Where’s a Lawyer When You Need One?Some days, Marla Miller’s phone just doesn’t stop ringing. People call her FAMILY LAW practice in Edmonton all day long, trying to find a lawyer to hire, but there aren’t any available. "We can’t even call them all back. We’re too busy," says Miller, a collaborative family lawyer and mediator. "It’s really problematic. Even if someone has an emerging situation, or court pending, sometimes you just have to say, ‘Good luck, sorry. We’re not taking any more clients.’ "
Miller’s office isn’t the only one fielding desperate calls. In Edmonton and Calgary, family lawyers are refusing to take on new cases,
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For Percy, the root of the problem is clear. "In the last several years, there’s been a strong argument Canada does not graduate enough lawyers," he says. Prevailing wisdom might suggest that fewer lawyers is a good thing, but observers worry it’s just the opposite, driving up the cost of legal services by restricting the number of people who can provide them. As with any other product, "the price of [legal services] is a function of supply and demand," says Vern Krishna, a lawyer and law professor at the University of Ottawa. When it comes to lawyers,
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Over the past 30 years, Canada’s population and its need for legal services has ballooned, yet the number of law students who graduate each year is "virtually unchanged," notes Krishna. Today,
Order Online Cheap Shoes Air Jordan 7 Cardinals 2011, Canada has 16 common law schools, the same number it had three decades ago, when the population was smaller by a third. While some schools have opened extra spaces, the impact has been minimal in 2006, 2,973 law students were admitted to the profession, just 133 more than a decade before.
John G. has 75 law schools for a population of nearly 61 million, while Australia has 28 law schools, and 21 million people. Naturally, Canada also has a small supply of lawyers. Here, there’s about one lawyer or notary for every 421 people.
It’s not that there aren’t enough Canadians who want to be lawyers: some faculties get 10 applicants per spot,
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For the thousands of Canadians who don’t get accepted each year many of whom, undoubtedly, would make perfectly fine lawyers studying abroad is an attractive option, and foreign schools are only too happy to take them. Of the 750 law students at Bond University in Australia, over 100 are from Canada. The school even teaches Canadian constitutional law,
Online Store Find The Latest Style Of Black Toe 1s, and will begin offering Canadian corporate and tax law this year, "not because they’re fascinated by it; they’ve got a market," says Krishna, executive director of the Federation of Law Societies’ accreditation committee, who notes that steps are now being taken to make it easier for foreign trained lawyers to practise here. About 200 qualify to work here each year, including Canadians who have studied abroad.
Getting a degree is, of course, just one step to becoming a lawyer. Provincial law societies (lawyers’ self regulating bodies) require new graduates complete a bar admission course and articling period,
Where Can i Buy Mens Air Jordan 13 Retro Playoffs 2011, yet both vary in length across the country (the course is six months in Alberta, but just six weeks in Nova Scotia; articling requirements vary from six months to a year). This suggests "entry requirements may have been set, in some instances, at a higher than necessary level,
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For Canada’s aspiring lawyers, the bar to entry is set high. Given their unique responsibilities, that’s not necessarily a bad thing except if it skews who enters the profession, and the career path they take. To attend a Canadian law school, "you have to come from a well off family that can afford to support you through seven years of university," Kelly says. Those who can pay a tutor for the Law School Admission Test, or can afford to shell out the money to study abroad (Bond’s Canadian students pay a whopping $22,000 in tuition alone), are also at an advantage.
In Ontario, where law school tuition was deregulated in 1997, two thirds of law students come from the wealthiest 40 per cent of families in the province, a 2004 study found,
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As Ontario law school tuition skyrocketed, the number of graduates looking to take jobs in lower paying public law fields (including criminal and family) has taken a dive, says Frank Addario,
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Law schools have long fought the notion they’re merely a conveyor belt to big firm jobs. The University of Toronto, for example, offers Canada’s only back end debt relief program, which helps students choosing lower income employment to pay off their loans. Schools host public law career fairs,
Cheap Authentic Mens Shoes Air Jordan 11 Legend Blue, run legal aid clinics, and provide other opportunities to learn about what’s seen as alternative work. But some say the ivory tower could do more to make legal education accessible. Ryerson University is now considering opening a law faculty that would offer flexible, part time courses, says Julia Hanigsberg, its general counsel and secretary of the board. Although part time law programs are rare in Canada, they might attract a more diverse student body new immigrants, mature students returning to the workforce who’d pursue a more diverse practice of law, she argues. And, because they could work part time, "they leave law school with smaller debt loads and greater freedom to choose public interest or other lower paying careers," says David Chavkin, a professor the American University Washington College of Law.
Ironically, attracting a more diverse student body was exactly what Lakehead University was trying to do: it recently advanced a proposal for a new law school in Thunder Bay, one that would attract northern and Aboriginal students, and retain more lawyers in the area. "What we hear from students,
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In fact, Lakehead was just one of four Ontario universities (excluding Ryerson) that had new law faculties on the drawing board. But last year, the provincial government denied funding to all of them,
Buy Online Womens Shoes Air Jordan 3 Retro White Cement 2011, concluding that demand from the student side hasn’t increased enough to justify it (in 2007, 4,469 people applied to Ontario law schools, almost 1,000 more than 10 years before). And the Law Society of Upper Canada warned there may not be enough articling spaces for new students anyway. (Lakehead’s independent survey identified enough articling jobs to meet the needs of the 55 law students it hopes to admit each year, Gilbert says.) Extra funding for law schools is rarely popular with government, notes Krishna: "Do we say there’s not enough residency [positions], so we’re not going to train more doctors?"
Despite the growing number of experts who say Canada needs more lawyers,
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Yet Canada’s lawyer supply is so very restricted, and access to justice remains a struggle for so many, that it seems adding more legal service providers must be part of the solution. "We know there’s the demand from the student side. We know there’s the demand from people who need legal services," Hanigsberg says. "One can’t help but look at that and say, how can it be that we don’t need more lawyers?"
See also LAW; LEGAL EDUCATION; LAW AND SOCIETY.
Maclean’s February 9, 2009
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Welcome To Our Online Shop Air Jordan 11 Low Concord, Kate and Ainsworth Vincze, Cameron. 2009. Where A Lawyer When You Need One?. The Canadian EncyclopediaWhile every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
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