Starting with the graduating classes of 2015, all common law program graduates in Canada will have to meet new national rules to become lawyers.
“In 2010, Canada’s law societies agreed on a uniform national requirement that graduates of Canadian common law programs must meet to enter law society admission programs,” said Bob Linney, Communications Director of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada (FLSC).
The added benefit to new graduates is greater mobility across Canada. “Any graduate from any approved Canadian law program will be able to apply for admission to any law society,” he said.
FLSC Requirements
According to the Report of the Task Force on the Canadian Common Law Degree, the idea of a national requirement first started back in 2007 when the FLSC saw the legal market in Canada changing. Until then there had been no uniform requirement, the closest approximation being the Law Society of Upper Canada’s over-40-year old requirements. With the 2002 National Mobility Agreement allowing for inter-provincial movement and the increase in foreign-educated lawyers entering through the FLSC National Committee on Accreditation, standardization was needed to harmonize the differences between provinces.
“The national requirement specifies the competencies and skills graduates must have attained, and the law school academic program and learning resources law schools must have in place,” said Linney.
By 2015, all common law programs will have to be approved by the FLSC Canadian Common Law Program Approval Committee. Not all of the law societies have made the changes needed for the FLSC decision to be final and binding. As for the committee that decides on the approval of programs, it is comprised of members chosen by the Council of the FLSC, with some recommendations from the Council of Canadian Law Deans.
Though the committee will enforce many requirements for common law programs, the FLSC will largely allow them to meet the requirements however they see fit. One exception, documented in the report, is that it is recommended that ethics and professionalism competencies be acquired in their own course. Other requirements for applicants to law societies will include the understanding of the duty to communicate in a civil manner, ability to address ethical dilemmas, and familiarity with general principles of ethics and professionalism such as fiduciary and confidentiality duties to clients, conflicts of interest, and the importance of serving the serving the public interest in the administration of justice.
U of T Law Program Changes
Unlike most Canadian law schools, U of T Law only has mandatory courses in first year, leaving the upper years free for students to choose their own path except for the compulsory moot, and the Critical Perspectives and the International, Comparative, or Transnational Law requirements, which were only added recently.
“Last year, the Standing Curriculum Committee of the Faculty [Council] was tasked with considering how the new FLSC requirements should be met,” explained Ian Lee, Associate Dean of the JD Program. “At the Committee’s recommendation, in March 2013, the Faculty Council adopted two new JD graduation requirements.
To fulfill those two new requirements, students will have to take a course in ethics and professionalism as well as Business Organizations to fulfil the Federation’s fiduciary duty requirement, in order to graduate in 2015 or later. The faculty will be offering a new Legal Ethics course (LAW 362 H1) and the existing Business Organizations course (LAW 212 H1) to meet the requirements. The administration noted that over 90 percent of students were already taking “biz-org”, making it a minor modification to the existing curriculum. Meanwhile the new ethics course can either be taken during an upper year semester or as an intensive course.
Last year’s first year class, which will be the first to graduate under the new rules in 2015, had “Ethics Week”, consisting of an intensive ethics course in the fall semester of first year. Because of the substantial similarity in content to the new ethnics course, they will probably only be required to take Business Organizations and not the new Ethics course.
However, Sara Faherty, Assistant Dean at the Office of the Associate Dean, explained that the law school administration is still waiting for formal approval of the previous JD program that students started in 2012-2013. The FLSC states that it will post whether a program complies with the national requirements as of 2015.
“We believe that the Legal Ethics programming delivered in the first year of the JD program in 2012-2013 meets the Law Society of Upper Canada’s new requirements, and have had informal indications to this effect from the Law Society of Upper Canada,” said Lee. “We are, however, still awaiting formal confirmation. When we receive it, we will let the affected students know that they do not need to take one of the new ethics courses in 2014-2015.”
For this year’s incoming class, the changes to the curriculum have already been implemented as first year students no longer have “Ethics Week” in the fall semester of first year, but rather had an “Ethics Day” in its place. The extra week has become a fall break or reading week for students. The trend towards implementing two reading weeks per year, usually attached to an existing statutory holiday such as Thanksgiving Day in the fall and Family Day in the winter, has become more common, with universities across Ontario now focusing on student health and wellness issues.
