The meeting was the first for treasurer Peter Wardle since his recent electoral victory over benchers Stephen Rotstein and Murray Klippenstein on June 18. Wardle presided over a tumultuous year at the law society, with much of it under the long shadow of a scandal surrounding former CEO Diana Miles, a saga that began in June 2024 when Wardle’s predecessor, Jacqueline Horvat — now an Ontario Superior Court judge — signed an agreement to increase Miles’s compensation to nearly $1 million without bencher approval. A report from former Ontario Superior Court associate chief justice Dennis O’Connor found the move to be outside the scope of the treasurer’s powers.
At the meeting, Wardle said the controversy was “clearly the defining event” over the past year for the LSO.
Law Society of Ontario treasurer Peter Wardle
Wardle said his priority over the next year will be to restore trust with LSO stakeholders.
“We need to get back to business, managing the affairs of the law society in the public interest,” he said. “We also need to promote respectful dialogue in our interactions with each other. That’s partly my responsibility as the chair of this board, but it’s also your responsibility. Yes, we have factions at convocation, but that should not stop us from engaging in civil discourse.”
One of the items benchers dealt with at the meeting was the issue of restoring trust, namely through implementing the nine recommendations in the O’Connor report. And Geneviève Painchaud, co-chair of the LSO’s governance review task force, said the law society has made a significant amount of progress on that front.
Convocation adopted a three-stage action plan in April to deal with the fallout from the O’Connor report, and Painchaud noted much of the work addressing his recommendations involved compiling and consolidating existing law society resources and information, and standardizing processes. She said committee mandates have been consolidated alongside governance practices and policies in a manual for benchers, with the task force reviewing position descriptions for the treasurer, the CEO and the corporate secretary to help ensure that authorities are clearly identified and to ensure accountability to convocation.
“So, what’s next for the task force? We keep going through the summer,” she said, noting the task force continues to work with external adviser Richard Leblanc on his review of governance procedures. “We have a sizable group on this task force, so we are going to be pushing through where changes or enhancements are needed, and they will be reported back to convocation for information or approval as appropriate.”
Benchers also approved changes to its bylaws to support integration of the LSO’s family law service provider (FLSP) initiative within the family court system. The initiative permits specially trained, licensed paralegals to provide limited legal services in family matters. Once authorized, FLSPs may assist clients with process navigation in family court, completing applications for joint and uncontested divorces, arguing motions to change child support based on the payor’s “line 15000/T4 slip” income and excluding special and extraordinary expenses, responding to support enforcement proceedings, filing domestic contracts and preparing change of name applications.
The next LSO convocation is scheduled for Sept. 25.
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