Fees for Articling Students Skyrocket by Almost 80% in 2014

It has been awhile since I discussed the situation facing law graduates in Ontario and in the interim it appears that we've gone from grim to very grim. This morning there was a report posted on CBC indicating that the fees charged by the Law Society of Upper Canada to law graduates are increasing by 79% in 2014. In hard numbers the fee has jumped from $2,712.00 in 2013 to $4,859.00 for 2014. To take this analysis a step further consider that the total cost of my legal education (tuition plus articling fees) was approximately $33,000.00 just five years ago, now the total cost can easily reach three times that. 

This increase is largely being driven by the costs associated with the new Law Practice Program ("LPP"), the new licensing route adopted in 2012, which allows students without articling positions to get licensed to practice law in Ontario. An increase of this magnitude is unacceptable and is largely a tax on young law graduates who have little choice to pay it if they're going to recoup any of the money they spent attending law school. The total cost of the LPP is being spread around to all law graduates in the licensing process regardless of whether they're taking the articling or LPP route.

I won't do an in-depth rehash all my observations regarding the articling crisis, but essentially the core drivers are: continued fallout from the global financial crisis combined with a soft economy; a massive jump in the number of law students being trained in Ontario; technological change; increased competition from law schools in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Caribbean; and, a lack of articling positions. It's not a good time to be graduating from law school amid closures of firms like Heenan Blaikie and rumours of further turbulence down the road.

It's still my fervent belief that the articling crisis requires the intervention of the Ontario government to address the over-supply of law students. At a bare minimum, Kathleen Wynne and Brad Duguid need to slash enrolment at Ontario's law school and begin examining whether additional regulatory tools need to be deployed to preserve any semblance of law being accessible to those who aren't from wealth. For previous articles I've written about the articling crisis, see: here, here, here, and here.