Legal Excellence Program Evaluation, Final Report

1. INTRODUCTION

The Department of Justice (DOJ) went through a period of rapid expansion around the turn of the century. The Legal Excellence Program (LEP or Program) was established in 2001 to meet the DOJ’s growing need to have a stable supply of entry-level lawyers. Three important considerations contributed to its establishment: the expectation that there would be a wave of “Baby Boom” retirements within the next five to ten years; the increasingly organized and competitive market for recruiting and retaining new lawyers; and the relatively low public profile of the Department as an employer of choice among prospective articling students. The Government of Canada’s 1999-2000 branding exercise found that the DOJ was not in a strong position to compete for “top talent” graduating from law schools.

Since this time, the LEP has been the Department’s principal source for articling students and ultimately, an important source of entry-level lawyers. It has hired hundreds of articling students, most of whom have been retained by the DOJ following the completion of their articles.

The 2008 Strategic Review has required that the Department reconsider how it provides legal services. In response, the DOJ developed the Law Practice Model, which is designed to help the Department reorganize the way it assigns legal work. In the short term, the Department will focus its external recruiting efforts at the entry or LA-01 level. This means that the Department needs to be assured that its hiring policies and programs are able to support the recruitment and hiring of high-quality lawyers.

1.1. Objective of the Evaluation

The purpose of this evaluation is to examine the rationale and continued relevance of the Program; the extent to which the program design is appropriate to support the objectives of the LEP; and what has happened as a result of the Program.

It is important to point out that this evaluation is not designed to assess the effectiveness of the LEP operations in each of the regions. Rather, the evaluation assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the Program at a national level.

The evaluation covers the period from 2001 when the Program was announced until February 2009, when the data collection for the evaluation was completed.

1.2 Structure of the Report

This report contains five sections, including this introduction. Section 2.0 describes the Legal Excellence Program, while Section 3.0 describes the evaluation methodology. Section 4.0 summarizes the key findings, and Section 5.0 presents conclusions, recommendations and management response.