What: Famed corporate law firm Torys’ Toronto headquarters
Where: The soaring steel and glass Toronto-Dominion Centre at Wellington and York
How Big: 180,000 square feet over nine floors for a staff of 700
All stories relating to lawyers
Great Offices: Torys’ gallery-like headquarters at Wellington and York
Mayor May Not: we rundown Rob Ford’s recent (and lucky) close calls in court
Between a libel suit, a conflict-of-interest case and an election audit, Rob Ford is spending more time in court than Lindsay Lohan. But with news yesterday that the mayor won’t be prosecuted for improper campaign spending, Ford is free of serious legal challenges for the first time in more than a year. (That said, don’t shelf the #FordCourt hashtag just yet—he still has almost two years left in office, after all.) Below, we look back on the mayor’s biggest legal snafus and why he always seems to get a little lucky when it comes to the law.
A Life Interrupted: Hassan Rasouli’s journey from an earache to a high-stakes battle over end-of-life decisions
Two years ago, Hassan Rasouli checked into Sunnybrook hospital to have a brain tumour removed, fell into a coma, and provoked a Supreme Court battle over who decides to pull the plug. Then, one day, he awoke
For the past two years, the Rasouli family has visited Hassan daily at the Sunnybrook ICU (Image: Christopher Wahl)
Early in the summer of 2010, Hassan Rasouli, a 59-year-old engineer, had a problem with his right ear. He noticed sounds were coming in muffled and indistinct, as if through a ball of cotton. By August, his hearing loss was getting worse. The ear was slightly numb, too, and at times Rasouli caught himself feeling dizzy. He didn’t think much of it. He had moved from Ishfahan, Iran, to Toronto just four months earlier with his wife, Parichehr Salasel, a family doctor, their 27-year-old daughter, Mojgan, and their 22-year-old son, Mehran. They’d come to Canada with the capacity for risk particular to the new immigrant, the kind that leads someone to abandon a life of familiar comforts for an uncertain world where the possibilities might open up a little wider. They were excited about creating a new life.
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Q&A: Brydie Bethell, the latest lawyer to represent Omar Khadr, reveals her client’s post-Guantanamo plans
Omar Khadr has been detained at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 for killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. He hired you last year. Did he seek you out, or you him?
He sought us out. My co-counsel, John Norris, and I had appeared before the Supreme Court in 2008 and 2010 on related cases. I was familiar with
the territory.
Khadr has churned through at least 10 lawyers, often claiming to have lost faith in them. Was it difficult to gain his trust?
It’s difficult with any client. What makes my relationship with Omar complicated is that I can speak to him only through a secure line at a location in the D.C. area or by visiting him at Guantanamo.
You worked for the UN in the Middle East, did your master’s at the London School of Economics and studied law as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Did any of that prepare you for this case? Read the rest of this entry »
Not even close. At the UN, I was based in Jordan and travelled all over, but I was basically an intern. I learned that writing policy papers wasn’t what I wanted to do.
Spotlight: Patrick J. Adams gets his breakout role as a bogus lawyer on the hit series Suits
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Before Suits debuted last year on the tiny USA Network, it sounded like every other legal dramedy with impossibly good-looking lawyers sassing judges and having confrontations in front of floor-to-ceiling windows. That assessment wasn’t entirely off the mark: Suits is set in a stylish Manhattan firm (though shot in Toronto) and features an easy-on-the-eyes cast, including its boyishly handsome star Patrick J. Adams. But the show, which recently began its second season, quickly distinguished itself from the clones with its snappy pacing and sharp dialogue, and became a sleeper hit. The Toronto-born Adams plays the dishy and disheveled anti-hero, Mike Ross, a low-level con artist who stumbles into a job as an associate, despite having no law degree, after impressing the firm’s star litigator with his photographic memory and self-taught mastery of legalese. (TV rules of plausibility are in effect.) Adams brings nuance to the role of the savant hustler. Ross can be ruthless, and yet vulnerable—a mere guppy in a sea of Armani-clad sharks. Earlier this year, he nabbed a Screen Actors Guild nomination for best actor in a drama series, which pitted him against award heavyweights like Bryan Cranston (for Breaking Bad) and Steve Buscemi (who won for Boardwalk Empire). For the 30-year-old Adams, who spent a decade stuck in Hollywood’s revolving door of guest spots and doomed pilots, landing Suits has meant a huge leap in name recognition. It’s the breakout moment actors dream of, and almost as unlikely as, say, stumbling into a job as a lawyer without a law degree.
