When I first heard about the articling crisis, it perplexed me that a legal system which excludes so many from access to justice could simultaneously leave so many of its new graduates without articling opportunities.
How can a legal system which denies legal aid to all but the poorest and effectively prices the middle class out of legal services simultaneously produce structural unemployment for its recent graduates?
Is there a connection between the articling crisis and the access to justice crisis?
Renowned defence lawyer Clayton Ruby believes so, and made the case for tackling both challenges together in his submission to the Law Society of Upper Canada Articling Task Force and in an article in The Lawyers Weekly.
In his brief to the Task Force, Mr. Ruby spoke of the days when criminal and immigration firms, relying heavily on legal aid clientele, were able to take on articling students. By contrast, he observed that few such firms are able to afford to take on articling students nowadays due largely to the cuts to legal aid over the past two decades.
Legal aid was not always so inaccessible, and legal services out of reach for so many. A dramatic shift occurred over the past two decades or so as the federal government stepped back from its commitment to fund 50% of criminal legal aid it made in the 1972 Federal-Provincial Agreement on Legal Aid in Criminal Matters, and as provincial governments of all stripes cut, capped and froze legal aid expenditures. A few years ago, the criminal lawyers association boycotted serious criminal legal aid cases, resulting in a settlement providing some increase to their rates, but anyone who’s volunteered at a clinic knows that severe limits to legal aid eligibility persist. The result of decades of austerity and neglect is a legal aid system which excludes all but the very poorest, including many under the poverty line.
Linking access to justice to the articling crisis, Mr. Ruby proposed that legal aid certificates be structured so that small criminal and immigration firms would earn more money with a student than without, by designating part of the billing structure for articling students. Making the case for his plan in The Lawyers Weekly, Mr. Ruby concluded that “[w]e have a professional responsibility to provide better access to justice for the poor and the middle class. And we have a professional responsibility to train the next generation of lawyers.”
While both the majority and the minority of the Task Force passed on Mr. Ruby’s proposal, he raised excellent points on linkages between the crises in access to justice and articling opportunities for graduates. Both are an embarrassment to the profession, and he’s absolutely right to aim to tackle them together.
