Greetings from the Chair
Bonnie Patrick*
Welcome back. Hope all of you had a fun and prosperous summer.
You will note that there have been some changes on the Executive since our last newsletter. Some persons have “traded” positions and we have managed to “recruit” new members. We always need more Executive members, to assist us in providing a broad perspective on the issues that exist for those of us who consider ourselves “sole, small firm, general practice lawyers”. If you are interested in assisting us, please advise me (goulinpa@wincom.net) and I will most certainly provide you with the answers to any questions you might have about being an Executive member of this Section. For those who would like to help, but to a lesser degree, you can send us articles for our newsletters...either your own or those of others which you feel would be of interest to the Section and we will most certainly review them for publication.
I am extremely pleased to announce that the OBA Sole, Small Firm and General Practice Section List Serve will be launched in the next few days. This list serve will give you the ability to interact with other Section members by simultaneously sending a single e-mail message to all of them. List serves, sometimes called e-mail lists, are really nothing more than a group of people with the same e-mail address. In effect, they allow a large group conversation via e-mail. In the next few days we will be sending out an e-mail that has instructions on how you "subscribe” to this list. This member benefit is not automatic for all members – you must subscribe to participate on the list. People join a list serve to interact with other people who are interested in the same topic – in this case – information and issues that would interest sole, small firm and general practice lawyers in Ontario. This will include a wide variety of topics, case law updates, referrals, practice management questions and dozens of other topics of interest.
In the next few days all Section members will receive an e-mail inviting them to join the list serve. If you want to participate, please follow the instructions. If you don’t want to participate just ignore the message – you can always join later. I encourage you to take advantage of this amazing opportunity to network with like-minded fellow Ontario sole, small firm and general practitioners.
For those of you involved in the practice of family and/or criminal law, I refer you to the OBA website and in particular to the dinner program we were involved with, conducted in April along with the Criminal Justice and Family Law Sections, concerning matters where the Children’s Aid Society are involved in a proceeding. I had the privilege of chairing this program, and although I must admit I practice in neither of these areas, I found the discussion lively and interesting. For those of you who do practice in these fields, I would suggest you review the CD which was produced for the program which, in addition to discussion by persons involved in the proceedings (criminal lawyer, family lawyer, crown counsel, CAS lawyer), also contains documents which I assure you are jam-packed with useful information (http://www.oba.org/En/gen/sep05/publications.aspx).
The Task Force Report concerning sole practitioners and small firm lawyers produced by the Law Society is now available on the Law Society webpage (http://www.lsuc.on.ca/news/a/hottopics/sole-practitioner-and-small-firm-task-force/). I encourage all of you to read this document carefully, if you have not done so already, as it impacts directly on you and your practice. The Ontario Bar Association is providing input to the Law Society with respect to the findings contained within this document. If any of you have comments, criticisms and/or suggestions relating to the Task Force Report, I encourage you to send them to me (goulinpa@wincom.net) as soon as possible or directly to the Law Society of Upper Canada. At the very least, please read the Report to educate yourselves about how the Law Society suggests they “help” us.
This Section is again planning on participating at the Annual Institute (January 23, 2006) by providing a breakfast presentation. We will be providing you with precedents and documentation you may find useful if and when you are in the position of arguing for costs when the “other side” is a government agency (such as the Family Responsibility Office), a charity (such as the Children’s Aid Society) or the Crown itself. Information with respect to the Institute will be arriving in your In-Box as well as by snail mail. Hope to see you there. Even if you think you will never need the information provided that morning, drop by and join us for a coffee and a muffin.
Finally, there are interesting articles in this newsletter and I encourage you to give them a look. Any editorial comment is most welcome.
* Bonnie Patrick, Goulin & Patrick, (519) 258-8073, goulinpa@wincom.net.