Program

Description coming soon.

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Description coming soon.

The legal services landscape is being reshaped by powerful forces that are challenging longstanding assumptions about how legal needs are met, how legal services are delivered, and how legal professions are regulated. Artificial intelligence, technology-enabled service providers, new business models, global investment and shifting public expectations are creating both opportunities for innovation and pressures for change.

Drawing on developments in Canada and abroad, this presentation will examine how regulators can respond to these changes while maintaining public confidence, supporting innovation, advancing access to justice, and preserving the independence necessary to serve the public interest.

30-minute presentation followed by 30-minute Q&A.

30 minutes

This moderated table discussion builds off the opening presentation. Each table will be provided with questions that challenge how law societies are addressing some of the key drivers of change. Topics range from the expanding legal services ecosystem and lack of guardrails, alternative business structures, private equity in the legal service delivery space, and whether regulators can in fact stay on top of all changes when confronted with such a rapid pace of change.

60 minutes

This session will explore the impacts of AI on the legal landscape, and the opportunities that exist to harness AI for legal service delivery and legal regulation. The panelists will provide perspectives from the practice of law as well as from regulation on how AI is changing both the provision of legal services and their regulation. Key questions the panelists will be asked to demystify include: how can AI be adopted in regulation? In what ways can AI serve to tackle shared interests among regulators? Will AI transform what is regulated? Understanding how the profession uses AI will be crucial to the responses.

30 minutes

AI presents law societies with a three-fold challenge: how to harness it in our own regulatory operations, how to guide a profession whose use of these tools is evolving faster than our rules, and how to keep abreast of a technology that no single regulator has the resources to track alone.

This session will break participants into discussion tables to tackle questions across all three fronts: How are regulators currently using AI, and what is its potential in legal regulation? What guidance does the profession need from us now, and how do we develop it quickly enough to matter? And given the expense of attempting to stay ahead of the curve — monitoring developments, testing tools, assessing risks, and related work — where are the opportunities for law societies to pool efforts and costs through shared intelligence-gathering, joint testing, and coordinated guidance?

The moderator will provide tables with questions to answer, informed by the previous panel discussion.

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From AI, to mobility, to AML, to discipline — how can law societies ensure adequate resourcing to tackle the ever-increasing demands of public interest regulation? What strategies can be deployed to allocate sufficient resources? Must law societies say no to regulating certain things?

This panel discussion explores the challenges and limitations of public interest regulation when coming up against the reality of resource constraints. The conversation will include discussion on the sustainability conundrum in public interest regulation: can we be more sustainable by offloading collaborative work to the Federation, for example?

This session will be a moderated table discussion where participants will discuss some of the creative ways their law society has deployed resources, opportunities for collaboration at both the regional and national level, and where the Federation can and should play a central role.

15 minutes

This practical and interactive session asks the room to converge around what has been discussed and help rank the opportunities where the Federation should specifically convene. The session will invite participants to make difficult choices about what the Federation should focus on to leverage its national voice.

This session should help stimulate what the Federation’s forward-looking priorities should be and enable us to move towards strategic planning in a meaningful way.

60 minutes

Update on proposed NCA assessment process; Governance review planning session

Update on proposed NCA assessment process; Governance review planning session

Description coming soon.

Description coming soon.

Description coming soon.

Description coming soon.