Manning began her tenure as president on Sept. 1
Kathryn Manning took the reins as president of the Ontario Bar Association this week, and foremost on her list of priorities is tackling what she describes as “unprecedented polarization in the bar.”
That’s according to Manning, who told Law Times on Wednesday that she knows exactly where to start: talking to members of the bar. “We want to be able to identify the places where lawyers are seeing discourse break down,” she says.
“We really want to be driven by research into what it is that lawyers are seeing and what they’re needing,” she adds.
According to Manning, the divide in the Ontario bar can be traced back to 2019, when the Law Society of Ontario oversaw heated campaigns for its governing positions, known as benchers. That year, members of the StopSOP campaign ran and gained a majority of the lawyer seats.
The StopSOP campaign – which rebranded last year as FullStop – had formed in response to the LSO’s introduction of a statement of principles, requiring all lawyers and paralegals to commit to promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion through their work. Campaign members argued that the new requirement breached their freedom of expression.
In 2023, another group of lawyers formed the Good Governance Coalition to counter FullStop.
Manning says the OBA already has several initiatives she plans to expand on. These include the association’s Hard Conversations series, which invites speakers to lecture on legal issues and Diversity Dialogues, a group discussion forum.
The aim is to “develop professional development programming that will give guidance, advice, and strategies on how to have difficult conversations both within law firms and legal departments,” Manning says.
She also aims to continue supporting OBA initiatives to celebrate diversity across the bar. These initiatives help foster understanding between lawyers with different cultural backgrounds and perspectives and shed light on how those factors shaped different legal approaches, Manning says.
Apart from addressing division in the bar, Manning says her other priority is modernizing the legal profession – a task she says the OBA has been working on for years.
“Our courts have come really far since 2019, and the pandemic did help that,” she says, pointing to practices like online document filing and video hearings. “We’ve had great cooperation with the courts and with the Ministry of the Attorney General, so I really want to continue to foster all of that.”