The Ontario Bar Association’s project will connect volunteer lawyers with businesses in need
Roughly a year after launching its pro bono portal, an online service that aims to match volunteer lawyers with Ontario residents in need, the Ontario Bar Association is opening the portal up to small business owners in Toronto who are seeking free legal advice.
Starting Wednesday, small business owners and entrepreneurs who cannot afford to hire a lawyer can apply for free legal advice through the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas’ website. TABIA will assess the applications for eligibility, and determine whether to give those applicants access to the pro bono portal.
Part of the eligibility assessment involves figuring out whether an applicant’s legal needs fall into one of five categories: starting or structuring a business, partnership and shareholder agreements, commercial lease review, employment documentation, and licensing and regulatory requirements.
Volunteers lawyers will not advise applicants on litigation or provide ongoing legal support.
For Louis Frapporti, a partner at Gowling WLG who proposed the new initiative, which is currently operating as a pilot project, the benefits of making legal support more accessible to small business owners is clear. On the one hand, small businesses create jobs and generate economic activity; supporting them is key, he says, to strengthening the vitality and resilience of Toronto’s commercial districts.
But Frapporti says volunteer lawyers stand to benefit from the project too – particularly those who are early in their careers and struggling to find new clients.
“In helping someone start a business and giving them the potential to grow and sustain themselves, you are also potentially creating a new client that can become a paying client and not always a client that requires pro bono,” Frapporti says.
“This is a way of actually creating and building new clients for business lawyers that comes out of the desire to do good in the community,” he says, adding, “Something that I’m very interested in and feel quite strongly about is if we can do this at scale, we have the ability to really model how helping someone start a business can also help a lawyer grow a practice.”
The project does not have a definitive end date. But Frapporti hopes it can expand beyond Toronto so that small businesses across Ontario will have the option to seek legal advice through the OBA.
In a statement about the project, OBA president Katy Commisso said, “Ontario lawyers care deeply about the communities where they live and work, and they want meaningful opportunities to give back.
“Through this partnership [with TABIA], lawyers can use their expertise to help entrepreneurs overcome legal barriers, support local economic development, and strengthen the businesses that help our communities thrive.”
