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Law Times made a big splash 25 years ago when Canada Law Book’s Stuart Morrison
and Canadian Lawyer’s Michael Crawford asked Jim Middlemiss to start the paper.
I’ve always been attracted to kind of the tabloid paper, so when I sat down with Mike and
Stuart, they said we want to create, you know, a tabloid newspaper for lawyers. And I
was like, really? Yeah, we want it to be gossipy, we want it to be about the news of law,
not about cases. Because if you look, at the time there were just a couple of publications.
There was Canadian Lawyer, which wrote all sorts of interesting things about law firms,
and there was the Lawyers Weekly, which wrote about cases.
One of the earliest stories dealt with a scandal at former national law firm, Lang
Michener LLP.
We got pretty lucky shortly after. The Martin Pilzmaker thing arose, which was a lawyer
at Lang Michener, an immigration lawyer that was accused by the law society of
inappropriate things involving clients. We went after that story hard. The Globe was
working on that story as well, but I recollect right I believe the Globe reporter had kind of
gone off to do a book and so let that story lie. So we really carried the ball on it. And
when he got back, he picked up big time.
While controversies like the Lang Michener affair helped the paper make its mark, the
Law Times has always covered a broad range of news. And when a law firm collapsed, as
happened with Robins Appleby and Taub in 1990, Law Times covered the story.
According to Middlemiss, there sometimes were consequences for telling stories law
firms didn’t want people to know about.
I had just graduated from law school, so my friends were actually in their articling year at
the time I was the founding editor of Law Times. And I remember by April one of my
friends called me and she said, you know, “The partners have called me in and said we
understand you’re Jim’s friend and you don’t have to be his friend anymore if you don't
want.” That told me the kind of impact we were having.
A major story came in 1992 when Law Times received a letter detailing deputy attorney
general Mary Hogan’s difficulties with attorney general Howard Hampton. The story
about problems in Hampton’s office was big news and it also ensnared Law Times when
police showed up at the newsroom to investigate the leaked letter.
So what was the fallout? Two days later, homicide police knocked on our door with a
warrant and they wanted the envelope that it came in, they wanted to search my office, et
cetera et cetera. So we complied. I spoke to our lawyer and did what we needed to do to
comply with the police. I never heard back on what happened.
Law Times and the legal profession have changed a lot since those days. A current issue,
of course, is the future of the legal profession, particularly as it relates to alternative
business structures, something touted in a recent Canadian Bar Association report.
Middlemiss, who still writes for Canadian Lawyer, thinks outside investment in law firms
is necessary to handle the coming challenges.
Just because of the capital that’s going to be needed to introduce a lot of the things like
data analysis, data mining, big data. If you read anything on big data, we are just at the
beginning of a huge crunch of information. Everything now is digitized, whether it’s in
video, audio or the written word. Companies are storing more and more of this data.
When litigation arises, you’ve got to cull through it and figure it out. The ability to build
systems that allow you parse through that information is going to be so important.
Looking back, Middlemiss takes comfort in the fact Law Times continues to publish and
thrive.
I think we were successful and the fact that we’re talking about it 25 years after the fact
tells me that we did something right.
For Law Times TV, I’m Glenn Kauth.