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If custody and access disputes are a deck of cards, the trump suit is the best interests of the child. When separating parents litigate about how and with whom their child should live, findings about what’s best for the child are meant to sweep away the parents’ interests and rights-claims. This principle is uncontroversial, but applying it is difficult. What parenting arrangements are best for children, and how successful is the legal system in putting these arrangements in place?

North American family law conflicts are very often brought to mediation, in which a neutral third party attempts to bring about a voluntary resolution of the spouses’ dispute. Family mediation has many enthusiastic supporters, and has in many jurisdictions been made a mandatory precursor to traditional litigation. However, it has also given rise to a potent feminist critique, which identifies power imbalance and domestic violence as sources of exploitation and unjust mediated outcomes. This article summarizes the feminist critique of family mediation, and assesses the efforts of contemporary mediation practice to respond to it. Even in the absence of formal family mediation, litigating spouses are likely to be subjected to substantial informal pressure to settle from judges and other family justice system workers. The article argues that the feminist critique might be more relevant to this “settlement mission” than it is to formal family mediation as it is practiced today.

Commentators have predicted that machine intelligence and off-shoring will steadily undermine demand for lawyers in North America and Europe. This essay argues that this prediction is not equally valid for all types of legal practice. Personal plight practice — in which lawyers help individuals and small businesses involved in legal disputes — is largely sheltered from computerization and off-shoring. The article calls for the profession and legal educators to open doors between tomorrow’s lawyers and personal plight legal practice. Doing so will not only address the economic insecurity confronting tomorrow’s lawyers, but also enhance access to justice.

Traditional lawyer self-regulation, which has been abrogated or significantly compromised in most wealthy countries, lives on in anglophone North America. In the United States and in common law Canada, lawyers make and enforce almost all of the rules which govern legal service delivery. These regulatory regimes are also distinctive in their (i) maintenance of a single, unified occupation of "lawyer," (ii) insulation of law firms from non-lawyer ownership, and (iii) near-exclusive regulatory focus on individual lawyers as opposed to law firms. Other wealthy English-speaking countries (the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand) have gradually abandoned all of these elements of traditional lawyer regulation over the past 40 years.

Judicial dispute resolution is common in family courts, where it usually consists of informal efforts to bring about settlement in pre-trial conferences. Many judges are especially eager to promote settlement in child custody and visitation cases. This paper will critically evaluate informal JDR in parenting disputes, by asking whether and to what extent it is in the best interests of the children involved. It begins by identifying several features which distinguish custody and access disputes from other types of civil litigation, and which are relevant to the normative analysis of JDR in this context.

How can we preserve and extend what's good about contingency fees, while minimizing the bad and the ugly? In order to identify the regulatory tools best suited to this challenging task, this Chapter proposes a consumer welfare analysis. The consumers of contingency fee legal services are the individual clients, and the members of classes, represented by law firms working on this basis. These consumers, like other consumers, have interests in:(i) quality, (ii) price, (iii) fairness, and (iv) choice. Part 2 of this Chapter will analyze these four sets of consumer interests, all of which are affected by the regulation of contingent fees. Part 3 scrutinizes various regulatory approaches to contingency fees against the consumer welfare criterion. I argue that heavy-handed interventions, such as fee caps and retrospective price review, can do as much harm as good for consumers. "Light touch" alternatives such as disclosure and standardized contracts, and fostering the "invisible hand" of the market, are preferable approaches for a regulators interested in maximizing consumer welfare.

