The letter from Law Society of Upper Canada Treasurer Derry Millar (“
LSUC on women and legal aid,” Law Times, Jan. 11, 2010) about women in the legal profession and legal aid leaves an impression with which I simply cannot agree.
It is true that Convocation spent three years studying the issues confronted by women in the profession. And indeed, we studied it over a decade before that.
Sadly, what came out of the most recent intolerably lengthy study period was an agreement to bring 55 large- and medium-sized firms together to discuss - still further - how to retain women in the profession and to prepare written material to assist firms in making women’s lives better. Talk, talk, talk. Giving those discussions a fancy name, Justicia, doesn’t make them any more effective. Nor does it fully meet our obligations as a law society.
Even today, women working as in-house counsel earn 19-per-cent less on average than their male counterparts. As recently as 2002-08, with pretty good consistency, about 40-per-cent more women than men left the profession in their first five years of practice and are not practising law today. Women are far less likely than men to be partners in firms. The law society has simply never responded to the urgency of the situation.
You would think that the law society might publicly evaluate the openness of large- and medium-sized firms towards women and publicize the results so that the good firms have an impetus to keep on with useful programs, and the bad ones have some incentive, if only out of embarrassment, to change.
Or, if the law society and LawPRO refused to hire firms with bad records, we would see some dramatic changes. Without either commitment, short-term economic interests dominate decisions respecting the retention of women. Everyone has figured out the law society is not really going to do anything, so why change?
Sure, we initiated a Parental Leave Assistance Program to provide financial benefits for young mothers and fathers who have no other source of benefits and cannot access employment insurance. There are 30,000 members of the legal profession in Ontario. Thirty-nine men and women were approved for this program in its first year. Now that’s a huge impact on the profession.
During the legal aid boycott, the law society was responsible mostly for one platitude after another, and those platitudes were overwhelmingly modest expressions of confidence in the attorney general. The law society did not support the one action that was in fact effective: the boycott that was brought and carried out by the Criminal Lawyers’ Association.
Most significantly, over the years, the law society has stood by and watched silently as the provision of criminal legal aid to poor people turned from a decent public service into the provision of third-class legal services for the poor. It has taken no effective action to prevent this, then or now.
Clayton Ruby,Bencher, Law Society of Upper Canada,Toronto
