Lisa Stam explores the legal implications of remote work at OsgoodePD

When Lisa Stam decided to act on her entrepreneurial instincts and start her own virtual law firm back in 2017, she was still something of an outlier in the field.

“For most people in the legal profession at that time, there was this idea that you could only be a real law firm if you had a nice office to go to. I questioned that,” Stam says. “When I started SpringLaw, the idea wasn’t just to be a solo practitioner with a paperless practice. I wanted to build a fully integrated virtual law firm operating in the cloud.”

Seven years and one pandemic later, few of Stam’s clients or her colleagues in the employment law bar bat an eyelid when one of the firm’s remote-working legal or administrative staff – including eight lawyers – request a video meeting to discuss a case.

“Covid forced everyone to go home, buy a webcam and figure it out,” Stam says. “I think it’s a wonderful development. It’s not exactly the same as in-person, but it’s pretty close and it’s way better than all the phone calls and emailing we used to do.”

But it’s not just legal workplaces that have been shaken up by the rise of remote work. The collapse of the consensus around the necessity of an employee’s physical presence in the office has left employers in almost every sector of the economy dealing with increasing demands for flexibility and exposed them to a whole new set of legal challenges.

On Oct. 18, Stam will chair Osgoode’s Understanding the Legal Implications of Remote Work program, where she and a faculty of legal experts will help human resources professionals, lawyers and others in the industry to understand and address the risks that come with the new workplace reality, while at the same time embracing best practices for attracting, retaining and supporting remote employees.

“Of course there are some people who have no choice but to be in person; you can’t do brain surgery from home,” she says. “But for any knowledge workers out there, we learned through Covid that a lot of their duties can be done remotely. The question then is should it be done remotely? That’s what we’ll be exploring with owner-operators, employers and their HR folks.”

When Stam entered her own working career, the legal profession wasn’t even on her radar as she graduated into an administrative role after studying medieval history at university. However, she can pinpoint the moment that her attitude changed, during a group meeting to discuss the potential unionization of the workplace.

Stam had attended on a whim, but soon found herself mesmerized by the labour lawyer leading the session as she smoothly handled the questions and concerns of the audience.   

“I thought her job looked amazing,” Stam says. “I had always been interested in labour issues and politics, so it wasn’t completely out of the blue, but that was when I started thinking about how I could get myself into a job like hers and I began looking into the possibility of going back to law school.”

By the time she arrived at Dalhousie University’s law school, Stam has already set her sights on a future in labour and employment law. After articling and practising for several years at union-side law firms, she made the switch to representing employers and management after joining a global business-focused firm.

These days, with more than two decades at the bar behind her, Stam tries to achieve more of a balance in her client base, assisting a variety of individuals and businesses in all areas of employment law, including advice on employment contracts, workplace policies, privacy issues, health and safety and human rights issues.

“I love representing both employers and employees. It gives me some perspective as to what they other side may be thinking,” she says. “Employment law is rarely as binary as people think and I feel like it makes me a better lawyer when I can see both sides of the story.”

Stam’s history with Osgoode can be traced to another of the institution’s extensive collection of labour and employment offerings, where she has tackled the issue of social media and technology in the workplace at several editions of the Certificate in Human Resources Law for HR Professionals. Osgoode also offers an annual Certificate in Labour Law, while those who wish to dive even deeper into the subject have the option of enrolling in the part-time Professional LLM in Labour and Employment Law to enhance their expertise.

Among the hot topics that attendees will explore at Stam’s remote work program are the growing issue of moonlighting by remote employees, the resentments frequently generated in hybrid work environments and the duty to accommodate requests for remote work in the context of disability management.

“Those pre-Covid assumptions about the business case for working in person are gone and it’s all become highly subjective,” she says. “I’m not aware of any study that says that their sales went up because they pulled everyone back to the office. In fact, there may be some empirical evidence showing the opposite, but employers still feel differently and are sorting through those feelings.”

While some commentators have suggested that the remote work versus in-office debate breaks down along generational lines, the reality is much more nuanced, according to Stam.

“It’s not just Baby Boomers who want everybody in the office. There’s a big mix of people who want to come in,” she says.  “Younger employees need opportunities to learn, meet people, get dressed up and go for drinks after work.  It’s healthy for them to have a demarcation between their student and professional lives.

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