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
www.canadianlawyermag.com 27 "Solve a real problem with the right people. Think like an innovator, not a charity. And measure impact, not effort. If people leave with greater confidence, greater autonomy, and greater control over the decisions that affect their own lives, then we've built something that truly matters" Brendon Pooran, Pooran Law build a team that's united by shared values and a commitment to filling a genuine gap in access to justice. Second, think like an inno- vator, not a charity, design a model that can change how legal services are delivered. And third, measure impact, not effort. For us, if people leave with greater confi- dence, greater autonomy, and greater control over the decisions that affect their own lives, then we've built something that truly matters. Patrick Brown TURNING TRAGEDY INTO TRAFFIC LAW Principal partner, McLeish Orlando LLP, Toronto, ON Patrick Brown is principal partner at McLeish Orlando LLP in Toronto and one of Canadian Lawyer's Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers for 2026 in the Changemakers category. He has spent decades at the front of Ontario's plaintiffs' bar, serving as past president of the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association and chairing the Ontario Bar Association's insur- ance law section. But it's his work outside the courtroom that colleagues across the profes- sion point to most often. Injury prevention researchers, road safety advocates, and legal educators alike describe him as someone who treats advocacy as unfinished until it shows up in policy, not just in judgments. From coroner's review to provincial law Brown served as counsel for a year on Ontar- io's most extensive coroner's review into cycling deaths, work he still walks through in granular detail. The review produced 14 recommendations, several of which reached the statute books directly. "They passed the one-metre law, became a law under the Highway Traffic Act, that anybody passing a cyclist has to give one metre, and if you don't, it's against the law," Brown says. The Ministry of Transportation updated its driver's handbooks, Ontario's cycling strategy followed, and municipalities began adopting complete streets guidelines that reshaped bike and pedestrian infrastructure across the province. British Columbia and Quebec later passed their own one-metre laws. The review's find- ings have since resurfaced as evidence in the section 7 Charter challenge to Bill 212, the case testing the province's move to remove bike lanes in Toronto. A decade of bills that keep dying Not everything has landed. Brown has drafted the same vulnerable road user bill five times over 10 years, and it has failed five times. The government eventually folded a version into careless driving law as an aggravating factor at sentencing, a change Brown says lacks real teeth. He points to a case where a driver who killed a cyclist received a $75 fine as the kind of outcome the bill was built to prevent. Getting it passed, he says, requires a broader cultural shift, one where road violence stops being treated as an acceptable cost of moving people quickly through cities. Training the next generation of litigators For more than a decade, Brown has served as the civil law subject matter expert for the Law Practice Program, shaping training that reaches hundreds of new lawyers each year through mock files, live-actor examinations, and hands-on discovery exercises. He built the program the way he wished his own articling experience had worked, practical instead of left to chance, and points to mentorship as the piece no training video can fully replace. The fight that isn't finished Brown's litigation has already reshaped policy more than once: a daycare death that led to new Ontario childcare legislation, a ski hill injury that produced new safety protocols for terrain parks, a boating death that changed compensation limits under maritime law. Still, he returns to one unre- solved goal, reducing road violence broadly, through the vulnerable road user law that