Deji Omotosho came to Canada with an established legal career in Nigeria, including experience in prosecution. After completing the Canadian licensing process and beginning his legal career here, he started looking for opportunities to deepen his understanding of the Canadian legal system while continuing to work.
Osgoode’s Professional LLM in General Law offered the breadth and flexibility he was looking for.
“I was looking for a program that would allow me to focus on my studies while also meeting my work and career obligations,” he says.
The program let him keep working toward a deeper grasp of the Canadian legal system without lowering the bar academically: “We were expected to contribute to interactive classes, complete assignments and put in our best.”
He started the program as in-house counsel, but his direction shifted early into his studies. When he moved into Crown prosecution and decided to build a long-term criminal litigation practice, he switched out of a specialized LLM stream and into General Law, where the course list was open enough to follow that change.
Law of Evidence became the course he used most directly, feeding straight into his prosecution files. Classroom discussion mixed substantive law with the perspectives of classmates who were already practising, sharpening arguments he could take into court.
“The things I learned, I took back to my work and used them,” he says. “It had a direct impact on my area of practice.”
An international law course pulled him furthest from his usual caseload, covering the International Criminal Court, other international criminal institutions and the historical development of international law. He calls it his most engaging class: “It was probably my most interesting class in terms of the things I was exposed to.”
The material on international criminal institutions gave him a broader frame for questions of jurisdiction and accountability that also surface in domestic prosecutions.
His years prosecuting in Nigeria gave him a working knowledge of common law procedure well before he set foot in a Canadian courtroom, and Charter protections now shape how he builds a case from its earliest stage. “What you do at the initial stages of an investigation is as important as what you do at the prosecution stage,” he says. A flawed search or a mishandled arrest can decide a case long before trial, whether the charge is theft, homicide or drug trafficking.
The program left him with a network of classmates he still consults on cases outside his own specialty, trading perspectives across practice areas as questions come up. “It’s not about one person knowing it all,” he says. “Everybody comes with their own ideas, and we learn from each other.”
Coming out of Osgoode with a General Law LLM, Deji has built the criminal litigation practice he set out to establish when he left Nigeria, grounded in both courtroom experience and the procedural safeguards specific to the Canadian system. What started as a search for a program flexible enough to fit around a job became the foundation for a more deliberately chosen career.
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Deji Omotosho – Crown Prosecutor, Public Prosecution Service of Canada
Graduate of the LLM in General Law (2022)