A lot of immigration lawyers think the government helped Conrad Black with his residence permit
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (Image: Twitter)
In June, it seemed the rumours that Conrad Black had high-ranking government help with his application for Canadian residency had been quelled—but now they’re back. More than 80 lawyers (all immigration specialists) have signed an open letter to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, saying they believe he helped speed along the newspaper magnate–cum–jailbird’s temporary permit. The letter is in support of a Toronto lawyer, Guidy Mamann, who had suggested such a high profile case wouldn’t have been left solely in the hands of civil servants without a “wink or nod” from the minister. Following Mamann’s comments, Kenney’s office asked the Law Society of Upper Canada to investigate and formally censure him, but the file was closed due to lack of evidence. Surprisingly, the famously litigious baron has steered well clear of this particular war of words. [Globe and Mail]
The Cult of Pastor Song: a religious sex scandal in Toronto’s Korean community
The sex scandal consuming Toronto’s Korean community began when six international students said they were repeatedly gang-raped by members of their small church. The accused allege that their eccentric pastor brainwashed the women to deflect attention from his own transgressions
Holy orders: Jae Kap Song, the founder and pastor of Jesus First, encouraged his flock to wear church uniforms and live together in six shared apartments
One July day in 2007, an 18-year-old woman checked into her Toronto-bound flight at South Korea’s Incheon Airport. She was travelling light—she had with her one suitcase containing clothes for a range of seasons, some books and a favourite brand of face cream. She had been living with her grandparents in South Korea and was joining her mother, who had split with her father and moved to Toronto to study acupuncture three years earlier.
A court-ordered publication ban prevents me from identifying the woman, but I’ll call her Yeri. Her plan was to learn English at one of Toronto’s hagwons, Korean-run cram schools that cater to the thousands of young men and women who come to Canada on student visas each year. With command of the language, she would get into a better college in South Korea and ultimately, her family hoped, receive coveted job offers at multinationals.
From the airport, Yeri headed to a Bloor and Islington apartment building where her mother lived in one of six units leased by members of Jesus First, a Korean Presbyterian church run by a pastor named Jae Kap Song. Her mother belonged to the church and expected her to join, too. They’d share one of the apartment’s bedrooms. A second bedroom was shared by two male members of Jesus First.
QUOTED: Conrad Black thinks some eye contact could help him keep his Order of Canada
I seek the opportunity to present the very lengthy and complicated history of the past few years in person, looking the members of the Advisory Council in the eyes, answering any questions they may have and explaining to them why termination would be the unjust and inappropriate heaping of insult upon injury.
Conrad Black, on why he deserves an oral hearing before an advisory council decides whether to revoke his Order of Canada because of his criminal record. The baron argues that, though he served 37 months in American prison for fraud, a Canadian court would never have convicted him. Although federal lawyers representing the council believe he has no case, Black is pulling out all the stops, filing affidavits and getting buddies like Henry Kissinger to write letters of support. Because everyone trusts Kissinger, right? [Globe and Mail]
Faulty towers: who’s to blame for condoland’s falling glass, leaky walls and multi-million-dollar lawsuits
Jan Gandhi and Omar Jabri share a love of big-city life: the people, the architecture, the fashion, the logarithmic bustle of human energy that comes from high-density, high-rise living. They first met as articling students with different Bay Street law firms, introduced by mutual friends. Together they moved to New York, where Gandhi worked as in-house counsel for MTV and Jabri as an intellectual property lawyer, and they lived in an apartment in Chelsea. Gandhi became addicted to flash-sale websites, filling her wardrobe with deeply discounted designer fashions. Flash sales are enormously popular in New York. She saw an underserved market in Toronto, so she hatched a plan to return and launch her own site.
