INCEPTION OF THE ELAO
Andrew Monkhouse, principal of Monkhouse Law, and I are both members of the Ontario Bar Association Council. We attended an in-person OBA council meeting this past December. We discussed gaps in services provided to employment lawyers in Ontario and were interested in creating a platform that represented both, management-side and employee-side employment lawyers. Since the pandemic, employment law has constantly been on the centre stage. First with layoffs resulting from unprecedented nationwide lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, then it was the vaccine mandate. The pandemic has been a catalyst for change in employment law. The workplace has evolved more in the last 2 years, than it did in the previous 20. After the OBA council meeting, Andrew and I continued to talk. We incorporated the association and reached out to lawyers that represented prominent firms and included both management side and employee side lawyers. We put together a very strong team and the rest, as they say, is history.
There are many gaps in services provided to employment lawyers in Ontario. There are currently (at least to my knowledge) no moot court/mock trial continuing professional development events with an employment law focus. This is striking given the number of summary trial and summary judgment motions in the pipeline in Ontario courts today. We also felt that there was not enough opportunity for management-side employment lawyers to network with employee-side employment lawyers. One benefit of hiring a lawyer is to be able to leverage the good relationships s/he has with the lawyer on the other side to resolve a seemingly convoluted claim, fairly quickly, based on having two experienced counsel working together toward a resolution.
Unlike models followed in other areas of law, where there are two separate associations, one representing the plaintiff side and the other representing the defence side, like in criminal law or personal injury law, we felt that the employment law bar is far more collegial. We wanted to capitalize on this collegiality to facilitate dialogue and strong relationships. To do that, it is necessary to have an association that represents employment lawyers on both sides of the courtroom, management side and plaintiff-side lawyers, sitting in one room, deciding the future of our bar. We wanted this organization to be inclusive yet nimble so we can react quickly to rapid developments in employment law. The aim is to ultimately help the public, business owners and employees.
For the first year, we have decided to keep membership free. We are in the process of building a website and a LinkedIn profile. Here is our logo, which was recently approved by the BOD. We want to reach out to our friends in the bar and encourage all to join the association and be part of the conversation about the future of employment law. We also want young lawyers to volunteer for the association. We want senior lawyers to contribute to the precedent bank. We want firms to post jobs on our website. In the future, we plan to intervene in cases at the Court of Appeal of Ontario and the Supreme Court level. We want to know what our members want so we can best serve them.
By Tahir Khorasanee
