Lakehead University To Launch New Law School

Lakehead University Law School

The inaugural class of Ontario’s first new law school in decades starts this fall in a province already teeming with new lawyers, but these students will be steered away from the big-city fray.

As law school enrollments continue to rise and more students studying law abroad return home, a growing number of graduates are scrambling for a comparatively stagnant number of articling positions — a 10-month work experience mandatory to become a lawyer.

But the so-called articling crisis never made its way as far north as Thunder Bay, Ont., where Lakehead University is set to unveil its new law school, said the new dean.

“If you talk to many of the law firms up here they’ll say, ’Look, we’ve been trying to get an articling student for a number of years, we just can’t get the right one,” said Lee Stuesser, who has taught law for more than two decades.

“For years I’ve been saying to law students, ’Look outside the big centres. There are jobs there.’ And you know what? They haven’t. So there is a shortage (of lawyers) here in the north.”

In March 2008 about 6% of articling candidates couldn’t find a spot, according to the Law Society of Upper Canada. Three years later that number had risen to 12% and by March 2012 approximately 15% of potential lawyers were being left in the lurch.

The majority of articling spots are in Toronto, Ottawa, Windsor and London — which are all home to law schools — and just 2% of the positions are in Ontario’s north, according to recent statistics from the law society.