Education and Credentials

The work of the Society’s Education and Credentials department over the past year has been, as for other departments, characterized by an increase in both volume and complexity.

Since 2021, our department has managed a 200 per cent increase in the number of transfer applicants from international jurisdictions. In many ways, this reflects positively on the climate our profession has created: lawyers from across the world see Nova Scotia as a viable and attractive place to continue their career, whether by joining an existing firm or starting their own practice.

The spike in lawyers transferring to Nova Scotia from other Canadian jurisdictions has somewhat tempered this past year, but numbers remain significantly higher than pre-pandemic.

Our department has endeavored to support the development of a welcoming and competent Bar that encourages qualified lawyers from near and far to bring their services here. At the same time, we continue supporting the education of articled clerks across Nova Scotia, seeking to retain lawyers who are locally trained and mentored. These two interests are not mutually exclusive; it is our belief that creating an inclusive and diverse Bar is essential in recruiting and retaining the best lawyers in our province, for the benefit of the public.

Our Legal Services Support team has been busy advising new lawyers and new practices in setting up their Nova Scotia operations. At the same time, a demographic shift is happening in the profession and our LSS team is also working with lawyers looking to retire or transition out of their practice. They help to ensure these lawyers have plans in place to leave the profession on their own terms.

This work is especially pertinent for practices outside of HRM, where a single lawyer or firm can often be the point of access to legal services for their community. This gives rise to challenges in succession planning. Legal Services Support provides dedicated attention to the needs of these lawyers and communities, including work to develop new and simplified guidance for file retention and destruction, which has been successfully implemented by members across the province.

A trend impacting our work is around navigating the growing complexities of interjurisdictional practice as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift towards remote working has challenged every profession and it’s clear that the conventional model of working exclusively in the province you live in is no longer the only way lawyers are practising law. To support this new reality, our regulatory framework must be dynamic and adaptive.

To that end, the Society has also launched an Innovation Sandbox pilot project. This allows legal services providers who seek to do things in new ways that benefit the public to partner with us in identifying a path toward regulatory compliance.  This can mean exploring how we might regulate new technologies, new or unconventional business models, or any other innovation that we will assess and, if approved, closely monitor to see if it should be possible within our regulatory framework. We intend to move forward with this project in the short term and we look ahead to working with our members to use this as a tool to support the profession’s evolution.

As we finish the 2022-2023 reporting year, our department, and our organization, has met the increase in both demand on our credentialing resources, and complexity of issues facing the profession that require our support, but we must continue to grow and adopt innovative approaches to the challenges we face. In the next year, it is our goal to continue this work with the Credentials Committee and collaborate with our Council, other staff and Committees, and our members to adapt and thrive in our rapidly changing profession.

Jennifer Pink

Director, Education and Credentials