Lexpert magazine features articles and columns on developments in legal practice management, deals and lawsuits of interest in Canada, the law and business issues of interest to legal professionals and businesses that purchase legal services.
Issue link: https://digital.carswellmedia.com/i/1547047
22 www.canadianlawyermag.com TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL LAWYERS 2026 that Indigenous treaty rights function as a binding constitutional limit on provincial secession efforts, a precedent Feasby's orig- inal ruling put in place and that now works its way through appellate review. The Supreme Court's decision on Quebec's Bill 21 carries similar weight. The Supreme Court of Canada's official case docket for English Montreal School Board v. Attorney General of Quebec confirms the four-day hearing concluded in March 2026, and the ruling remains under reserve. Legal observers have described Chief Justice Wagner's handling of the case as a test of his ability to hold together a court navigating one of the most politi- cally charged constitutional questions in a generation, whether the notwithstanding clause can insulate legislation entirely from judicial review, or whether some outer limit still applies. AI governance shows no sign of slowing. Statistics Canada's second-quarter 2026 analysis of AI use by businesses reports that AI adoption across Canadian businesses has tripled since the second quarter of 2024, and professional services firms are adopting faster than the economy-wide average. With legal ethics scholarship, bias research, and contract automation now converging on the same set of problems inside this year's list, next year's report may need to treat AI governance as a prac- tice area in its own right, not just a theme running through several categories. Finally, in-house legal departments are likely to keep absorbing responsibilities that once sat with outside counsel or other parts of the business. The CBA/Mondaq report found this shift is most pronounced in public companies and government orga- nizations, where complexity and account- ability continue to intensify, a trend this year's in-house winners are already living out inside healthcare, pension management, and manufacturing. BUSINESS Yola Ventresca WHEN CULTURE BECOMES THE BUSINESS CASE Managing partner, Lerners LLP, London, ON Yola Ventresca is managing partner at Lerners LLP in London, ON, named one of Canadian Lawyer's Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada for 2026 in the Business category. Her nomination could just as easily belong among the changemakers, and that overlap isn't a coincidence. It's the reason she made this list. Ventresca has spent her tenure as managing partner treating culture, mentor- ship, and advancement as business infra- structure, not a separate, softer conversation happening alongside the firm's actual work, precisely the kind of structural thinking reshaping how influence gets defined across this year's list. Built the case before she built the policy Ventresca was elected managing partner of Lerners LLP's London office in 2021 and took up the role on January 1, 2022, becoming the first racialized woman, the first woman with young children, and the youngest person in the firm's history to hold the position. She inherited a compensation system rooted, like most firms', in billable hours and financial metrics alone. She championed a restructuring that the executive committee embraced, tying rewards for culture-building directly to profitability, client retention, and recruit- ment as part of the bottom line. That reframing extended to how the firm measures its own results. Ninety-four percent of associates eligible for advance- ment to non-equity partner, the step that falls under her direct authority as managing partner, moved up during her tenure. The equity partnership decision that follows sits with the partnership as a whole, a distinc- tion Ventresca is precise about. She also personally sponsored two women lawyers through the equity partnership process, both successfully. "It wasn't hard," she says. "They kind of came to me ready made." Understated as that sounds, it draws a sharp line between mentor- ship, which offers advice, and sponsorship, which changes careers. Independence has two different meanings Ventresca's practice outside firm leadership has tested her thinking on independence from two directions. As lead counsel for a faculty association that successfully chal- lenged a university's unilateral restructuring decision, and separately as an investigator retained to examine allegations of sexual assault involving leadership, she has come to see independence less as a matter of resisting outside pressure and more as a discipline of recognizing her own bias, then setting it aside to follow the evidence. Welcoming dissent by design That comfort with scrutiny carries into how she runs a room. Ventresca says she wants people around her who see things differently, not people who fall in line. "If you think I'm wrong and you don't tell me that, to me that's like sending me off a cliff," she says. "You need to be able to tell me, 'We disagree with you.'" What some of 2026's most influential lawyers are up to SPECIAL REPORT