treated influence as a title. They treated it as something built, tested, and rebuilt when the first version didn’t hold. That’s the throughline worth remembering long after this list is published, influence in Canadian law right now belongs to the people willing to do the unglamorous, structural work everyone else assumes someone else will handle.

Hull, who served as a judge for this year’s list, put it more simply: these are candidates who are “hardworking, decent, and focused,” proof that old-fashioned effort still carries as much weight as any new technology.

 

Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers 2026

• 
  Patrick Brown
  Principal Partner
  McLeish Orlando LLP
   
  
• 
  Yola Ventresca
  Managing Partner
  Lerners LLP
   
  
• 
  Yameena Ansari
  Founding Lawyer
  Ansari Immigration Law
   
  
• 
  Elizabeth Bowker
  Partner
  Stieber Berlach LLP
   
  
• 
  Farah Ismail
  Senior Vice-President, Chief Legal, Privacy and Compliance Officer
  SE Health
   
  

CHANGEMAKERS

 

• 
  Patrick Brown
  Principal Partner
  McLeish Orlando LLP
   
  
• 
  Yameena Ansari
  Founding Lawyer
  Ansari Immigration Law
   
  

• Brendon Pooran
  Managing Partner
  PooranLaw
• Amy Salyzyn
  Associate Professor and Dean’s Research Professor in Technology and Justice Futures
  University of Ottawa Faculty of Law
• Paul Saunders
  Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer and Partner
  Stewart McKelvey

BUSINESS

 

• 
  Yola Ventresca
  Managing Partner
  Lerners LLP
   
  

• Claudia Desjardins Bélisle
  Office Managing Partner
  Miller Thomson
• Martha Harrison
  Partner
  McCarthy Tétrault LLP
• Raj Juneja
  Partner and Co-Head of the National Tax Group
  McCarthy Tétrault LLP
• Shahir Guindi
  Partner, Corporate, Former National Co-Chair
  Osler

HUMAN RIGHTS, ADVOCACY, CRIMINAL

 

• 
  Elizabeth Bowker
  Partner
  Stieber Berlach LLP
   
  

• Gideon Christian
  Associate Professor and Research Chair in AI and Law
  University of Calgary
• Michael Rosenberg
  Partner
  McCarthy Tétrault LLP
• Muneeza Sheikh
  Founding Partner
  Muneeza Sheikh Employment and Human Rights
• Stephanie Willsey
  Lawyer
  Cochrane Sinclair LLP

IN-HOUSE

 

• 
  Farah Ismail
  Senior Vice-President, Chief Legal, Privacy and Compliance Officer
  SE Health
   
  

• Christine Chen
  Chief Legal Officer
  University Pension Plan Ontario (UPP)
• Rustam Juma
  General Counsel, Corporate Secretary and Privacy Officer
  Volkswagen Group Canada
• Arun Krishnamurti
  Senior Counsel
  Google Canada
• Lorne O’Reilly, K.C.
  Lead Counsel
  Dow Chemical Canada ULC

GOVERNMENT, NON-PROFITS, ASSOCIATIONS, JUDICIARY

 

• Justice Colin C.J. Feasby
  Justice
  Alberta Court of King’s Bench
• Michael Geist
  Professor
  University of Ottawa
• Honourable Niki Sharma
  Deputy Premier and Attorney General of British Columbia
• Justice Michael Tulloch
  President and Chief Justice of Ontario
  Court of Appeal for Ontario
• The Right Honourable Richard Wagner, P.C.
  Chief Justice of Canada