From Conference to the Nation’s Capital
Though Canada’s oldest law society, the Law Society of Ontario (formerly the Law Society of Upper Canada), was established in 1797 and many others are well over 100 years old, it was not until 1927 that law society leaders, at the initiative of Sir James Aikins of Manitoba, first came together to form the Conference of Governing Bodies of the Legal Profession in Canada.
The main objective of the Conference was “the consideration of matters of common interest to the Governing Bodies of the profession in the several provinces and the making of recommendations in respect thereof to the Canadian Bar Association and to the Governing Bodies of the profession in the provinces.”
The annual conference structure endured for 45 years and served its primary purpose as a vehicle for Canada’s bar leaders to share ideas and common experiences. In 1972, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada was established as a non-profit corporation whose mission as a coordinating body and forum for exchange between law societies gradually took on more importance with the growth of the legal profession and the complexity of issues facing the law societies. The Federation was housed in Montreal, Quebec from 1985 until 2006 when it engaged its first full-time Chief Executive Officer and relocated to Ottawa, the nation’s capital.
Today’s Federation
Recent years have seen a rapid and dynamic evolution in how law societies have come together nationally through the Federation to fulfill their public interest mandates. Here are a few examples:
| 2001 | The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) is founded to provide free access to legal information for the public and the legal profession. Its online collection has grown to include all laws of Canada’s federal and provincial governments, as well as more than 1,000,000 Court cases and decisions of administrative tribunals. |
| 2002 – 2006 | The National Mobility Agreement is signed and implemented to break down interprovincial barriers and facilitate the recognition of credentials and the transfer of lawyers between Canada’s common law jurisdictions. |
| 2005 – 2008 | Canada’s law societies agree on new national rules for lawyers and Quebec notaries to help fight money laundering including a prohibition for them to accept more than $7,500 in cash and requiring them to observe rigorous client identification and verification rules. |
| 2006 | The Territorial Mobility Agreement extends the regime for lawyer mobility to Canada’s northern territories. |
| 2009 | With rapidly growing demand for assessment of credentials of individuals whose legal education was obtained abroad, the Federation modernizes its processes and relocates its assessment service (the National Committee on Accreditation) from the University of Ottawa to the Federation’s head office. |
| 2010 | The Federation and Canada’s law societies formally approve national requirements for law degree programs in Canada’s common law jurisdictions to ensure high standards of competence for individuals who wish to enter the legal profession. |
| 2009 | The Federation adopts a Model Code of Professional Conduct to set the benchmark for harmonizing codes of conduct to be implemented in each of Canada’s law societies so that the public can expect the same high ethical standards to apply to the legal profession everywhere in Canada. |
| 2010 | The law societies approve the Quebec Mobility Agreement which formalizes reciprocal recognition of the Canadian Legal Advisor category of membership for lawyers and enables their transfer between common law and civil law legal systems. |
| 2011 | The Federation approves the applications for two new Canadian law degree programs at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia and Lakehead University in Ontario – the first new law schools in Canada in over 35 years. |
| 2013 | Law societies signed the National Mobility Agreement 2013 and the Territorial Mobility Agreement 2013. These agreements expand mobility rights to permit Canadian lawyers to transfer between Quebec and the common law provinces and territories with ease regardless of whether they are trained in Canadian common law or civil law. The new mobility agreements will come into effect only once implemented by each law society. |
| 2014 | Law societies adopted National Discipline Standards governing how law they handle complaints to ensure that members of the public are treated promptly, fairly and openly wherever in Canada they have used the services of members of the legal profession. |
| 2015 | The National Requirement that specifies the competencies and skills graduates of Canadian common law programs must have attained and the academic program and learning resources law schools must have in place came into effect. The Federation’s Canadian Common Law Program Approval Committee approved 19 existing Canadian law school programs. |
| 2015 | The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Federation’s constitutional challenge to the applicability of certain provisions of Canada’s Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act and regulations to the legal profession, ending a 14-year legal battle with the federal government. The Court found that regulations that would have forced lawyers to collect information about their clients and their financial transactions and turn that information over to the government on demand interfered with legal counsels’ duty of commitment to the client’s cause and violated protection in the Charter against unreasonable search and seizure, and rights of security of the person. |