Taking the Lead

Robert Yalden (left) of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, with Professor Nicholas Kasirer, Dean of McGill’s Faculty of Law. (PHOTO: OWEN EGAN)

Robert Yalden has a long-standing attachment to McGill. A partner in the Montreal office of the prestigious national law firm, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, Yalden teaches business law at the Faculty of Law and serves on its Advisory Board. His connection to McGill is also a family aΩair: his wife, Pearl Eliadis, earned a BSc from McGill in 1981, as well as a BCL and LLB in 1985.

With Yalden taking the lead, his firm and its partners have made a gift of $300,000 to create the Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt Seminar Room in the Faculty of Law’s expanded facilities in New Chancellor Day Hall. A portion of the gift will also be earmarked for the Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt Business Law Fund, which will support undergraduate research and provide seed money for visiting lectures, roundtables and new projects related to business law.

“Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt is among the very first law firms to step forward and support Campaign McGill. We are very grateful for the initiative and leadership it has shown,” says Nicholas Kasirer, BCL’85, LLB’85, Dean of the Faculty of Law. “Not only is the firm providing valuable support to legal scholarship, it is also raising its profile among students interested in pursuing business law.”

Yalden’s connection with McGill stretches back to 1990, when he started teaching at the Faculty of Law while working towards a civil law degree at l’Université de Montréal. He had previously earned common law degrees at Oxford and the University of Toronto, but had developed a strong interest in Quebec culture and legal traditions. After spending a good part of the 1990s practising business law in Toronto, Yalden returned to Montreal in 2001 to help open the Osler office, which has since grown to include more than 80 lawyers – many of them McGill graduates.

Yalden has gained a deep appreciation for the breadth of McGill’s legal curriculum and the extraordinary projects that students are involved in. “McGill trains fantastic young lawyers, who are at ease in both languages and legal traditions, are intellectually curious and take a creative approach to tackling challenges.”

He hopes that other law firms will follow Osler’s lead in supporting the Faculty of Law. “We all have an obligation to invest in our premier law faculties. The future of legal scholarship depends on it.”

Linda Sutherland