No matter how you slice it - physically or metaphorically - it's an awfully long way from Bay Street to the eastern edges of Scarborough. In the city's high-risk neighbourhoods, such as Kingston-Galloway, access to a good lawyer, and the leverage that comes with it, can be as remote as First Canadian Place.
But one of Canada's big-gun law firms is making a unique proposition to this neighbourhood's residents: Walk in and get a bona fide Bay Street lawyer - for free. With that lawyer comes access to the many boardrooms, tribunal rooms, and courtrooms that would otherwise be out of reach.
The project, which comes through an innovative outreach centre called the East Scarborough Storefront, connects lawyers from Heenan Blaikie with locals who are left in limbo by the province's embattled legal-aid system.
"If they make too much money for legal aid, but still not nearly enough to go out and retain a lawyer, we don't feel that they should be cut off from access to our justice system," says Ryan Teschner, a 29-year-old associate at Heenan Blaikie who co-founded the project with a colleague, Trevor Guy. Starting in a week's time, local residents - and they have to be local - will be able to walk into the East Scarborough Storefront, where a caseworker will interview them, screen their case and, if they fit, connect them with a lawyer. After that point, they enter into a full lawyer-client relationship, in which the lawyers promise to see the case through to the end.
"The main thing that people come for is employment law and wrongful dismissal," says Anne Gloger, the manager of the East Scarborough Storefront, a space where 40 social agencies share facilities. "Payment withheld by employers is a huge one. Applying for pardons is something that comes up fairly often. A lot of people own property overseas [and]don't know how to go about selling it."
There are caveats: Heenan Blaikie doesn't practice criminal law or family law. Prospective clients have to live in the neighbourhood, and there's still an income cutoff, which varies by circumstance. For a family of four, for instance, the income limit would be $75,000.
That still leaves a range of legal problems that are lower-profile, but just as important.
The program is a far cry from the legal clinic the Storefront already runs, which sees a legal-aid lawyer dispensing come-and-go advice for all of one day every two weeks, and offers a preview of the cases that Heenan Blaikie will be taking on.
Part of the challenge is in meshing the chronically under-funded world of front-line social services with the pressure-cooker atmosphere of downtown law.
Some management innovations have proved helpful. At Heenan Blaikie, lawyers log pro bono hours in the same way as billable hours. "The work gets carried out in the exact same way as it does for our other clients," says Norman Bacal, the firm's managing partner, who threw his support behind Mr. Teschner's initiative.
The system also removes some disincentives lawyers might have faced for working pro bono.
"By counting it as billable time, it doesn't hurt lawyers when they're being reviewed or assessed for bonuses. It sends a really strong message within a firm," notes Yonit Fuhrmann, deputy director of Pro Bono Lawyers of Ontario, the charity that brokered the deal between Storefront and the firm.
All the same, Mr. Teschner admits that it might have to restrict entry into the program if demand is overwhelming. But he's adamant that a private firm has a role to play, where the public system is failing.
"It's giving them access to forums that they may have felt they're shut out from," he says, an edge of urgency betraying his lawyerly demeanour. "At the end of the day, it's everyone's justice system."
Special to The Globe and Mail