New Program Advisors Join the Osgoode Certificate in Construction Law

Patricia Morrison remembers a time when she could count the members of Calgary’s construction law bar on her fingers.

Still a relatively new call when her firm merged to become the national firm Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in March 2000, Morrison – one of three new program advisors for Osgoode’s Certificate in Construction Law – helped a senior partner establish the firm’s construction law practice in the city.

“We were early pioneers in the area. Back in the day, there were maybe six lawyers who could say they had a specialized construction law practice in Calgary,” says Morrison, now BLG’s National Group Head, Disputes – Commercial & Construction. “Everyone says they do construction law these days, so I feel lucky that I was able to get out ahead as a junior lawyer, gaining exposure to construction work and building a reputation that way.”

It was a similar story in London, Ontario, where Marcia J. Oliver – another of the new program advisors for Osgoode’s Certificate in Construction Law – got her start in the practice area in the early 2000s.

“Construction law was always something that firms offered for their corporate clients, but it really was a small bar at that time,” she says.

As the daughter of a civil engineer who spent his career in highway construction and transportation, Oliver developed an interest in construction at an early age; and with pre-law experience in Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation, she gained exposure to traditional design-bid-build project delivery and P3 partnerships.

Oliver worked on the MTO team managing the financing and development of the first phase of Highway 407 – one of the earliest P3 projects in Canada.

These experiences left her well placed to thrive as the construction law scene changed quickly – driven in part by the 2005 establishment of Infrastructure Ontario and Canada’s broader embrace of a public-private partnerships.

“Growth in the area has been exponential, not only in terms of the number of people involved, but also in the volume of dollars and the complexity of the projects,” says Oliver, who is currently the General Counsel & VP Legal at Bennett Construction Group, a specialty general contractor in the Water and Wastewater Infrastructure sector. “It’s now a pretty sexy area to practice in. There’s lots of money at stake and I have seen more traditional commercial litigation firms dipping their toes in.”

In contrast to the industry transformation, many of the legal issues that construction professionals and their legal advisors encounter on a day-to-day basis remain largely the same as those of their 20^th Century counterparts, according to Seema Lal, who completes the trio of new Certificate in Construction Law advisory panel members.

“The legal issues themselves haven’t necessarily changed significantly and nor have the basic goals of project participants: they want to complete the work on time and on budget,” says Lal, the Co-Chair of the Construction and Infrastructure Practice Group at Singleton Urquhart Reynolds Vogel LLP in Vancouver.

Lal adds that construction projects have become more complex in recent years. And with the introduction of new forms of project delivery, as well as new prompt payment and related legislative reforms, the legal landscape is shifting.

After earning an undergraduate degree in psychology, Lal admits that construction law wasn’t really on her radar until she articled at a firm with a strong reputation in the area. In the 25 years since, she has hardly looked back.

“It has definitely been the right career choice for me,” Lal adds.

Morrison – another psychology undergraduate major – felt like she was thrown into the deep end when her construction law mentor drafted her onto a file involving cost overruns and design issues at a nitric acid plant. As a second-year associate, she was handed responsibility for examining the head piping engineer in pre-hearing discoveries.

“I had to go from zero to 100 pretty fast, but I was hooked,” Morrison says. “That was the file that launched my career. It wasn’t the biggest one, but it was a great example of the types of things I would be doing for the next 25 years.”

“There are plenty of debt claims and contractual interpretation issues that you see in any other type of litigation, but then you throw in all the technical detail that you need to have a handle on. Every file is unique and that’s what really intrigued me,” she adds.

Younger lawyers who are hoping to ease themselves into the practice area a little more gently than Morrison will find the Certificate in Construction Law provides them with a solid understanding of the core legal issues impacting construction projects, from start to finish.

“This is one of the most comprehensive programs I’ve been involved in,” she says. 

For Lal, one of the main strengths of the Certificate in Construction Law lies in the professional diversity of both its faculty and attendees, who include lawyers working in house or in private practice, as well as project managers, general contractors, subcontractor and trades as well as engineers, architects and other construction professionals who may not have a legal background.

“The material cuts across professional boundaries,” Lal says. “It provides a unique combination of that base legal understanding that you need, paired with practical advice from speakers who have seen how legal and contractual risks affect their work on the ground and can give you some strategies to mitigate against some of the risks that come up.”

Legal practitioners and industry professionals who want to dive deeper into the subject also have a new option to enhance their expertise further, thanks to OsgoodePD’s recently launched Professional LLM in Construction Law. 

Building upon elective construction law courses that were already available to Professional LLM students in OsgoodePD’s Energy and Infrastructure and Business Law programs, the new LLM accepted its first intake of students last year, making Osgoode one of a select few global institutions – and the only one in Canada – to offer a devoted Construction Law LLM.

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