Forthcoming, Dalhousie Law Journal.A lawyer should be a loyal ally for each client, and should never exploit a client for personal gain. Legal services regulation should prevent such exploitation. It should also create certainty, and foster trust in every lawyer-client alliance.When it comes to time-based legal fees, Canadian legal services regulation is not yet doing its job. Throughout Canada, rules say that legal fees must be “fair and reasonable,” and “disclosed in a timely fashion.”1 These fine sentiments are supported by long lists of factors to be considered when a legal fee is called into question and then assessed retrospectively. That is, more or less, all that the codes of conduct have to say about time-based legal fees.What we lack are clear rules and efficient procedures to determine what specific billing and disclosure practices are -- and are not -- “fair,” “reasonable,” and “timely.” The status quo gives unethical lawyers room to take advantage of inexperienced clients in niches such as family law, estate law, and employment law, in which time-based billing is common.2 It also subjects ethical lawyers, and their clients, to unnecessary distrust and disputes regarding fees. Reconciling the obvious need to charge and collect fees with the ethical obligation to practice “honourably and with integrity” raises complicated ethical issues,3 for which regulators should offer more concrete guidance. Without fixing prices or curtailing flexibility in billing arrangements, regulatory reform can create a much fairer field for agreements between lawyers and clients about time-based fees.Part 1 of this article considers first the beginning, then the middle, and finally the end of a typical retainer involving time-based billing and an inexperienced client. At each of these three junctures, we find ethical ambiguity creating both opportunities for exploitation and conflicts of interest. The vagueness of the rules requires a lawyer to unilaterally make decisions that increase or decrease the client’s bill. This creates a conflict between the lawyer’s financial self-interest, and their fiduciary obligation to put the client’s interest first. Part 2 argues for more detailed regulation of time-based legal fees, in order to prevent exploitation, create certainty, and eliminate fee-related conflicts of interest that undermine trust in the lawyer-client relationship. Wherever possible, the best practices for time-based billing already used by ethical and conscientious lawyers should be enshrined in regulation. Drawing on regulatory theory, I argue that a move from the current vague standard to more precise rules would create certainty, without significantly constraining flexibility. Part 3 turns from the rules to the procedure that is meant to enforce them. I argue that the court-based process for identifying and remedying unethical billing is inaccessible, inconsistent, and vulnerable to strategic abuse by both lawyers and clients. Making law societies fully responsible for regulating legal fees would make the system more holistic, accessible, and consistent.

The judicial role in child custody and visitation disputes has traditionally been understood as one of authoritative decision-making. However this new empirical research suggests that many family court judges prioritize the pursuit of voluntary settlement in pre-trial conferences, using evaluative and facilitative mediation techniques. Drawing on qualitative interviews with judges and other family law professionals in Toronto and New York City, this article identifies points of consensus and controversy among settlement-seeking family judges. Despite the general support for settlement-seeking, there are substantial differences of opinion regarding coercion, due process, and the meaning of the best interests of the child standard.

The mounting wave of unrepresented litigants, and the many unmet legal needs which Canadians experience, demand innovative responses that go beyond the traditional call for more state-funded legal aid. The argument of this paper is that excessive regulation of legal services is partially responsible for Canada’s access to justice crisis. Regulation of legal services serves important public interest goals. However, the argument of this paper is that it also reduces competition and innovation, and increases price. It therefore impedes access to justice and drives up the number of unrepresented litigants. Some market entry and market conduct regulations appear to be stricter than they need to be to accomplish their legitimate goals, and others may not even have any legitimate goals. Policy-makers seeking to increase access to justice without spending public money should consider reforming these elements of the regulatory regime.

“Whose Best Interests?” compares the law of custody and access disputes with the procedure used to resolve them, and argues that there is a fundamental contradiction between these two things. The former focuses on the interests of the children involved to the exclusion of all else. The latter, however, is essentially designed to protect the best interests of the adult parties to the dispute. The article concludes by considering two alternative reforms which might resolve this contradiction.

Custody and access disputes occur when parents separate without agreeing about how to divide the on-going rights and responsibilities of parenthood. This article reports on empirical research with child custody evaluators who deal with these cases on a regular basis. On paper, the role of these professionals is to gather information and then make decisions about what parenting arrangements would be in the best interests of the children. However, the central finding of this research is that, in practice, their primary goal is to bring about voluntary settlement of the disputes. This article proposes an explanation for this phenomenon which is based on the evolution of custody and access law, procedure, and ideology over the past 30 years. The rise of the "logic of durability" is proposed as an explanation for the concerted pursuit of settlement among both child custody evaluators and family court judges.

“Personal plight” is the sector of the legal services industry in which the clients are individuals, and the legal needs arise from disputes. This article proposes that competition among personal plight law firms is suppressed by three demand-side phenomena. First, consumers confront high search costs. Identifying competing law firms willing and able to provide the needed services often requires significant expenditure of temporal and psychological resources. Second, comparable price and quality information about firms is scarce for consumers. Both of these factors impede comparison shopping and reduce competitive pressure on firms. A third competition-suppressing factor is observed in tort legal service markets, where offerings are typically priced on a contingency basis. Contingency fees have relatively low salience to consumers, and this reduces consumers’ willingness to negotiate and comparison-shop on the basis of price. This analysis is supported by the author’s empirical research with Ontario personal plight lawyers as well as the existing literature. The article concludes by suggesting possible consequences of this analysis for regulatory policy.