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Conrad Black (armed with lawyers, of course) fights to keep his Order of Canada
(Image: United States Marshals Service)
Post-incarceration, Conrad Black has turned his love of litigious matters into a hobby. The most recent fight for the “oppressed” baron started last year, when Black learned that his pesky conviction for fraud meant he could lose his Order of Canada (and you know he doesn’t want to stop wearing that cool Order of Canada pin). Now Black is taking the council reviewing his membership to court because he wants them to hear him out in person—according to his lawyers, Black’s case is too complex to be sussed out through written arguments. If Black, a noted and long-winded writer, can’t plead his case via text, we’re afraid to imagine how epically wordy his courtroom speeches will be. [Globe and Mail]
Conrad Black says Random House caused him $1.25 million worth of suffering
(Image: UrsaSharp)
Conrad Black must love lawyers as much as Barbara Amiel loves her Hungarian kuvasz dogs. In the midst of working through a few leftover Hollinger lawsuits—and one of his own against British author Tom Bower for his
biography
The Law Society of Upper Canada keeps its name (not that it’s old-fashioned)
In what sounds like a truly stirring annual general meeting, the Law Society of Upper Canada decided this week to keep its old-timey name (so what if Upper Canada hasn’t been a geographic region for about 145 years and the name yields the acronym LSUC?). A few rebels had dared to suggest the society, founded in 1797, become the Ontario Law Society (or, even better: the League of Extraordinary Ontario Lawyers and Paralegals). According to the Toronto Star’s account, federal lawyer Tom Vincent unfurled a map of Ontario “with a purposeful flourish” to show that the historical boundaries of Upper Canada don’t represent the present region. Next, former treasurer Vern Krishna—who has a “well-trimmed, snow-white handlebar moustache and round spectacles”—argued passionately in favour of tradition. Ultimately, the deciding point was that the change would cost $1.5 million. An overwhelming majority defeated the motion—and then threw up their top hats and monocles and shouted huzzah! Well, that’s what we imagine, at least. [Toronto Star]
For once, the courts give Conrad Black reason to be “delighted”
(Image: Charles LeBlanc)
The courts have delivered everybody’s second-most despised media supervillain something of a moral victory. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled yesterday that Conrad Black was actually within his rights when he filed libel suits in Ontario against a mostly American group of former Hollinger International Inc. directors, officers and advisers—including Black’s avowed nemesis, Richard Breeden, and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Of course, the victory is largely academic, since Black has already agreed to settle the suits, and he’s certainly not getting out of jail any sooner. The Lord’s lawyers say he was “delighted” to hear the news—but, given Black’s penchant for rhetorical flourishes and his profound distaste for Breeden, we figured he would have chosen a more bombastic descriptor. We certainly hope the hoosegow isn’t getting the good baron down.
[Globe and Mail]
Rob Granatstein: how city hall tries—and fails—to tackle the systemically screwed-up Toronto taxi industry
Toronto’s taxi industry has been a mess for more than 50 years. As a passenger, you feel it as soon as you slide your bum onto the vinyl backseat and see the starting fare of $4.25. The meter quickly rolls higher as you lurch through stop-and-go traffic while listening to your driver blather away on his Bluetooth. For this dubious service, Torontonians pay more than taxi customers in New York and Los Angeles.
If it’s any consolation, your driver is equally ticked off. Despite the high price paid by riders, the average cabbie working a 12- to 14-hour shift is lucky to take home $75—after paying for the car, gas and dispatch fees. A 2008 academic study conducted by professors at Ryerson and U of T found that shift drivers, who rent their cabs from plate owners on a daily or weekly basis, can make less than $3 an hour. People in the taxi industry claim there are 1,000 too many cabs on the road, which is killing the drivers’ ability to make a living. Toronto currently has approximately one cab for every 520 people, whereas a decade ago, we had one for every 1,000.
Whenever politicians try to fix our troubled taxi industry, they inevitably make it worse. Yet city hall is wading in once again, with Councillor Cesar Palacio, chair of the licensing and standards committee, heading up a 10-month review that will attempt to resolve some long-standing grievances among drivers.
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