New lawyers for new times

It’s the week before the very first courses begin at Ryerson’s Faculty of Law and the inaugural class of 170 students are gathered for a Zoom session on leadership. The panel includes a dozen guest speakers, who are advocating for changes in criminal law, disability accommodations in the workplace, Black representation in legal leadership and more.

A student asks Jordana Goldlist, a criminal defence lawyer who was once homeless and now fights for youth in the justice system, how she would define a leader. Leadership comes down to “character, as opposed to skills,” she replies, and that for her, a leader is simply someone who is “fed up with the status quo and won’t back down, even if the cause is unpopular.” She reminds the class that 100 years ago, as a woman, she wouldn’t have been able to go to law school. “We’ve made changes in society because people have stood up and ignored the noise and focused on doing what was right.”

Launched in the fall 2020 term, Ryerson’s law school wants to educate students to be more than just lawyers, and its inaugural class is a diverse group of future leaders who have a passion for social innovation. The aim of the school is to train lawyers who will advocate for reforms and increase access to legal representation using technology and entrepreneurship.

While some in the profession have worried about an overabundance of lawyers, Anver Saloojee, assistant vice-president, international at Ryerson, who took on the project of designing the law school back in 2015, found that there is a vital need for lawyers who represent marginalized people in society, and can mobilize technology to serve clients who can’t afford tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Alarmingly, research shows that more than half of Canadians self-represent in family court, and the number of Canadian defendants without lawyers in criminal and civil law cases is on the rise.

Why the next generation of lawyers need a solid grounding in technology and entrepreneurship

Donna Young, the founding dean of the law school, was drawn to the school’s four pillars: equity, diversity and inclusion; access to justice; innovation and entrepreneurship; and sound academics with innovative pedagogy. “It sounded like the answer to a lot of people’s questions,” she recalls.

While other law schools are working to incorporate innovative business models and social justice, “it’s hard to move an established institution,” says Young. “If this is built into your founding principles and documents, then you don’t have to push against any cultural norms. That was really attractive.”

Young has grappled with law’s access problem throughout her career. When she worked at the Ontario Human Rights Commission, there was a two-year wait for a case to proceed. “That’s not access,” she says. “Training lawyers who are willing to represent low-income and marginalized clients is vital to increasing access.” But providing services has to make financial sense to be sustainable, which is why Ryerson is teaching law students about socially innovative business models.

“We believe that combining our focus on legal technology and access to law enables us to train lawyers who think differently about providing legal services to clients, to make it more affordable,” explains Saloojee. Ryerson’s ability to instruct students on the opportunities posed by technology is bolstered by the Legal Innovation Zone, the world’s first legal tech incubator, which was developed by Ryerson and other partners in 2015 and is housed at the university.

The law school incorporates a coding intensive, a mandatory social innovation course, and small mentoring groups with legal practitioners. While the school won’t expect students to code their own programs, it’s designed to offer skills that can help them promote access to justice.

Students will learn to answer questions like, “What kind of data do you need to collect and process in order to arrive at proper conclusions in legal software? What kind of protections will you build into an AI (artificial intelligence) system to ensure a claim isn’t wrongly denied?” explains Sari Graben, associate dean for academic, research and graduate studies at the law school.

One first-year student, Upama Poudyal, is already in the process of rolling out an app that connects people to lawyers. Rather than simply searching for lawyers online or asking for referrals, users will be able to fill out a digital form with questions such as what language they want their lawyer to speak, how much they can spend, and more. Based on the answers, the app will recommend a lawyer. “If we’re going to live in a fair society, then everyone should be able to access legal resources, especially when they’re going through traumatic events such as divorce, criminal proceedings, or even real estate transaction issues,” Poudyal says.

Young says that society also needs more lawyers who understand technology to help the government regulate fast-growing technologies. “Facebook has become this kind of behemoth that is in some ways more powerful than government. It’s also been responsible for enabling misinformation on the grandest scale, and is just one example of a technology company trying to avoid regulation,” she says. “We need tech-savvy lawyers to figure out legislative ways of dealing with newer technologies.”

A long journey to a new vision

Ryerson’s law school has been a long time coming. Over the past decade, the university has worked on proposals addressing concerns that there were enough law schools in Ontario and demonstrating need for a different approach.

Anver Saloojee, assistant vice-president, international at Ryerson and one of the founders of the law school, launched a project in 2015 that showed that many Canadians were going unrepresented in legal matters due to financial barriers. With its focus on advancing social justice, entrepreneurship and technology, the university is well-positioned to train the next generation of lawyers who can innovate on cost-effective models for representation.

Lawyers have also been calling for schools to produce graduates that were ready for practice as many law schools typically don’t teach the practical matters such as filing a motion or drafting a contract. “When we researched legal education in the United States and other countries, we found there have been growing calls for changes in how legal education is being delivered,” says Saloojee. Building on Ryerson’s signature model of melding academic and applied knowledge, the school breaks from others by using a co-teaching model, where law practitioners co-teach with legal professors.

Ryerson Law’s Integrated Practice Curriculum (IPC) offers an attractive option for students as it fulfils the Law Society of Ontario (LSO) articling requirement for licensing. The IPC weaves professional skills training directly into the three-year academic program through the co-teaching structure of each course, the intensive programs offered at the beginning of each semester and the professional placement during the third year. Upon graduation, Ryerson law students are immediately eligible to write the licensing exams to gain entry into practice. Graduates don’t need to article since the experiential requirements for licensing will have already been fulfilled.

Julia Shin Doi, Ryerson’s general counsel and secretary of the Board of Governors, played a key role in garnering support for the vision. In a strategic meeting with around 50 legal leaders from across the GTA she remembers that “there was a lot of enthusiasm in the room for our vision.”

Preparing law students for an array of career options, from running an independent practice to working for a non-profit organization, is one of the goals of the school. “A legal career can include practising in a law firm, legal aid clinic, government or corporation,” says Shin Doi.

In 2017 and 2018, Ryerson received approval from three key accreditation bodies for the law school: the Quality Assurance Council, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, and the LSO.

In an effort to make the Ryerson Law program more accessible to applicants from underrepresented communities, the university has set tuition at just over $21,000, well below the cost of the other law schools in the city. In collaboration with law firms, advocacy groups and community and business leaders, Ryerson is also offering numerous scholarships and awards to students. Law firms supporting scholarships include Torys LLP, McCarthy Tétrault LLP, Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP, Gardiner Roberts LLP and Hicks Morley Hamilton Stewart Storie LLP. Scholarships have also been created by the John C. and Sally Horsfall Eaton Foundation, Andrew and Valerie Pringle, and Nadir and Shabin Mohamed in honour of Dale H. Lastman.

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