Often referred to as a pioneer of legal innovation in Canada, Moyse passed away Dec. 2
Jason Moyse, a key member of Canada’s legal innovation community, passed away on December 2 due to a car accident. He was 52 years old.
Lawyers who worked with Moyse remember his passion for new technologies and their capacity to improve the legal industry.
“He was a firm believer in the fact that legal startups could really make a huge impact on legal services,” says Mitch Kowalski, senior commercial counsel for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority.
“He is just a passionate evangelist, and it's important to have people who are out there cheerleading for change in the industry.”
Moyse “was one of a small band of pioneers who were working to inspire the Canadian legal system to be more innovative,” says Ian Holloway, dean of law at the University of Calgary.
“But what made him special, in my view – and a real delight to work with – is that he wasn’t just focused on technology. Rather, he was just as interested in how we need to change how lawyers think and function.”
Moyse’s career spans both private practice and in-house roles. In 2014, he joined Cognition LLP, now known as Caravel Law, which launched to deliver legal services through a lean overhead, technology-based model. The following year, he co-founded LegalX, a law-focused innovation hub at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District.
In recent years, Moyse worked in various roles in the legal tech space and was a fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. He contributed to the center’s LegalTech Index, tracking startups in the legal tech sector there.
Moyse was most recently senior manager, legal business solutions at PwC Canada.
Kowalski, who first met Moyse in 2012, remembers him as a firm champion of innovative ideas and the people behind them.
At LegalX, for example, Moyse and co-founder Aron Solomon ran Dragons Den-type events “where new startups could showcase what they had to offer and allow investors and others to learn more about them,” Kowalski says. “We need those people in our community, back then and also today, to keep progressing and evolving and innovating.”
Holloway says he first met Moyse more than 20 years ago when Holloway was appointed dean of law at the University of Western Ontario – just as Moyse was graduating from the law program.
About a dozen years later, the two worked on a legal innovation project at the University of Calgary. The group working on the project was “small and hardy,” Holloway says, “and Jason’s was one of the key voices.”
“He really was ahead of his time,” Holloway says. “I loved working with him, and it was always a treat to have him come speak with our students and our professors.
“Whenever I went to Toronto, meeting him for a coffee or a beer was always high on my list of priorities,” Holloway adds. “He’s going to be missed by all of us who think about our profession’s future.”
