The labour market for lawyers has gone global. International opportunities await Canadian lawyers who seek fame and fortune abroad. But woe to anyone who tries to come home again. Photography by Lee Towndrow.

Naomi Loewith and Kris Borg-Olivier are Canadians who trained abroad and faced course work, exams, and months of articling when they returned to Canada. Given all the red tape they faced, we’re lucky they bothered to come home.

Once Naomi Loewith decided she wanted to be a lawyer, everything seemed to fall into place. Upon graduating from the University of Western Ontario, the Ancaster, Ontario, farm girl was accepted to Harvard Law. During her studies, she worked with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. When she graduated from Harvard, she was granted a clerkship with Justice Morris Fish at the Supreme Court of Canada. She entertained a couple of offers from Manhattan firms, but decided she wanted to come home for good. She had a stellar legal education and, in her clerkship, the best articling gig in the country. Or so she thought.

Like all foreign-educated lawyers seeking to practice in Canada, Loewith applied to the National Committee on Accreditation (NCA) to have her education considered “equivalent” to a Canadian law degree. “They told me I needed four courses,” she recalls, “none of which were mandatory courses for Canadian law students.” Still, it amounted to about a full semester of study, which wasn’t so bad. She enrolled in the self-taught course run by the University of Ottawa and completed her studies during her clerkship. That’s when her luck ran out: the Law Society of Upper Canada informed her that her Supreme Court work would not count toward her articles. Their reason: the rules state that she must complete her educational equivalency before commencing the articling process.

Loewith was frustrated. “What qualified as articling for every other clerk didn’t for me.” Undeterred, she found an articling position with Lenczner Slaght Royce Smith Griffin LLP in Toronto, held her nose to the grindstone and finished the process. In the end, the Law Society gave her three weeks’ credit for her 12-month clerkship, so she could make the next call to the bar. All told, the licensing process ate up two years of her life. “I graduated in the spring of 2005. I was called to the bar in September of 2007. And it’s not like I took a few months off — I was working that whole time.”

Loewith, now an associate at Lenczner Slaght, is not alone. Canadians are now studying law abroad in record numbers, which has led to a corresponding increase in nightmarish tales of red-tape entanglements with the NCA and the Law Society when they try to come back home. And their stories pale in comparison to those practicing lawyers who’ve immigrated from overseas, only to be told they must effectively start their legal education from scratch. The articling stage is just as problematic — the ranks of those seeking admission to the bar are swelling, but the number of articling positions is not.