As the 21st century began, the emigration of Canadian lawyers to the United States was seen as a crisis within the Canadian legal profession. Today, it is accepted as a fact of life. Yet, trends in that migration pattern have never been publicly quantified. Using data from the New York State Bar Association, LinkedIn, interviews, and archival sources, I studied the history of Canadian-trained lawyers in New York, the primary American jurisdiction of legal practice for Canadians. As I show, once opportunities opened for Canadian law students to practice in large New York law firms, their emigration largely became a function of the business cycle.
Concerns about Canadian lawyers emigrating to large American law firms returned amid 2021’s white hot market, but these concerns paled in comparison to the anxiety that the Canadian legal profession once felt about Canadian brain drain.
During a hiring boom in 2000, Professor Harry Arthurs wrote about the arrival of American legal employers at Canadian law schools and the moral panic that ensued over the loss of Canada’s “best and brightest.” Since then, American recruitment of Canadian lawyers has continued, but studies of that recruitment have not. To understand how the American recruitment of Canadian lawyers emerged and evolved, I examined the history of Canadians practicing in New York. This blog post briefly summarizes some of my findings.
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