ARCTIC OBITER

MARCH 2010 | 3
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
FLSC Semi-Annual Meeting
March 18th to the 20th was the Federation of Law
Societies semi annual meeting. This year it was held in
Toronto and I attended with Linda Whitford, Erin
Delaney and Lou Sebert. The day and a half of meetings
were packed with information, compelling speakers and
extremely interesting topics which are
important to our profession and those we
serve.
Among the topics which were discussed
was how the regulation of our profession
should and will change as our profession
becomes more global and more services
are developed which take over many
areas of today’s general lawyer’s practice.
Services such as title insurance are
carving away at the types of real estate
transactions a lawyer will handle. In
some jurisdictions in Canada, refinances
are handled completely by banks and
title insurers without the involvement of
Shirley A. Walsh
a lawyer. Paralegals are handling more and more files
which were once solely the purview of lawyers, and in
Ontario paralegals are now governed by the Law Society
of Upper Canada. And increasingly, global, primarily
low-cost but competent lawyers in foreign countries are
performing routine legal tasks for local (Canadian) clients
at massive cost savings. The trend seems to be that these
types of changes are increasing (although they will likely
take longer to get to the Northwest Territories than to
Toronto or Vancouver), and we need to be prepared to
address the practice and regulatory amendments that will
accompany the changes.
A large portion of the Friday afternoon meetings was
taken up by the discussion of the future harm exception
to confidentiality in the proposed national code of
conduct. I sat on a panel with Sheila Greene, a member of
the executive for Newfoundland and Labrador, and
Gérald R. Tremblay of the Barreau du Québec and we
were given two scenarios where we had to decide
whether to break confidentiality based on our existing
codes of conduct. We had three different answers for
each scenario because our codes are not the same – in fact,
there are very striking differences
nationally. A new uniform rule is
desired, however the difficulty is where to
draw the line on what constitutes a
justifiable reason to report information
obtained from a client. Future crime?
Imminent bodily harm to an individual?
Is there a threshold of possible financial
loss to an innocent third party that could
trigger a future harm exception (i.e. a
Bernie Madoff type situation) and is that a
sliding scale? It was a very interesting
discussion with no clear resolution and
more work is being done to determine the
best wording for this public safety that
will also protect the fundamental legal and
civil right of solicitor-client confidentiality.
Saturday’s presentations were extremely interesting with
presenters from the International Bar Association, the
Canadian Bar Association, the Department of Justice
Canada and others regarding their experiences with
assisting developing Bars in countries such as
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and China. The
presentations highlighted the need in countries where the
rule of law is still being developed and how we can help
very easily and in ways that don’t involve traveling to
those jurisdictions.
These few paragraphs cannot do justice to the amount of
interesting information that was presented during the
conference. If anyone would like more information, or a
copy of any of the materials which we obtained, please
contact me or the law society office.